don't eat alone

One of my morning rituals is to read the Writer’s Almanac. When we lived in Massachusetts, in played on WBUR as I was going to work; here in Durham I read the text on the website. Besides a daily dose of poetry, Garrison Keillor also mentions two or three significant birthdays or anniversaries. Today is Steve Jobs’ birthday. The short essay on his life had this quote:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I smiled when I read the words because this has been one of those weeks when the theme of failure has risen back up in my life. It’s an ongoing theme, though I’m not sure of the melody. I have written about it several times — most recently here and here. A few days ago, Win Bassett pointed to the blog of one of his friends, Wil Wheaton, who is also a writer and was also hearing the same theme. He said:

. . . failing at one thing does not mean you fail at all things and that’s the end of it. Failing at something can often be the beginning of succeeding at another thing. . . .

. . . yesterday, I sat down and I plotted out a story I’ve wanted to tell for a long, long time. I sat down, thought about my big idea, and then had an incredibly fun time drilling down into that big idea to find the narrative story and character arcs that exist inside it. And the thing about doing that? It was fun. I wrote out a few mile markers to generally move the story forward, so I know what I’m driving toward, and when I got to the end, I discovered something incredibly awesome that I hadn’t even considered in the months I’ve had this idea bouncing around inside my brain. I typed it into my text document, gasped in delight, and clapped my hands like an excited child … which I guess, in that moment, I was.

This morning, I listened to the TED Radio Hour on WUNC as I drove to church, which is becoming a weekly ritual thanks to the station’s new schedule. This week’s episode asked “How Do Schools Suffocate Creativity?” The segment I heard centered around a TED Talk from a few years back by Sir Ken Robinson, a man who has spent his career looking at ways we can enhance how we learn and grow. As I was turning into the church parking lot he told a story, which a teacher told him about a little girl in her class who hardly ever paid attention. When they began drawing one day, the little girl became absorbed in the activity and more focused than she had evern been. The teacher asked her what she was drawing and the little girl said she was drawing a picture of God.

“No one knows what God looks like,” said the teacher.
“They will in a minute,” she responded.

Just as I parked the car he said,

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

That was my call to worship. When I took my seat in the sanctuary, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down what I had heard and, as we moved on into the service, I wrote, “Is that true about faith?”

Ginger preached this morning from Philippians and Paul’s admonition to be imitators of Christ. She talked about the television preachers she had seen this morning who were quick to say that being faithful to God meant God would take care of everything, which of course is just not true. Not only that, it’s not helpful because when everything doesn’t come up roses, we are left feeling like, well, failures. “One mistake,” she said, “can lead us down the path to self-doubt.”

I thought of what I had heard in the car: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Ginger continued: “Being human means we are born to mess up,” and she encouraged us to open our hearts and our hands and say together,

In the light of the Cross, I will let go of the need to be all things to all people.

I will let myself fail in Jesus’ name — just like Jesus did. One of my favorite sermons on the Crucifixion is Frederick Buechner’s “The Magnificent Defeat” Jesus was not a success by any earthly measure: he amassed no fortune, he had a marginal following, he had no political power, he had no family or heirs, and he was executed. His willingness to live such a life is what made the hope of Easter possible.

For the benediction to our day, Ginger and I walked in the cool of the evening through our town and found our way to some Mexican food along the way. We talked through the sermon and I told her what I had heard, alongside of trying to figure out what life looks like in the days ahead. The book tours I was able to do in the fall and in February were awesome and wonderful and important and small. I am where I have been often in my life, figuring out how to fail faithfully.

Tonight, I have few answers. I just needed to say the questions out loud again and be reminded of what I know is true. I am also grateful for a friend who called to invite me to Nashville in a couple of weeks. His encouragement could not have been timed any better. Life is good and hard and also full of grace.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — (Here’s the shameless plug part: his deal is on Saturday, March 9; anyone up for putting something together either Friday or Sunday?)

My church is on a roll.

