don't eat alone

I know I said this a review of Mike Stavlund’s book, A Force of Will: The Reshaping of Faith in a Year of Grief, but I’m going to start by talking about why Patty Griffin is a great songwriter. Trust me: they’re connected. I finished the book last week and was so moved and challenged by what I read that I when I sat down to write about it I came up with more angles than a high school geometry class. It wasn’t until I was riding home from the Patty Griffin concert at the Haw River  Ballroom last night that I found a way to funnel my thoughts and feelings into something that didn’t look like a second grade finger painting project.

One of the songs she didn’t sing last night is “Rowing Song” from her record called “Impossible Dream.” What kills me about the song is its profound simplicity. The first verse begins,

as I row, row, row
going so slow, slow, slow
just down below me is the old sea
just down below me is the old sea

On paper, the words don’t look so different from, “row, row, row your boat gently down the stream,” but she keeps going . . .

nobody knows, knows, knows
so many things, things, so
so out of range
sometimes so strange
sometimes so sweet
sometimes so lonely

and then comes the lines that still leave me breathless:

the further I go
more letters from home never arrive

In ten ordinary words — none with more than two syllables — she breaks your heart and then concludes,

and I’m alone
all of the way
all of the way
alone and alive

And that’s just the first verse. I could go through the rest of the song and much of her catalog and show you time after time where she takes words we know and offers new dimensions of resonance and in a well-crafted turns of phrase. The more I listen to her, the more I am called to remember it is better to say something true than to try and say something new. I realized as I rode home last night that Mike had done the same thing in his book, which describes the year or so following the death of his child, Will, who was a twin and was born with heart issues and a cleft palate and died a few months after he was born. (Wow — that’s way too brief a description for all the family went through, but I hope he will understand.) Though their situation is not something most of us have to live through, he describes feelings that go back as far as Rachel weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31:15) and beyond. And like the stream of humanity before him, he worked to make meaning out of faith and life in the face of almost indescribable loss.

I wasn’t thirty pages into the book when I found myself moved by his words, much like I continue to be caught by the first verse of “Rowing Song.” He was talking about the “palliative repairs” the doctors had to do for Will: “a repair designed to work well enough, and for long enough, to get the patient to the next point in his or her treatment.” (25) As he describes what was happening to his little boy he says, “I think faith is palliative, too” (26) and then elaborates:

Like a writer’s drafts, or a backpacker’s tent, or a scientist’s hypothesis, or a gardener’s weeding, or a parent’s relationship with a child, our present faith only needs to work for its appointed time and should in fact be flexible, temporary, and transitory. We shape it as best we can and then let it be shaped by God, ourselves, and our community. Maybe faith is only and ever palliative, intended to start us on a journey of eternal collaboration with our Maker. (29)

I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop when I first read the passage and said, “Yes!” loud enough to make two or three people look up. I felt both resonance and gratitude. Resonance in being reminded that faith is fundamentally relational rather than propositional and gratitude for his courage to answer the call Shakespeare extends in the closing lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. (V.3.342-43)

From my own experience with depression and the deaths of my father-in-law, Reuben, and my dear friend, David Gentiles, I understand that grief pulls us into ourselves, even to the point of self-absorption. Even Jesus cried from the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?” What faith brings to the mix is a path that transforms the journey inward into one of connectedness. Grief, loss, death, uncertainty, and even loneliness are essential strands in the fabric of what it means to be human. So Patty sings in the second verse:

you just have to go, go, go
where I don’t know, know, know
this is the thing
somebody told me
a long time ago

Though I don’t know if Patty and Mike have ever met each other, I somehow imagine they have both spent time reading what is one of my favorite books of the Bible: Ecclesiastes. Though we don’t know who wrote the book, we have attached a name, Qoheleth, which is a Latin transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew title of the book (confused yet?); many simply refer to the author as “Preacher.” That name pulls up images from my Southern Baptist roots and I see a weathered and weary soul — in jeans and boots, I suppose — who is pretty beaten up and yet too wise so surrender to cynicism. He’s sitting under an old pecan tree that’s only a few years older than he is and just as weary somewhere in Central Texas on a timeless and torrid August afternoon when he looks up at the less-than-sheltering sky and then at us and says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” (Ecc. 1:9)

At the top of the back cover of A Force of Will are these words (in capital letters):

THERE IS HOPE — EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO HAPPY ENDING

Mike doesn’t wrap up all the loose ends any more than Patty Griffin makes everything work out in the last chorus and yet I find in both the same thing that keeps me re-reading Ecclesiastes: an informed hope that knows, as Paul says directly in Romans 8, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. Period. In that spirit, Mike talks about the “acceptance” phase of grief being, in his experience, perhaps more aptly named “exhaustion.”

