don't eat alone

I spent the morning working on this slideshow. The music is from the “True Grit” soundtrack.

Peace,

Milton

I spent another Monday in Raleigh this week — my third one. The North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP has sponsored the events, which have become known as Moral Mondays, as a response to the damaging laws being passed down by our state legislature during this session which include cutting unemployment benefits to 170,000 of our citizens and opting out of Medicaid coverage, which will leave many without health insurance. They have proposed other bills to do heavily restrict early voting in our state and to restructure the tax code so that corporations would pay nothing but there would be a sales tax on food. My list of laws is by no means exhaustive.

Each week, a certain number of the protesters have chosen to participate in an act of civil disobedience by entering the NC Legislative Assembly building and staying beyond the legal time limit. (Who knew it was against the law to stay too long?) And they have been arrested. As of yesterday, over 700 people have been taken to jail for doing nothing more than standing and speaking and singing together in solidarity about the injustice being done. The protests have been intentionally kind and nonviolent. And they have been powerful, even though mostly disregarded by those who were elected to listen to the people of the state.

Yesterday, I went in with those who were going to be arrested as a supporter, which means I stayed until they told us if we stayed longer we would be taken to jail. The scene inside was thoughtful and determined. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,” we sang, as we stood in two circles, one floor above the other. Then one young man began to chant, “This is what democracy looks like,” and I thought, “Indeed it does.”

When I was in high school, Ray Charles recorded a version of “America, the Beautiful” that remains my favorite version of the song. What I love most about it is he intentionally sang the verses out of traditional order. He began,

O beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife,
who more than self their country loved,
and mercy more than life.

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
till all success be nobleness,
and every gain divine.

Then he said, “When I was in school, we used it sing it something like this,” and then he began with what we all know as the first line: “O beautiful, for spacious skies . . . .” Before any  purple mountain’s majesty or any fruited plain, the beautiful part of our story tells of those who valued community over self-promotion and, just like the song says, mercy more than life.

Mercy — that’s what’s missing most from the life our legislators are seeking to fashion for us. Their idea of success carries little or no nobility, and the gains they envision reek of power and conquest, not of compassion and hope. What is beautiful about America is not our wealth nor our power. It is our people — every last one of us. I trust that our Monday meetings are more than flailing at windmills or venting our anger. We are working to move beyond anger, to build something, to believe that we are doing more than bailing water out of a sinking ship; we are banding together to make things better  , to do our best to love justice, do kindness, and walk humbly with our God and with one another.

On Thursday, I will stand on our front porch and read the Declaration of Independence, leaning back into all the years we stood in front of the Old State House in Boston where they have read it every Fourth since the very first. Much of the document talks about the right of the people to do away with a government when it is unjust and unfit to rule. I must say I smiled when I read it again tonight in preparation for my delivery in a couple of days, and as I recalled what it has felt like to stand and sing and shout in the shadow of the Legislature these past few weeks. I smiled because I trust that the arc of history bends towards justice and love. I smiled because, even though these new laws are painful and damaging, they will not be the last word. I smiled because I know our country is not best defined by the richest who get the attention, but by the millions who work day after day for far less than they deserve. I smiled because God is on the side of the poor and the broken and the downhearted.

All the money in the world won’t change that.

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw;
confirm thy soul in self-control,
thy liberty in law.

Everybody sing . . .

Peace,
Milton

I preached at our church yesterday. I went a little “off book” during the sermon, so the manuscript is the best recreation I could do.

_________________________________

Luke 7:36-50
“Forgive Us Our Debts”
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham NC
June 16, 2013

The listserv in our old neighborhood was active Friday afternoon.

The instigating email concerned a man who was crossing Club Boulevard right at Oval Park — over and over again. The woman who was writing said she stopped to let him cross as she was going to pick up her kids and then found he was still trying to get to the other side on her return trip. This time the car in front of her did not stop, and was greeted by the flashing lights of a police cruiser parked nearby. The man in the crosswalk was no random walker; he was seeing who was obeying the law.

One of those who replied to the letter said, “I think this is entrapment and you might not have to pay the ticket.” The next reply, which came quickly, began, “It’s only entrapment when you get caught.” So goes the law: when we break it, we have to deal with the consequences. We have to pay the ticket.