Not too many weeks ago, we spent three Sunday nights together for “Forgetting But Not Forgotten: Alzheimer’s and Faith,” which attracted over eighty people each week. On Tuesday of this week, we began a four week Lenten series, “Poverty in Durham: A Faith Perspective.” Twenty-seven percent of our children live in poverty. Though poverty is not unique to our town, I think the level of determination to figure out how to end poverty in our lifetime is not the standard discussion in most places.

And that’s what we are going to be talking about — not only how to get aid and support and food and care to those in need, but also how to offer that care in a way that treats the recipient as an equal and doesn’t make them pay for the gift by having to accept our condescension along with it. We are also going to be talking about systemic change — in our town, in our lives, and in our nation and world.

This week’s focus was “The Challenge of Poverty in Durham” and we looked at the challenge in faith, in fact, and in person. I don’t plan to recount the entire evening, but I do want to mention part of one speech that has hung with me. Mel Williams, who just retired as pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church and is now working with End Poverty Durham, was the one who talked about the challenge in faith. He began by saying,

At Watts Street, whenever we looked at a mission opportunity, we asked three questions:

is it good news?
does it seem impossible?
is it likely to fail?

If the answer to all three questions is yes, there’s a good chance the Spirit of God is at work in it.

From there, he moved through several Bible passages from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus pointing out God’s continual call to not only care for but to identify with the those in poverty. And then he asked:

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

The last speaker for the evening was a woman named Kimberly Crowe who spoke about poverty from a first hand experience. She recounted her difficult life, which included living in her car while she was six months into a high risk pregnancy, struggling to pay bills and find adequate housing, and also what life was like now that she was working two jobs and trying to raise her child who has some serious medical issues. In the question and answer time that followed, she brought her story into the present tense, saying she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to keep her fifteen dollar an hour job because they would not take her family needs into consideration for scheduling; the “needs of the business” were all that mattered. She anticipated she would have to let that job go so she could take her son to the doctor and keep the eight dollar an hour job to at least bring in some money.

At the close of the program, several people descended on her with offers of rides and other tangible support. Her needs were ones we could meet. As we did, Mel’s question came ringing back in my mind:

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

Our state legislature and our governor have decided to “fix” the tax system here in North Carolina. I think they mean “fix” as in make it work again; I hear it as “fix” as in setting the game up so the winners and losers are predetermined. The proposal discussed today was to do away with our state income tax and raise sales tax on food and also adding it to several services, which means ending a tax that distributes the burden of bill paying over all of society and beginning one that burdens those who have less at every turn. Taxing food and clothing punishes the poor, period. At the very same time, our legislators are considering ending the corporate income tax. We are not just turning our backs on the poor, we are knocking them down and driving over them.

And our state is by no means unique. Much of the rhetoric on the national level centers around blaming the poor for ruining our economy since they get things like food stamps. We even call the programs “entitlements,” as though it was some sort of privilege to have to stand in line for hours to get economic assistance, or that a welfare check was some kind of golden ticket. Too often, poor is used as a euphemism for lazy or stupid. Neither is true. Poverty is not a disease, or a life choice, or even a consequence, or a judgment; it is not having enough to live like a human being. And Jesus called us to do all we can to let people know they are uniquely and wonderfully created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

i hope the question haunts me long past Lent and on beyond Easter. It’s hard and messy because it means we have to talk about the strata of our society that involve race and class and education. It means we have to look at those who stand with signs along the side of the road and figure out what to do for that one person and we have to think about how to change our social systems that thrive on the backs of the poor. Our elected officials are not going to lead us because in the polished halls of wealth and power where they live, they can see only as far as their arrogance and fear allow. This one’s on us.

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

Discuss . . .

Peace,
Milton

The best part of an idea is the conversation it creates. The last several days have created a conversation in my head and my Moleskine among folks who have yet to know they are talking to each other.

I woke up this morning to a message from my friend, fellow Pilgrim, and self-described physics lover, Alice, who said,

Your sermon mentioned knowing where we are and where we are going. Because my brain works differently, I immediately thought of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which basically says you can’t know both (about quanta anyway). “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a concept in quantum mechanics that states that of all the things you can measure about an object, there are some things that cannot be known at the same time. An object’s location for example, no matter how small or large, can never be known exactly if you know even a little bit about how fast the particle is moving or what direction it’s moving in. This also works the other way around: the more one knows about how fast the particle is going and the direction it is going, the less one knows about where it is right now.”