Now, this is not the same thing as defeat. In my experience anyway, it is actually energizing and empowering to come to this place of exhaustion — to accept, finally, those things that cannot be changed, and those things that can be redeemed, and those things that lie in the mysterious space between. (211)

At church today we said a hard goodbye to a beloved associate pastor and her family as she moves to the next chapter of her ministry and leaves us to do the same. After we shared Communion we sang,

for the wonders that astound us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Yes. And thanks for those like Mike and Patty who keep calling us to live into that love and reminding us that we do it together.

Peace,
Milton

Somewhere I have pictures.

During the summer of 2011, a group of young people and adults from our church went to Birmingham, Alabama to help clean up after the devastating tornado that had dredged a path of destruction a mile wide from Tuscaloosa through the Magic City. We drove up to the north side of town and parked in what once was a neighborhood. The tornado had happened weeks before; what was left looked nothing short of a war zone. Block after block had been leveled, leaving only fragments of foundations, pieces of houses, and piles of debris. The wreckage was overwhelming, but the hardest part for me was the capricious nature of the storm: one side of the street was destroyed and the other left virtually untouched. The image that sticks in my mind is the corner of a house with about half the front wall still standing. The window was open and a flimsy, sheer curtain was hanging from the inside out, as though the wind was still blowing. Through the window, I could see the fields of desolation. Though the rest of the house was gone, that little curtain had somehow hung on to that piece of wall.

When we lived in New England, the storms we worried about were blizzards. And we had some mean ones. When they hit, however, they hit us all. The whole area was buried and then we all dug out together after it was over. Tornadoes, however, play nasty tricks. I read this morning of a man who went across the street to the elementary school where his child was because he thought that was the safe place to be. The school was hit, and not his house. How do we make sense of a storm that acts like a sniper in a crowd, hitting some and missing others for no apparent reason?

The short answer is we don’t.

We can explain the science of how the storm developed, or why it did such damage, but there is no way to make it comprehensible. Though life certainly carries an expectation of loss, this kind of tragedy makes no more sense than the Sandy Hook shootings or the Boston Marathon bombing. The verse that keeps coming to my mind and heart is,

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more. (Matt. 2:18, NRSV)

The grief we feel goes back as far as the stories go.

I’m sitting at the dining table in a friend’s house in Brentwood, Tennessee, in between weddings — one in Birmingham and the other in Chicago. The morning here is quiet and sunny; the day promises to be hot. For the first time in several days, the hours ahead of me are not scripted. I have time to write, which is not something I have been able to say lately with any regularity. The timing with the tornado is coincidental, and I find myself caught between wanting to say something and wondering what I have to say. The proliferation of immediate media (immediate?) means there are already any number of articles and opinions that have been posted across all sorts of platforms. Some seek to comfort, some to explain, some even to blame or chastise. My sense is all of us who are writing (and reading, perhaps) are trying to speak to the grief, and trying to understand what it means to be among those whose houses are still standing. As I’m writing, the weather forecasters are saying more severe storms are possible across an area which includes north and central Texas where some of my family are. Also, as I’m writing, I have found myself drawn to this old Rich Mullins song.

bound to come some trouble to your life
that ain’t nothing to be afraid of . . .

The truth is, on this sunny and unsettled morning, I have nothing to say that has not already been said, no story that has not already been told over and over since grief is as much a part of the human experience as getting up everyday. So I’ll step into that stream and say, again, that God is Love. Not God is in control. That doesn’t help because too much that happens in our world, whether natural or human, is random and damaging. God is Love and love is stronger than tornadoes and bombers, than grief and fear, than distance or even death.

It’s not a new word, but it’s what I’m holding on to today.