In the scene from Jesus’ life before us this morning, he is at the home of Simon, a Pharisee — one was all about the law, who found his identity in it, and who had also invited Jesus to dinner. Based on the murmuring that comes a bit later, they were not alone. There were others  — all men — who were part of the gathering. The woman who showed up, however, was not on the guest list. She just showed up, came in the house with an alabaster jar of ointment and used it to anoint Jesus’ feet, weeping in the process. She then washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. In the middle of this keep-everyone-at-arm’s-length dinner party, she incarnated vulnerability. And she is never named. All we know was she was a sinner — a woman from the city, Luke says. Her sin is unnamed as well, though commentators over the years have almost unanimously assumed she was a prostitute — “a harlot,” “a woman of ill repute” — as though the only sin a woman could commit in first century Palestine was a sexual one. But if we widen our view beyond the designated lectionary passage for today, we can hear Jesus as he responded to those who questioned his choice of companions in the verses just before ours.

For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”

When we hear the label given the woman in light of what Jesus just said,  Luke labels her rather deftly: “You know those people Jesus keeps hanging out with? She’s one of them. A sinner.” In the first part of the chapter, Jesus had been on a bit of a healing spree. Perhaps she had seen how he had treated other people in their distress, had been a part of the crowd that had followed him, and knew she could find help and hope if she could get to him. And so she did what she needed to do to get to him. Whatever she had done and whoever she was, she was overwhelmed with gratitude for the love that exuded from him and demonstrated it extravagantly. And Jesus received her offering in grace and love.

Our first clue that Simon and his pals aren’t dealing fairly is they didn’t respond directly to either the woman or to Jesus. They muttered. Simon questioned Jesus’ identity as a prophet because a prophet would have known “what kind of woman was touching him.” Jesus responded by calling him into direct conversation — “Simon, I have something to say to you” — and then he tells a parable about the two debtors — one with a large debt and one with a small debt — who are both forgiven by a banker. “Which one would be more grateful?” asks Jesus.

Simon responds sheepishly: “I suppose the one with the greater debt.” His tone implied that he was quite sure the woman would be the larger debtor in their scenario. I think it’s safe to say Simon would not have seen himself as the sinner in most any story.

Jesus agreed with his answer, but then turned the focus of the conversation from the parable to a rather pointed and personal contrast between the woman’s extravagant gratitude and Simon’s half-hearted hospitality. Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

David Lose writes:

Why this change of focus? Because the truth Jesus points to cuts both ways. It’s not only that one who has been forgiven much loves much from gratitude, it’s that the one who is forgiven little loves little.

Jesus’ analogy between debts and sins in the passage made me think of the Lord’s Prayer. If you have had the chance to worship in other congregations where they say the prayer each week, you know one of the decisions any church has to make is which word to use: trespasses, sins, or debts. When I was a kid, our church in Zambia said trespasses, which always sounded really cool with a British accent, yet it made it sound like we had jumped a fence or crossed a border and ended up somewhere we were not supposed to be. Sins is a good theological word — one that pretty much only gets used in church — and speaks to the things we do that do damage and separate us from God. When we say debts, we talk about what we owe, what we don’t have to give, what we can’t even up.

Forgive us our debts.

Debts create obligations. When we create a formal debt like a mortgage, we have a repayment plan and everything works well until we get behind on our payments. Then the law kicks in as it were. If we don’t pay our debts, we can lose everything. Carry the analogy back to the Lord’s Prayer and we are offered the chance to realize we are up to our necks in relational IOUs, in damage done and repairs unpaid, and we can’t keep up with the payments. David Lose, again:

Forgiveness cancels relational debt and opens up the future. Which is why it’s so important, so valuable. Consider: forgiveness at heart is the restoration of relationship. It is releasing any claim on someone else for some past injury or offense. That’s why the analogy to a debt works so well.

But it’s also something more. Forgiveness also gives you back yourself. You see, after a while, being indebted, owing others, knowing yourself first and foremost as a sinner — these realities come to dominate and define you. You are no more and no less than what you’ve done, the mistakes you’ve made, the debt you owe. When you are forgiven, all those limitations disappear and you are restored, renewed, set free. So, yes, forgiveness is everything.

The woman came in a broken mess and Jesus gave her back herself in love: “Go in peace,” he said. Simon acted all put together and was left standing as an observer of both the love and forgiveness.

Forgive us our debts, we pray, as we forgive our debtors.

It strikes me that our debts are full stops to the stories of our lives. They bring us to a screeching halt. Forgiveness lets the story continue. It pulls life into the present tense. We aren’t talking about last week or last year, or debts rung up long ago; we are living now by the grace of God. When we hold grudges, we trap ourselves in the moment when the damage was done and can’t move forward. When we forgive, we pour ourselves out in love and grace and the story rolls on.

