don't eat alone

I continued my reading of Nora Gallagher’s Practicing Resurrection and only got about five pages in when I a quote that brought the rest of the day rushing back to me.

A spiritual director told me once that God is found on the edge of things, in the margins. About a drunk who sleeps on Trinity’s porch he said, “You can ask him not to drink on the porch but you can’t ask him to leave. He lives in the part that makes the church uncomfortable and that’s where Jesus lives.”

We had a workshop on stewardship this morning at church. Eighteen of us gathered around the tables in the Fellowship Hall to listen to Jena Roy, a friend from Massachusetts, as she challenged us to look at how we see ourselves, who we wish we could become, what we worry about when it comes to our church, and what we would change. The group was engaged and engaging, working hard to listen to one another and to share honestly, and the morning was full of good things that left us with even more questions. And that’s a good thing.

We are a relatively small church (about a hundred and fifty active members), and we are a theologically liberal church that works hard to put hands and feet to our faith: we would be one of those “social justice” churches that frightens Glen Beck. As we listed the things that we saw as strengths of our congregation and then moved on to “stumbling blocks” and “opportunities,” we didn’t come up with three distinct lists. What were strengths to some were the stuff stumbling blocks were made of, and most everything provided the opportunity to make ourselves uncomfortable, which is where Gallagher’s words took me even though she was talking about something completely different.

The limits of our language come into play when we talk about our relationship to church because we use the same word for the physical building and geographical location that we use for the spiritual community we call the Body of Christ. We don’t have another way to describe what we do on Sunday morning other than to say, “I’m going to church,” but the separation in that sentence makes it problematic, at some level, when we want to say (0r sing), “We are the church.” When we talk about going to church, we think of it as a place of comfort and warmth, which is right and good, but when we talk about being the church we have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

As the conversation moved around the table, one person commented that we didn’t do our members a favor by suggesting they give two percent of their income to the church. “We’re letting ourselves off easy,” she said. Another, who is currently looking for work, said she has realized in the midst of her job search that, for the first time, she is taking into account the effect the job will have on the time on her life in church. “I’ve never thought of things this way before,” she said. The two comments came together for me in that being the church means we are willing to change the way we live to be a part: the way we spend money, the way we use our time, and even what we do for a job.

Part of the life of any institution is a push for self-perpetuation. The church is not exempt from falling into the pattern of using most of our energy to “keeping the doors open.” The call of the gospel is not to self-perpetuation, however, but to spend ourselves in the present, to not hold back. (Consider the lilies.) Our assembling ourselves together is, almost by definition, at cross-purposes with itself, pun intended. (Lose your life to find it.) And we haven’t even gotten to the relational energy it takes to be with one another. Most all of the epistles that make up the last half of the New Testament were written to deal with problems in the early church, with the questions and quagmires that grew out of trying to live together in Jesus’ name. The issues we raised around the table this morning were ours, but they were by no means original. This is the part of the church where drunks sleep and Jesus lives, where getting together matters more that getting my way, listening is a crucial incarnation of love, giving our offering is an act of discipleship and not a charitable donation, and committing ourselves to one another is more important that getting our way. After all, we are not a civic organization or a book club; we are the church.

Tomorrow night marks the last night of this particular menu at the Durham restaurant. Those who come to dinner on Tuesday will get a whole new menu of offerings. For those of us in the kitchen, it means coming into the same room to prep and cook, but to do so with new ingredients and new recipes, to set up the line differently, and to learn new patterns of cooperation with each other. The change is good, important, and uncomfortable work, and it’s the way the restaurant stays fresh. The church, like the restaurant, has its seasons, whether we’re talking about the liturgical calendar or the ebb and flow of life, and might do well to appropriate the metaphor. We might not have to ditch the whole menu, but we need a steady diet of change and choices that challenge us to see with fresh eyes and learn new patterns of faithfulness and compassion.

Our workshop this weekend was a new item on our church menu. I’m grateful for the work that went into making it happen, for those who gave their time to be together, and for the freedom we gave each other to made uncomfortable that we might see with fresh eyes where Jesus lives among us.

Peace,
Milton

Abel spent the afternoon
prepping the vegetable plate:
slicing shiitakes and scallions,
reducing the risotto, and
spreading the mixture on
sheet pans to let it cool.
Then he enlisted me to make
the rice balls and roll them
in Japanese breadcrumbs.
He cut sweet potatoes,
blanched greens, and
roasted garlic to make
the cream sauce.

The thirty-seven people
who ordered the dish were
offered both a visual and
culinary treat: the sauté
of spinach and sweets
on one side of the plate;
the small swatch of sauce
creating a bed for the three
golden crusted arancini;
the last ladle of cream
draped across the top,
with a sprinkle of scallions.

But only those relegated to
the kitchen were fortunate
enough to see how tenderly
Abel stacked the sauté;
how he nestled the small orbs
on their side of the plate as
though they were as fragile
as they were flavorful;
and the affection with which
he baptized them with the
puree of garlic and goat cheese;
the smile that sent the dish
to the diners. Thirty-seven times.

