don't eat alone

Tonight, I cooked dinner for some of our neighbors as part of my participation in our Old North Durham Neighborhood Association auction not long ago.

For tonight’s post, I offer the menu — with links to recipes.

Roasted Asparagus and Poblano Soup

Winter Salad

Autumn Gallette

Vietnamese Caramelized Catfish “Sliders” on a Sweet Potato Biscuit with Wilted Arugula

Chocolate Risotto with Marscapone Cream.

 

And a good time was had by all.

Peace,

Milton

It’s December in Durham, which means we have no idea what the weather is going to do from day to day. Right now, it might as well be May; tomorrow may feel like, well, December. Who knows. As I sat in our kitchen this morning, trying to decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioner, I saw a Facebook post from a friend showing that it was two degrees in Denver. Underneath, in smaller print, it said, “Feels like 18.” When I see a statement like that, I wonder who decided how eighteen degrees feel. Is it noticeably different from seventeen or nineteen?

Weather forecasting as always been an attractive career to me for one simple reason I remember my father articulating when I was in high school: “They get to be wrong everyday and they never get fired.” I am also old enough to remember George Carlin’s routine as Al Sleet, the “Hippy Dippy Weather Man.” At one point he says, “I imagine some of you were a little surprised at the weather over the weekend, especially if you watched my show Friday night, man. I’d like to apologize for the weather, especially to the residents of Rogers, Oklahoma; caught them napping.” And then there’s my favorite weather man, Phil Connor, who said, “You want a prediction about the weather, I’ll give you a winter prediction: it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be gray, and it’s gonna last you the rest of your life.”

I suppose the weather forecasters in Denver this morning are on to something larger than they realize with their postulations: there’s the way things are and then there’s the way things feel. Two measurements, sometimes both accurate, each in its own way and different for most every person. A life colored by grief feels the world differently than a life colored by achievement or surprise; a life colored by joy feels the world differently than one colored by depression or despair. For some, these days are Advent. For others, they are short, cold, and dark.

One of the things they taught us early on in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) was to understand that “perception is reality” when we were dealing with patients and families in trauma. What I had to learn (OK, one of the things I had to learn) was I couldn’t fix their perception. I couldn’t tell them what the temperature was and make them warm up or cool down with my explanation of reality. I had to listen. I had to listen to see how cold they were, or how hot they felt and then take their word for their weather in order to know how to help. I had to learn my readings of life weren’t the only accurate ones.

The birth of Jesus is the story of God entering our weather, putting on skin to see what it feels like to be one of us, stepping out into the cold rather than simply reading the thermometer and offers us a model to follow. Ginger and I talked about her trip on the 2012 Freedom Ride this afternoon and one of the biggest things I heard in what she learned is how hard it is for us to listen to someone else’s weather report rather than telling them the forecast. People need to be loved way more than they need to be fixed or advised.

Even though we have been in Durham five years, my blood has not thinned. From the inside of my skin, people think the winter is far colder than it actually is (that is, on the days when it is actually cold). I lived up North long enough that I no longer remember how to survive a Texas summer, and those folks just keep right on going as though it’s “not that hot.” Whether we call it the wind chill or the heat index, how it feels to step out into the weather of life is not so easily quantifiable. If wewant to know what it feels like, we have to ask.

And then we have to listen.

Peace,
Milton

I am a U2 fan because of James, John, and Todd — three guys in my youth group at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth back in the Eighties. Well, those guys and the fact that in those early days of MTV the band’s videos played relentlessly. One of my favorite memories at UBC was sending James’ mother to Sound Warehouse to pick up The Joshua Tree on release day because we were on a youth group ski trip. She met us with the CDs on our return. When the band came to town on the Rattle and Hum tour, we were all in the Tarrant County Convention Center for both nights. One of those concerts contained the performance of U2 and B. B. King singing “When Love Comes to Town” that ended up on the live record. James even managed to meet the band and they dedicated a song to him: “Bullet the Blue Sky,” as I remember.

My foot starts tapping just thinking about it.