The second hymn we sang this morning, “O Love, That Will Not Let Me Go,” was written by a man named George Murchison, who was a minister. He was engaged and found out he was losing his sight. When he told his fiancee, she broke off the engagement because she didn’t want to spend her life with a blind man. It was then he sat down and wrote:

O Love, that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee
I give thee back the life I owe
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be

Forgiveness. He knew, whatever life held for him, the rest of the story lay beyond the damage done by her leaving; it lay in trusting that what we have been reading over and over in these days of grief in our church: “Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus.”
As our story rolls on — the story of forgiveness and redemption and love, we are called time and time again to choose which character we will play. Sometimes, we are Simon: too trapped by all we are holding to move forward. Sometimes, we are the woman: heartbroken, grateful, and set free. Sometimes, we are like Jesus: we get to be forgiver, the one who gets to incarnate grace and love to someone who has lost sight of themselves.

May we be people who forgive even as we are forgiven. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

These past few days have been filled with grief in the lives of some of those closest to Ginger and me. Though their stories are not mine to tell, I have been touched as well and reminded again of how much death and grief are a part of life for all of us. In the midst of it all, I had a chance to hear Patty Griffin sing last Saturday night at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw NC, which is a little town about twenty miles from Durham with an awesome music hall. She is touring her newest record, American Kid

, which is a collection of songs she wrote as her father was dying.

“You can go wherever you want to go,” begins the first song — an offer of permission for a departure over which she has no control; as she continues, the permission becomes a blessing:

you don’t ever have to pay the bills no more
break a sweat or walk a worried floor now
working like a dog ain’t what you’re for now
you don ‘t ever have to pay the bills no more

As I listened to the third track, “Ohio,” I couldn’t help but hear trickles of Jordan-like imagery as she and Robert Plant sang about the river I crossed a couple of weeks ago, crossing over between Ohio and Kentucky.

if the hounds are howling and you cannot hide
my friend I will meet you on the other side
no lines, no lines the river is a river not a line
my love is the water and it’s stronger and deeper than time

About three songs into most any Patty Griffin record and I wish I could sit down and talk to her about how the streams of faith and hope run through her life. I make no assumptions about whom or what she trusts, and I find my faith is strengthened by her questions and honesty and her incisive choices of words. The most challenging and, I must say, beautiful, theological image on the whole record comes in the fourth song, “Wild Old Dog.”

God is a wild old dog
someone left out on the highway
I seen him running by me
he don’t belong to no one now

In concert, she talked about finding inspiration in seeing a pit bull running in the waving grass along the highway somewhere in Arkansas; at first, she was struck by his beauty and then realized someone had dumped him and, as she said, “he was done for.” What I hear in her song and the haunting image is the story of how God often gets left aside or behind in our darkest times, or even how some choose to see faith as something whose usefulness we outgrow, making this one of the saddest songs in the whole collection.

The palpable ache that comes with the absence of those we love is beautifully articulated in “That Kind of Lonely.”

every strand has come unwound
every heart is all worn down
everyone in the room wanted
to be somewhere else
so tonight I’ll find a key
and drive away a little early
It’s the last time I wanna be that kind of lonely

Truly, she writes as one acquainted with grief. Well acquainted. And from her sadness, then, she tells stories, as one would do at a wake or the meal following a funeral: “Irish Boy,” “Faithful Son,”  and “Not a Bad Man” sing of the man she learned her father was as he told her stories she had not heard before. “Mom and Dad’s Waltz” and “Get Ready Marie” give melody to a marriage, the latter with quite a bit of humor. Here is a gifted songwriter a the top of her craft, using her gifts to articulate both pain and hope, telling her story as a way of telling the story of our lives and deaths, which is a journey of both grief and grace, offering us healing in the hearing and the singing along.

The last song, “Gonna Miss You When You’re Gone,” brings the collection to a close with a strong and intentional goodbye. She doesn’t wait for him to die to tell him how she feels; she is singing to a man who was still here, though we are hearing the record months after her father’s death. It’s been over a year and a half since my father-in-law died and hardly a day goes by that we don’t speak of him, or catch a glimpse of him in some irrepressible memory. Part of what helps in those moments mixed with sadness and gratitude is the sense that we said what we wanted to say to one another before he died. We do our best work when we stay current with one another, even when life doesn’t appear to be on the line.

American Kid is record filled with songs that take sadness seriously but not ultimately, which makes it a gospel record, as far as I’m concerned — hymns for disconsolate hearts, melodies that lead us into memories. These are songs to take to heart.

Peace
Milton

Not from our home in Durham is the Liberty Warehouse, which once housed tobacco auctions. The building is not beautiful; it is, however, historic because it is one of the last of its kind still standing, a visual legacy of what our city once was. It is also on its last legs. Its most recent owners have set it up for demolition with a sort of planned negligence that have created a bit of a quandary for historians and city officials who want to honor and retain our past and must also come to terms with the reality of the structure’s deterioration. The old warehouse, it seems, will soon give way to something else, save a facade or two — something else that will probably give another historical commission pause in a hundred years or so.