So the more we know about where we are, the less we know about where we are going? I have no answers, and we aren’t quantum particles, but I thought you might have an interesting take on it.

I am fascinated by what little I actually understand of physics, most of that knowledge being limited to what I learned from reading Madeleine L’Engle. I used one of her quotes in my book:

Quanta, the tiny subatomic particles being studied in quantum mechanics, cannot exist alone; there cannot be a quantum, for quanta exist only in relationship to each other. And they can never be studied objectively, because even to observe them is to change them. And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech . . . Surely what is true of quanta is true of the creation; it is true of quarks, it is true of human beings. We do not exist in isolation. We are part of a vast web of relationships and interrelationships which sing themselves in the ancient harmonies. Nor can we be studied objectively, because to look at us is to change us. And for us to look at anything is to change not only what we are looking at, but ourselves, too. (And It Was Good 20,21)

The next scrap of science I have been carrying around in my head the past few days also made its way to the surface of my thought. Somewhere this week I read about Zeno’s paradox of dichotomy, which states that in order to reach a place you must first go half the distance, so you never get where you’re going because there’s always a halfway point.

Perhaps the reason I am attracted to physics is because I am forced to so quickly engage how much I don’t know and listen to the world on a different plane, one that calls me to trust what resonates, to trust what others can help me to understand; you see, I’m not going to get all of this on my own. Neither are the physicists or the theologians or the philosophers. The picture is both to large and too detailed. None of us has the benefit of adequate perspective.

Two more things. The first is a short film I learned about from David LaMotte, which looks at how our view of ourselves has been altered by the astronauts’ ability to see earth in the context of the universe rather than as one walking on the planet. The video is beautiful and compelling, calling us to an understanding of what they call “The Overview Effect.” One of the astronauts, Edgar Mitchell, said he came back to earth and could find nothing in the literature of science and religion to describe what he had experienced, so he went to the universities and “asked them to help me with what I saw.” Those he consulted came back with words from the ancients, which he quoted in Latin (which I don’t speak or write or read) and then translated: “see things as you see them with your eyes” — resonantly, viscerally, without explanation. David Loy, a philosopher, spoke in similar terms as he said the astronauts’ experience opened us up to feel awe: to transcend the separation between ourselves and creation and see it as a unity.

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Here’s the final piece of today’s mosaic: something from a sermon preached by Carla, our Minister of Christian Education, a couple of Sundays ago. As she spoke of Jesus’ call to follow, she used his metaphor of being a part of the Kingdom of God (one with which I have previously struggled.) Then, in good Southern fashion, she dropped the “g” and offered a new picture: the Kindom of God, “where all persons flourish in right relationship with God and one another in love and justice.” Yes. Her important slight change resonates with the “cognitive shift” one of the astronauts described. To see the earth from space requires a new way of thinking — the same way of thinking found in seeing ourselves as part of God’s Kindom.

Jesus used the metaphor in different ways:

• “It is among you,” he said.
• “It is within you.”
• “It is at hand.”
• “It is to come.”

All of them are true at the same time, leaving us with the theological equivalent of the kind of quandaries offered by Heisenberg and Zeno: we are created and called to live in both the now and the not yet, to carry both the past and the promise of our life and faith together, to live in the creative tension that notices both the dust on our shoes and the stars in the heavens. Though we are all over the map, we are connected in ways we do not even begin to comprehend.

Today, I will carry these things from our conversation:

• we are Here, in every sense of that word;
• we are Together, in every sense of that word;
• we are Loved, we are Loved , we are really, really Loved.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve continued my journey into The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us over the last couple of days and read something this morning that made me think of our lenten journey. Let me explain. In a chapter called “Ignoring the Content, Celebrating the Style,” James Pennybaker makes two points in an aside to the chapter that struck me.