Peace,
Milton

it’s a quiet pentecost morning and
I’m out of town on a side street of life
where I ducked out of the drizzle only
to find myself in hart and soul coffee
everyone here speaks my language

though silence is not my strong suit
it strikes me that it takes some quiet
for the Spirit to catch me by surprise
pentecost is less about pontificating
than listening, about learning . . .

grace does not require my opinion
only my attention and my willingness
to trust there might be another way
to see or say than mine — the God of
galaxies has a larger vocabulary than I

and the imagination to show up
dressed as wind and fire, as the little
girl with the giant bow at the next
table, as the silence sitting across
from me in the cheetah print chair

Peace
Milton

“Do you want to get well?”

The whole story swings on that sentence. The story I’m speaking of is Jesus’ encounter with the man at the pool at Bethesda.

Soon another Feast came around and Jesus was back in Jerusalem. Near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there was a pool, in Hebrew called Bethesda, with five alcoves. Hundreds of sick people—blind, crippled, paralyzed—were in these alcoves. One man had been an invalid there for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him stretched out by the pool and knew how long he had been there, he said, “Do you want to get well?”
The sick man said, “Sir, when the water is stirred, I don’t have anybody to put me in the pool. By the time I get there, somebody else is already in.”

Jesus said, “Get up, take your bedroll, start walking.” The man was healed on the spot. He picked up his bedroll and walked off. (John 5:1-9, The Message)

At different times in my life, both the question and the story have struck me in different ways. As a kid, I wondered why the guy didn’t just camp out on the edge of the pool and take a dive at the first hint of a ripple. In seminary, thanks to my pastoral care classes and then CPE, I heard the question with a more therapeutic bent, as if Jesus were asking, “What is blocking you from finding your healing?” I found a kinder eye in the midst of my years of depression because I understood the man’s sense of helplessness in a way I had not before. Yesterday, as Ginger was preaching from the story (which I have not read in a while), it struck me, whatever Jesus’ intent, the man didn’t answer the question. (About the time I wrote that down in my notebook, Ginger said it out loud in her sermon.) Jesus asks if he wants to get well and the man responds by saying he has no one to help him into the water.

For all of John’s wordiness in his gospel, he is stingy with the details in this story. The more I think about it, the more I realize how I have filled in the details may not be accurate. John says he had been an invalid for thirty-eight years, but that does not mean the guy was thirty-eight and had been sick all of his life. Perhaps he was older and left disabled by an accident or tragedy or severe illness. I’ve also mostly imagined him at the pool everyday for thirty-eight years, but that’s not clear either. What does seem true is that he had been an invalid for almost four decades and had come to the pool with some regularity. How does someone maintain hope in the midst of such a life for so long? Whatever kept him from the pool, this man had some strength, some faith that kept him coming back to the water, even in the face of almost certain failure.

Though John also tells of the legend about the healing powers of the pool, he doesn’t paint in much of a context for the interaction between Jesus and the man, other than to let us know there were other people there and they kept beating him to the water — and that many of the others had people to help them find their way to healing. But we see no other faces, hear no other voices. Only Jesus and the man:

“Do you want to get well?”
“I’m all alone.”

Jesus’ response is to help him, to stand with him: “Get up and start walking.” Jesus shattered the isolation that shackled the man with his attentiveness and gave the guy the chance to see something other than defeat.

During our call to worship yesterday at Pilgrim, we prayed that God might “save us from our aimlessness;” in our prayer of confession, we repented of our mistrust. In our service, both prayers are read together in unison — a physical reminder that we’re all in this together. Even with the weekly reminder, we can quickly forget and find ourselves feeling like the man at the pool, convinced he was the only one feeling alienated.

I do wonder about the other folks at the pool who must have seen the man there day after day, or week after week. What a difference it would have made for someone — even someone also waiting for the ripples — to say, “You’ve been here so long; let me help you to the water.” More than one healing would have happened.

In our aimlessness and mistrust — no, let me start over. In my aimlessness and mistrust, I have been healed by those who have asked, in their own way, “Do you want to get well” and then helped me up. I, like the man at the pool, couldn’t do it alone. Look around at the pools of people in which you find yourself — church, school, work, coffee shops, bars, shopping malls. REM was right: everybody hurts.