One of my colleagues from the computer store is on a trip through Europe, where the sense of history has centuries on us. Her Facebook page has been a photo gallery of all the Big Must See Destinations, including the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Her photograph showed up on the same day as Dick Gordon’s interview with a sculptor named Jimmy Grashow who, among other things, did a sculpture of the same fountain in cardboard. That’s right. Cardboard. Oh, and there’s this: his point was to put it outside, where it would be destroyed by the elements. The pictures show you how things fell apart. I transcribed the part of the interview that most captivated me.

Dick Gordon: So the plan was always to build it and then put it outside and to have it be destroyed by the weather?

Jimmy Grashow: Absolutely. Always. It’s thrilling to get an idea that just burns inside of you and then become obsessed with it; you try to push it away, you know its absurd . . . it’s so irresistible you can’t back off, so right from the beginning it was something I wanted to do.

Gordon: I don’t understand how you could devote the years you put into this always knowing that whatever intricate piece of Poseidon’s beard or whatever part of a horse’s hoof you were creating out of cardboard was being created simply to be destroyed.

Grashow: As you say it, I don’t know either. I want to cry. (laughs) But everything is process; that’s the only thing that I ever wanted to do was just do. It’s so thrilling to cut, to paste, to glue. Sometimes the result of all of that is inconsequential. I’ve done that. I’ve worked in the theater and the rehearsal sometimes is so much more magnificent than the performance. It’s so realer. Is realer a word? And that’s the way it was building the fountain: it was so real that the end result was inconsequential.

Gordon: You’ve just put it into terms that I haven’t thought of before because I was thinking of this ahead of time and thinking, OK, oil painters create a painting that is designed to last centuries; sculptors make something out of stone so generations will be able to look at it. Now you’re talking about dance and music and that doesn’t last the same way. So know you’re closer to performance art than fine art? Help me with the definition here.

Grashow: I can’t. I think it’s just about process. I mean everything goes. You know the World Trade Center came down and the Afghan Buddhas; I think last week they built a road in South America and used the gravel from a Mayan pyramid. Everything goes and everything is ephemeral. Artists sort of build in stone. Artists build in steel. What they build in is indicative of how they feel about mortality and life. I’ve always loved paper and cardboard. I’ve always loved material that seemed lighter and more ephemeral.

Gordon: More fragile.

Grashow: More fragile.

Needless to say, his last words had my humming Sting’s song for a couple of days at least. Something in there also sent me back to one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

We got a good rain here last Sunday night, which was my cue to get to weeding in the front yard on Monday morning. My attention had been pointed in other directions for some time, so the weeds had had the run of the place. The yard has been a work in progress since we moved in three years ago. There is no grass, only flower beds and trees and mulch and, well, weeds. The biggest culprit is the monkey grass. As I began pulling it up, I found the little plants were all connected. I was attempting to undo a network of growth and subversion, working to make room for the azaleas and hydrangeas to breathe. After a couple of hours, I had one side reasonably cleared out and the yard looks pretty good. Still, there is work to be done. I will need to keep weeding, I know, because I have already done so twice this spring. My hard work doesn’t leave much of a legacy, and it is still satisfying somehow, in part, at least, because it resonates with what Jimmy Grashow was saying about process: what matters is the doing of the thing.

As I listened to the interview, the other intersection for me was cooking. The reason I love to be in the kitchen is because I love the way food brings people together. When I create a dish, I want to make an offering, a work of art. I want the plate to create a moment where those around the table or around the room can find one another. A couple of weeks ago, I make Strawberry Shortcake for a gathering of folks in Birmingham. I even took a picture. The dish looked good, tasted good, and took time to put together. As soon as I put down my camera, we ate the artwork. And it was good. The legacy of the evening was in the stories and connections; the food was an invitation to the process.

The essence of a life well-lived is more like cardboard sculptures  and strawberry shortcake — and even weeding — than granite fountains. I spoke with a colleague this week who told me about a teacher he described as “the greatest man I have ever known.” HIs seminal memory had nothing to do with a particular class or accomplishment. The teacher, who went on to become a principal and then superintendent, left his mark by cleaning lunch tables. My colleague said, “Everyday at lunch he would come take our trays when we were finished, which gave him a chance to talk to the students, and then he would stay and help the janitors clean the tables in the cafeteria as a way of showing us that everyone’s job was important. I think of him everyday when I come to work because I want to be like him.”

Both the Liberty Warehouse and the Trevi Fountain with go the way of the cardboard sculptures one day, yet love lives on. Love lives on.

Peace,
Milton

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