don't eat alone

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

It was about this time three years ago when Ginger and I began making plans to move her parents here to Durham to live with us. Her father’s Alzheimer’s was progressing to the point that her mother couldn’t take care of him on her own and a nine hour drive was too far a distance for us to be of much help. We all became real estate moguls that spring, selling our house here and their house there and then buying one big enough for all of us. We found a wonderful old home just north of downtown. The house was built in 1926 and had been redone; the yard, however, had not.

We turned to our friends from Bountiful Backyards to help us turn the yard from garbage into garden. When they finished, we had three fig trees, two Asian pear trees, a peach tree, blueberry bushes, blackberry bushes, an elderberry bush, a pomegranate bush, and all kinds of other things that build a permaculture, along with two big beds for vegetables. And not a blade of grass in sight. Our little urban farm, if you will, has kept me on a learning curve of how to compost and fertilize and plant and harvest.

I’ve also had to learn how to prune — or, should I say, I’m learning.

My latest lesson came last week when Sarah and Kate came over to help give the garden its winter trim. I asked for help because my life was as overgrown as the backyard and I couldn’t catch up on my own. I also still cut back most anything with some trepidation because I’m not sure what goes and what stays. In my backyard, the wheat and the chaff are not so clearly labeled. We spent a couple of hours one crisp and sunny morning working our way around the yard.

They talked and pruned and I listened and asked questions. They were gentle and judicious in their cutting, paying attention to the shape of the tree, the direction of the growth, and the ability for all the branches to see the light. Each tree had its own pruning map, so to speak. The peach tree wants to take on a bowl shape, the branches growing out first and then up, like an open hand. The pear grows straight up, centered around one central branch that calls the others to follow. The fig tree grows every way it can, its size limited only by how much it’s cut back. The muscadine grape renders more fruit when cut back to one vine instead of many. As we worked, I took notes both mental and physical, and I couldn’t help but think in metaphor: I was being offered a visual picture of Lent. This is a pruning season.

At the risk of this post becoming “FIve Things I Learned in My Garden,” I want to mention a few things that I am taking as markers for these forty days, as guides for my thoughts and actions on the way to the Resurrection. I suppose the other risk is that I am stating the obvious. I’m willing to risk both as I begin my spiritual practice of writing everyday from now till Easter. The first is old growth has to be cut away for new growth to be possible. When they pruned the blackberry bushes, they told me the new growth that came from the cut would be what fruited. The old branches were spent. They weren’t making a statement of judgement; they were stating what they knew. What grew and fruited last year had to be cut away to make room for new growth.

I hear two things. One — some things in our lives need to be finished in order for new things to be able to begin. Attending to life in the same way Sarah and Kate attended to our garden means looking for what needs to go. Two — pruning is not clear cutting, or even random cutting. They were attentive. They discussed which branch had to be cut and where it had to be cut. Pruning in the wrong place would not produce new growth. How the new growth happens depends on where we cut.

The next thing is all growth is not necessarily good for the plant. Growth is not actually the point. Healthy fruiting is the point. Letting the plant grow into its fullness is the point of pruning. Therefore, good growth doesn’t always mean just getting bigger. Part of what Kate and Sarah took into account was how the different plants fit into the larger garden. Our biggest fig tree was significantly cut back because the peach tree close by needs the room and the sun.  The fig tree will grow and produce figs and will also stay smaller than it could because its best growth will be to let the peach tree come into its own.

One last lesson, at least for this time around: what grows now will need to be pruned in time. This year’s new growth will be old next winter and will need to provide nutrition for the new branches that will bear their fruit. As we grow and change, so do our roles in the world.

Wait. One last thing — how things grow is ultimately out of my control. I can only do what I can do. Last year I had trees full of peaches and pears and figs and the squirrels got every last piece. Until I saw the barren branches I didn’t realize the century-old pin oaks that line our alley were a squirrel highway and I had inadvertently built a Cracker Barrel. I pruned this year knowing that their traffic patterns haven’t changed. I’ve been told hanging empty aluminum pie pans from the trees will deter them. My neighbors have old CDs hanging in theirs. If the little bushy tailed varmints get all of the fruit this summer, we will prune and try again.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I know it’s Lent, but there’s a new recipe.