The memories unearthed themselves this evening because I went to a “U2charist” at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church here in Durham. It’s just what it sounds like: a Eucharist with music by U2. The idea has been around about a decade, but I’ve never gotten to go to one. We met in the Parish Hall at the church. The music was provided by U2FX, a local U2 cover band, who did a good job offering the songs. The priests at the church led the worship. The offering went to support the work the church is doing with the Bromley Mission School in Liberia.

We sang a lot of songs. Here’s the list, in the order we sang them:

Pride (In the Name of Love)
Vertigo
Yahweh
Beautiful Day
Amazing Grace/Where the Streets Have No Name
Magnificent
Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Heaven on Earth/Walk On
One
40
Window in the Skies

Two of them were new to me: “Magnificent” (based on the Magnificat) and “Window in the Skies.” All of them added meaning and focus to the service. The lead singer of the band took time to talk about how the U2charist had come to be in the first place and how it had found a life in many adaptations. The point, for me, might be best described in one of my favorite Billy Joel lyrics: “I believe there comes a time for meditations in cathedrals of our own.” The centuries-old prayers backed by electric guitars made for good worship because it cast new light through the stained glass.

One of the quotes I come back to every Advent is one I found about the time I got The Joshua Tree, though the words are also centuries old, from the pen of Meister Eckhart:

“What good is it if Mary was full of grace unless I am full of grace? And what good is it if Christ was born 2000 years ago, if he is not born in me, in my time, and in my culture?”

I don’t think he was saying we have to contemporize everything to make it meaningful. I’m not saying that either. What I hear in his words is the call to keep the story fresh, to keep telling it in a way that compels our hearts to hunger for God. Tonight, hearing the U2 in the context of Communion made both the songs and the sacrament come alive in new ways. I ieft wondering how I might put together an Emmylou-charist — and how I can be the best midwife for Christ to be born here in Durham this year.

oh, can’t you see what love has done
what it’s doing to me?

Here’s the video for “Window in the Skies.”

Peace
Milton

Libby is one of the folks I work with at the computer store and she is a wonderful photographer. What I love about her work is the way she captures a moment more than she creates a pose. She works to tell a story in a snap shot. It’s art. And it almost always leads me back to Jackson Browne’s opening lines to “Fountain of Sorrow” —

looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
there were one or two I know you would have liked a little more
but they didn’t show your spirit quite as true . . .

When we start talking about old stories, we have ways of visualizing them. That’s why making movies out of great books is dangerous work. After seeing To Kill a Mockingbird on screen, I can’t help but hear Gregory Peck’s voice when Atticus speaks each time I reread it. The filmmakers did good work there. Some others have not fared so well in the translation: Demi Moore as Hester Prynne comes to mind. When we come to how we visualize the story of the birth of Jesus, we’ve seen too many Christmas cards and Hallmark specials to remember, as Rev. Barber said the other night, “Stop saying swaddling clothes; say nasty! The Christmas story is violent!.”

And then there’s Mary.

I had lived through who knows how many Christmases before I began to get a sense of who Jesus’ mother was. When you grow up hearing Mary speak in King James English and singing things like, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and you hear your share of cantatas and classical settings of “The Magnificat,” the picture of Mary too quickly becomes a rather well put together opera singer and poet. I mean she made that stuff up on the spot.

But no. She was young — just old enough to be given away (as property) in marriage and not very experienced or educated. Nazareth was a one donkey town. As far as her singing  goers, perhaps we would draw a better parallel to a teenager with her first guitar (or lyre, I suppose) than Kiri Te Kanawa. I also think she was strong. She seems like she was one tough cookie from the start.

Yet, just like Jesus, Mary didn’t arrive fully formed. But the time the gospels come to an end, Mary was one of the few left standing at the cross, even though it was her son who had been summarily executed. In between Bethlehem and Golgotha she had pointed people at the wedding to Jesus when they needed more wine. Later on she showed up with other family members to take Jesus home because they thought he had lost his mind. But where we meet her in the story she was a young girl surprised by the the Spirit and invited to a life she could not begin to comprehend, only trust, which she did.