Chances are at Bethesda the man wasn’t the only one who felt alone. The pool might have been ringed with people wishing for someone to help them. Same way at church and school and work and wherever. Most all of us are waiting for someone to ask if we want to get well and then offer to help us up in one way or another. Most of us, too, would do well to look up from our lives and see who needs to be asked. We are both the hurting and the healers. We are all in this together.

Peace,
Milton

You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason
We should dream that the world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe
‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy with an Army or a Knife
To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life…

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate, would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late he’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the Evil side will win, so on the Edge
Of every seat, from the moment that the whole thing begins
It is…

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play…
For in this darkness love can show the way

So now the stage is set. Feel you own heart beating
In your chest. This life’s not over yet.
so we get up on our feet and do our best. We play against the
Fear. We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears burning in the happy angel’s eyes
For it’s…

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play…
For in this darkness love can show the way

Peace,

Milton

Yesterday morning I went to breakfast with a room full of people who make me proud to live in Durham. The group was the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, which is a profound collection of folks who are working diligently to end violence in our town, or as they say, “Our mission is to prevent and rectify the injustice of violence
that segregates our city and diminishes our humanity.” They incarnate that mission statement in some beautiful and meaningful ways:

• prayer vigils after homicides — at the site of the homicide — to honor and publicly recognize the human worthiness of the victim, to comfort family and friends, & to sanctify and bring healing to the site where the violence occurred;
• community lunch roundtables — with presentations from peacemakers and then discussion;
• Friday meal delivery — to the families of homicide victims to offer compassion and companionship; and
• the Reconciliation and Reentry ministry — which seeks peace by building intentional relationships among people of faith and newly released prisoners that facilitate both collective and individual acts of compassion, reconciliation, and peace.

During the course of the morning, we heard from a woman who has spent her life waging peace in our city; a retired navy officer who talked about how his heart had been changed by working on one of the Reconciliation and Reentry teams at his church; a “faith partner” from another R&R team who described how they had helped him as he tried to find his way after getting out of prison; and a woman whose son was murdered many years ago, alongside of a man whom she met through the RCND who was helping her tell her story of grief and reconciliation. Their book will be published this year.

The woman who spoke first talked like a poet. “We must do more than stump our toes on all that needs to be done,” she said. I could almost feel myself trip as she spoke. In our town, 27% of our children live in poverty. One out of four will experience food insecurity in his or her lifetime. Some of our neighborhoods live with unconscionable levels of crime and violence. Our state legislature seems determined to deepen the racial and economic divides that plague us — and I haven’t even gotten out of town.

Then the faith partner spoke, and invoked a phrase often repeated my Marcia Owen, the director: “You can’t escape our love.” Whether we are stumbling to find our place in life, bent over by a posture of pessimism, or tripping over our to do lists, those are words to help us all stand up straight.

Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint. (Is. 40:30-31)

We live in a society — and a world — convinced of the inevitability of violence. Even as North Korea rattles its sabers, the discussion centers around how to fight back. Congress can’t have a rational discussion about guns because of the fearmongering of those determined to profit by promoting the idea that the only way we can survive is to arm ourselves against one another. The battle of life is our working metaphor.

Breakfast yesterday reminded me that metaphor is an empty and insidious lie. Marcia and the many in our community who are waging peace are telling the truth: love, not violence, is the inescapable force. Love, not violence, will change the world and offer hope and security to us all. Love, not violence, is what makes the walls fall down.

And it happens one conversation, one meal, one visit, one vigil at a time.

As Ginger left the R&R meeting at our church Monday night, she called me to tell me about our new faith partner, who faces a difficult road. “I walked out of the church and saw our sign that says, ‘We welcome all,’ and I got emotional. When we do this work, we are doing the real work of Jesus.” Her words reminded me of something else she said coming out of one of her first R&R meetings, soon after we came to Durham: “If every congregation in America adopted one person coming out of prison, we could change our society.” Indeed.

Thomas wouldn’t believe Jesus was alive until he touched him and we tagged him as a doubter, yet, when we swallow the lie that violence is inevitable in our world and refuse to trust the power of Love expressed by the empty tomb, we call ourselves “realistic.”  When we do, we become the church Martin Luther King, Jr. described in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

May we be the “God-intoxicated” ones, those who love tenaciously and specifically, those who trust Jesus wasn’t joking, those who incarnate inescapable love.

Peace,
Milton