Direct Versus Indirect Knowledge
Some languages, such as Turkish, require you to provide evidence for any statement you make. If I said to you, “It was very hot in Austin yesterday” in English, you would likely shrug your shoulders and assume that I’m telling you the truth. In Turkish, however, you would use different forms of the verb “was” to denote whether I personally experienced the hot weather or am simply relaying the information from some other source.

Social Knowledge Lost in Translation
In a striking series of studies, Stanford’s Lera Boroditsky has demonstrated how the language you are speaking at the time dictates how you remember pictures of events. A bilingual Japanese-English speaker would likely remember the relative status of three other people if introduced to them in Japanese rather than in English. A bilingual Turkish-English speaker will remember me talking about Austin’s weather differently if we spoke in Turkish compared to English. (36)

Yes, I know he said nothing about Lent, but he did talk about language and memory, which lie at the heart of both life and faith. It matters how we remember things and how we talk about those memories.I remember getting a newsletter many years ago from someone whose husband had gotten ill and then died. “We found the cancer at Epiphany,” she wrote, and he died soon after Pentecost.” The sentence carried much more than it would had she said he got sick in January and died in May. Using the markers of the church year conveyed their journey of faith and grief.

The language of faith is an inside joke, if you will: those who know the words get the punch line. When Ginger’s first roommate in college was someone who had not grown up in church. Ginger was speaking Baptist when she asked her, “Do you have any convictions?” to which the young woman replied, “I’ve never even been arrested.” When you know the vocabulary, it’s a whole different story. Sometimes, we need to break the stained glass that has ensconced the word and relearn its meaning. My word to relearn for this week is confession.

Oh, I know what it means, and yet — our responsive Prayer of Confession at Pilgrim yesterday breathed some fresh air into my vocabulary. Here is the prayer:

All:  We confess our sins because we believe sin is real.  We believe sin is the real brokenness of relationship with others, with the earth, with myself, with God.

One:  We confess our sins because we participate in systems that break people.  We participate in systems that break our environment.  We participate in systems that break our relationship with the Holy.

All:  And, yet, we believe sin is more than passive participation in systems.  We confess our sins because, consciously and unconsciously, we cause brokenness.  Sometimes, we sin because the choice we’ve made seems to be the lesser of evils.  But sometimes we sin because we’re just selfish, jealous, lazy, proud, impatient, scared — or just too tired to care.

Another:  We confess our sins because that act of confession—that act of prayer—calls us to accountability and reminds us that we are not just sinners.

All:  We are also reconcilers, peacemakers, healers.

One:  And we have the responsibility to try to heal what we have broken, which is often really hard to do, and that’s why . . .

Left:  We also confess our sins to remind ourselves that we can’t do it on our own.

Right:  We need help. We need grace, community, and God.

All:  And so we confess our sins, not to make ourselves feel guilty, not to put on the sackcloth and cover ourselves in ashes. We confess our sins so that we can learn to love ourselves in all our wholeness, so that we can learn to love others in all their wholeness like God loves us.

The first thing I loved about the prayer was how long it took us to pray it. For a congregational prayer, this was a big assignment — not to mention we had to keep track of whose turn it was to speak. As the voices moved from one to all, and left to right, I prayed and listened. What I heard with new ears was the call see not only my brokenness but also the things — the people — I have broken. Like the Turkish word that let the hearer know whether I had experienced the heat in Austin or not, the lines about brokenness helped me hear the word sinner in a very personal and, I must say, helpful way. I loved the truth that sinner was not the last word. I am also a reconciler, a peacemaker, a healer.

It is our practice at Pilgrim to use the same prayers and responses for all of the Sundays in Lent (they usually change week to week). This season offers me the chance to tell time differently, to circle each week back to the same altar, to the same prayers, to the same words and see what has changed, what has been lost, and what has been found in my life. True, in some ways that is no different than any Sunday, but this season that moves in rhythm with winter giving was to spring, with old growth offering itself that new growth might come, I am grateful for the repetition and intention that calls me to look at my words that they might provide evidence that I have experienced the grace of which I speak.

Peace
Milton