One of the things I wish I had done while we lived in Africa was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. From what I understand, when you reach the last stretch ascending to the peak, they wake you up early in the morning — as in three in the morning — and you climb in the dark. They do it for two reasons: one, they want you too see the sunrise as you reach the summit and, two, they say you would climb it if you could see what’s in front of you. Sometimes it’s easier to look back where you have been than it is to come to terms with what lies ahead.

I wish there were interviews with Mary and Joseph where they spoke about what it was like to look back on where they had been as Jesus’ parents. I wonder how they would have told what happened on the road to Bethlehem, at their home in Nazareth, or any of the other stops along the way. I also wish there were pictures — captured moments like Libby’s photographs; I would love to see the young Hebrew girl we call Mary. I think it would change the story.

Peace,
Milton

Things started happening early here on West Trinity Avenue this morning. We were out the door at 6:30 to get Ginger to the bus for the 2012 Freedom Ride, then I came home in time to meet Jenny, our vet, who took Gracie with her for the day to see how the little dog is responding to the medication for her kidney infection, then my friends Lori and Terry came by to tell me about the friends so I can inscribe books for them for Christmas, then Rachel left for her Meals on Wheels run and Ellen, our housemate, left for work, and then Nicholas, a wonderful kid from church, stopped by with his mom to drop off cookies in celebration of St. Nicholas Day. When the house cleared, Ella, our youngest Schnauzer, and I took walk through the neighborhood. Then we came back and took a nap.

Our walk took us past Cocoa Cinnamon, our soon-to-be newest coffee shop (along with spices and teas and Mexican drinking chocolate), so we stopped to see how the progress is coming. Areli, one of the owners was there along with Heather, one of several artists who have contributed time and talents to what is going to be an incredible space. Heather’s project is the front room of this converted gas station, which is full of windows and light. Heather took a poem by Rumi (and I think a couple of other poems as well) and translated them into binary code and then worked out a pattern on the floor that visualizes that code. When Leon, Areli’s husband, described the idea to me I asked if the poem would be anywhere in the room. “I don’t know,” he said. “We may just let it be on the floor.”

When I asked Heather how it was going this morning, she said, “I need painters to help to put on a second coat.” There’s still a lot of room that has yet to see the first coat. She was sitting on the floor with a brush not bigger than a half an inch painting one small rectangle after another, displaying concentration and intent that will not likely be noticed by those coming in for lattes in the days to come.Yet she means every stroke and it matters that she does just as it matters that Ginger and the other Freedom Riders are crossing the South in a single bus that hardly anyone is noticing either.

Many Christmases ago, Ginger gave me a Byzantine icon writing class as a gift. Christopher Gosey, who was then artist-in-residence at Andover Newton Theological School, was my teacher and the class began a relationship that lasted a couple of years as I found deep meaning in the spiritual practice of painting the faces of the saints. His move to New Hampshire and then mine to Durham has left me with several unfinished works; one day I will find him again. One of the things I learned about iconography is the paint is almost translucent. We would mix the natural pigments into acrylic medium such that it required a great deal of repetition to bring the lines to life, going over each one twenty-five or thirty times. The point was to move deliberately and intently, to find meaning in the repetition, the ritual of tracing lines that had been handed down and then coloring them with pigments made of dirt and ash until they opened a window into heaven. A thin place. I leaned the Spirit could find me in the concentrated futility of that repetition, the motion that mattered for no other reason than I meant it — over and over. And no one else knew how long I had sat there to find that one line.

The story unfolding as we walk through Advent is a small story about a not-so-normal family struggling to make sense of their circumstance, going through the motions of life in hopes of finding a thin place that will help them understand what was happening. Mary was a hopeful young girl; Joseph was a confused and frightened man. No one in the story could see the poem they were painting. They knew nothing of shepherds and angels and magi. They knew about poverty and need and desperation and rejection. As Rev. William Barber said last night, “Stop saying swaddling clothes; say nasty! The Christmas story is violent! Mary forced to have a baby in a nasty manger.” Yet, they kept coloring in the boxes like Heather is doing and they stayed on the journey the way the Freedom Riders are doing and ended up giving birth to a baby in a barn in a small forgotten town.

Today would have been my father-in-law Reuben’s eighty-second birthday. He was a big hearted man who lived a small and important life. Until he moved to Durham, he had never lived more than ten miles from his birthplace. He spent his life tracing the lines of love that connected him to his relatives, to everyone Ginger brought home with her from school, and to all of those he encountered as he delivered Foremost Milk and Golden Flake Potato Chips. His was not easy and it was rich and full. Whenever you asked how he was, he said, “Fine. Wonderful. Marvelous. Fantastic. If I felt any better, I couldn’t stand it.” And he meant every word every time he said it. Tonight when the bus stops, Ginger will be back in Birmingham, where he was born.

I came home from work at the computer store to find Ella asleep on the couch and Rachel in her room. After a little while, Jenny brought Gracie home and then a friend came to take Rachel to dinner and Ellen came in from work and we all sat in the kitchen and talked about this small day we had all lived, the lines we had gone over once again painting the poems that are our lives.

And then I sat down to write.

Peace,
Milton

By the time most of you read this, Ginger will have received her Christmas present. She will be on a bus headed for Birmingham, Alabama as a part of the 21st Century Freedom Ride, which has been organized by a group here in Durham. They are riding from here to Atlanta and then to Birmingham for two days of retreat and renewal and challenge as they look at race relations in our country today. I found out about it through Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, one of the organizers and a fellow resident here in the Bull City. Tonight, we kicked off the Ride with a mass meeting to address racial profiling that met at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in the Walltown neighborhood. Jonathan describes how the meeting and the ride go together:

I’m delighted that my friend and mentor Rev. William Barber has agreed to kick-off this Freedom Ride with a Mass Meeting right here in Walltown to address the problem of racial profiling and the ways it is connected to our present struggle against a new Jim Crow–”the same old hatred,” as Rev. Barber says, “just dressed up in a suit with a business card that says ‘James Crow, Esq.’” For us, this Freedom Ride is growing directly out of the struggle of our neighborhood. (I witnessed police harassment of two young men from Walltown on our streets this week.) It is, we pray, an invitation to grow deeper in the wisdom of those who’ve gone before us and root our efforts in the rich soil of the Freedom Movement. But it is also an opportunity to recognize the many ways that our efforts for God’s new world in this place are tied to the efforts of other neighborhoods and others’ concerns.
Because, as Faulker said, history is never behind us. It’s not even past.
The same powers that King and so many others learned to name in the late 1960′s are still fragmenting communities and dealing death in our world today. And, just as importantly, the same gospel way that King chose to walk–all the way to the cross–is still a way open to us today.
Indeed, it is the only Way.

As I sat in the church tonight, on the cusp of 2013 and the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I was troubled by the barrage of statistics:

• African Americans make up 20% of the population of North Carolina but 57% of the prison population;
• African Americans are pulled over by the police nine times more often than white people;
• African Americans buy 15% of the cocaine sold in this country but make up 70% of the arrests.

Fifty years on and the work of equality and justice is far from done. When Rev. William Barber, the President of the North Carolina NAACP, stood up to speak, he wound those statistics into the season. “If you’re not challenging injustice,” he said toward the end of his sermon, “you’re not celebrating Christmas.”

He spoke brilliantly about Christmas being an “ugly story” of a poor and pregnant woman in her eighth month being forced to ride across the desert to pay taxes because the king wanted more; a violent story of a king who was willing to profile and kill all of the baby boys because he wanted to hold on to power; a compelling story because it calls us to trust in transformation: “Sometimes,” he said, “the people we look at most suspiciously might be our saviors.” He returned to talking about the challenge of dealing with the injustice in our country embedded in race and poverty and said, “This is Bethlehem. If you’re not challenging injustice, you’re not celebrating Christmas.”

The words bear repeating.

On the bus with Ginger are folks like Vincent Harding, who worked with Martin Luther King and has spent his life celebrating Christmas, and others like David Ramirez who are celebrating for a new generation dealing with immigration issues. Ginger is traveling, on her father’s birthday, back to her hometown where she was born in the downtown Birmingham hospital during the Children’s Crusade, just blocks away from the jail where  Martin wrote his Letter from the Birmingham Jail not even a month before. I expect she will come home with her own sense of transformation.

After the meeting tonight, I realize I have some celebrating of my own to do,even without a bus trip. After all, this is Bethlehem.

Peace,

Milton

As many evenings as we can, Ginger and I take a walk around our neighborhood, which, in our case, is downtown. Old North Durham sits just a few blocks north of the center of the city, not far from the Farmers’ Market Pavilion and a bunch of old warehouses and abandoned buildings that are coming back to life as different people bring their dreams to life. It’s even become informally known as the DIY District. Not too many years ago, downtown Durham was a wasteland; now it has come to life because people have done what it takes to chase down their dreams and many others have done all they can to encourage them.

Last night as we made the next to last turn toward home, we ran into a friend we met through the Wild Goose Festival a couple of years ago and who is now working as a social worker and living around the corner from us in a shared residence designed to support people with developmental disabilities. There are a couple of blocks of abandoned apartments that a developer bought and those with the dream of offering affordable and accessible housing got him to do more with the buildings that just go for the biggest buck. He is now finishing the third or fourth of the buildings with more to come. These are not temporary group residences, though I know there is a need for such housing.. People are buying these homes to put down roots in our neighborhood. Our friend’s dream is to help found a L’Arche community here in Durham; these homes are a step in that direction.

These new houses face the back of Fullsteam Brewery, now in its third year, which I continue to call The Most Encouraging Room in Durham. A couple of afternoons ago, I stopped by for a beer and, as usual, the place was crawling with kids and dogs. As I got to the door, a couple was coming out and the father was carrying a rather distressed and inconsolable child. “Why? Why, Daddy?” she cried. “Why do we have to leave Fullsteam?” I understood how she felt. Yet what is only a couple of years old to most of us is, I’m sure, a much older dream in the heart and mind of Sean, the owner, just as the accessible houses didn’t happen overnight. The same with Motorco Music Hall, or Geer Street Garden, and Cocoa Cinnamon (our soon to be newest coffee shop). Dreams take time to grow.

As I sat here this morning, thinking about the dreams coming to life all around us, I began to wonder how long God thought of the Incarnation before Jesus showed up in the manger. Yes, I understand God is not shackled by the constraints of time that bind us, and I still wondered how it all rolled out. The way the story of the Great Flood get told, God looked at what was going on in the world and made a decision — as though the flood had not always been on the calendar. To think it was all mapped out feels a bit mechanical, if not cruel. So what compelled God to decide it was time to know experientially what it was like to be human? Why wait so long or show up so soon? Why open things up?

When we as humans tell the story, it seems we somehow end up at the center of it. Jesus came for us. Why was God paying so much attention to our little pebble of a planet that matters only to those of us who live on it. Why would Jesus come here?

The hallmark of Jesus’ ministry was his care for the oppressed and marginalized. He came for the poor and outcast as much or more than anyone else. He taught the ones who had already flunked out. He kept saying, over and over, that our call was to care for the poor and downtrodden. Jesus was born as a poor kid to a less-than-important family on a throwaway planet to demonstrate incarnationally that God’s love reaches for every last one of us.

“When I gaze into the night sky,” said the Psalmist, “I wonder who we are that you are mindful of us?”

We are the throwaways on a dispensable planet. In a universe of possibilities, we are the afterthought, the center of absolutely nothing. We are the ones who could disappear and no one would notice. And Jesus came here. For us. On purpose. Because that’s what God does.

And that’s what God calls us to do. The greatest implication of the Incarnation is we are to go and do likewise. For those of us who have roofs over our heads and more food than we need, who have had the luxury of an education or the advantages of connections that allowed us to feel as though we deserve to be where we are, that call is difficult to hear because then we have to come to terms with the circumstances of our lives being something other than God’s blessing on us for being such good people.

As the rhetoric aimed at the poor in our country becomes more divisive and acerbic, looking at the manger or the stars or both must remind me Jesus became human not to say who deserved to be left behind but to know what it felt like to be dispensable and to make sure we knew no one deserved to be thrown away. Or maybe I can just look at the houses that are becoming homes alongside of the warehouses that are now gathering spots and the tienda where I can get a homemade empanada and the TROSA house full of folks in recovery.

Jesus would like Durham.

Peace,
Milton