Peace,
Milton

The whole scene arrived in the middle of a week when the story of the Prodigal Son is the lectionary passage, about as gift wrapped as a sermon illustration could be. Nomar Garciaparra, longtime and well-loved shortstop for the Boston Red Sox who was traded away, came home day before last, to retire. Though the terms under which he left in the summer of 1974 were not good at all, and it was the October that followed – and perhaps, in part, because of the trade – that the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years.

He has traveled to California and Chicago and back to California, trying to find his place. I must also say, for the record, that the Sox haven’t had a steady shortstop since. Every time Nomar came back to Boston, regardless of the colors he was wearing, the Fenway Faithful gave him a long standing ovation. We loved Nomar, even from afar. Besides, he was the only player we ever had whose name rhymed with homer, as in, “Come in Nomar, hit a homer.” (It has to be done in a heavy Boston accent – “Come on, Nomah, hit a homah” – and it rhymes the same way country singers think rain rhymes with string.)

Nomar knew it was time to retire and he also wished he could retire in his Red Sox uniform. Spring training is in full swing, and he is not playing for anyone. So the Sox offered him a contract: a one day, minor league contract that allowed him to become a part of the organization once again, and then he retired, at home. He’s happy and all those folks (like Ginger) who still have their Garciaparra t-shirts can wear them again. Nomar belongs to us. Period.

“The dream to play baseball in the big leagues started here,” he said at his news conference held at City of Palms Park before the Red Sox played a spring training game. “I really wanted to have that be the last uniform I ever put on.”

As I was walking home tonight from the restaurant, I found myself humming a soundtrack to my thoughts about Nomar’s last homestand:

and I see your true colors shining through
I see your true colors and that’s why I love you
so don’t be afraid to let them show
you true colors true colors
are beautiful like the rainbow

In the King James version of the story in Luke, it says the prodigal son “came to himself” as he was feeding the pigs and realized it was time to go home for good. He realized he was prodigal, as in wastefully extravagant, and he had used himself all up, along with his possessions. The dictionary offers a second definition for prodigal: “giving in abundance; lavish or profuse.” We might also use the same adjective for the father, who welcomed his son home with extravagant forgiveness and a barbeque to boot. They shared a propensity for extravagance; the father, however, knew how to spend himself in love. Such were his true colors.

Yes, I’m a Sox fan and I know I might be stretching the story a bit here, still I’m willing to stretch because one of ours that got lost has come home. He was humble enough to ask and the Red Sox ownership were generous enough to find a way to make it work. What it means for Red Sox Nation is, when we tell our stories (and we do tell stories), we can say he is one of us. Whatever happened between 2004 and now is what happened, but the real story is he came home. And my guess is it was no different at the Prodigal Household in the parable. As they bit into the brisket, they told stories, too, of how the boy had run away, and how the father had pined at the front door day after day. “And then you came home,” someone said. And they laughed and cried and told the story again, talking, I’m sure, with their mouths full.

We are at our best with our arms wide open. It’s true for both Bible and baseball.

Peace,
Milton

I can’t say I have ever heard God speak out loud, but I think I’ve come close.

Whatever God’s voice actually sounds like, I think I come close to hearing it when our children lead worship. Last Sunday, they led our call to worship by lining up in front of the Communion table and singing with holy gusto:

I am the church you are the church
we are the church together
all who follow Jesus all around the world
we are the church together

the church is not a building
the church is not a steeple,
the church is not a resting place
the church is a people

we’re many kinds of people
with many kinds of faces
all colors and all ages
from all times and places

and when the people gather
there’s singing and there’s praying
there’s laughing and there’s crying
sometimes, all of it saying

I am the church you are the church
we are the church together
all who follow Jesus all around the world
we are the church together

Their singing was evidence of the Incarnation, shown in the abandon with which they inhabited the words they sang and the tenacity of their hand gestures; they weren’t fooling around. As they began our Communion service, they called us to incarnate our faith not only as we passed the Bread and the Cup, but also as we passed the Peace during the service and as we passed the snacks at Coffee Hour. I could hear them singing again as I read the words of Augustine at lunch today, quoted by Nora Gallagher:

You are the body of Christ and its members. . . . It is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table. And it is to what you are that you reply. Amen. (23)

“The Word became flesh,” John says at the beginning of his gospel. Paul’s use of the body of Christ as the metaphor for the church suggests the Word stayed flesh. As Mary Oliver says, “The Spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest.” We are the Church, the Body, the Word still made flesh: Love with skin on. Together, that is.

I love the line in the song that says, “The church is not a resting place.” I remember my father telling a story years ago of a person leaving church one Sunday morning and telling him they would not be back. “I don’t come to church to be made uncomfortable,” they said. If we are the church, then we are not only Love with skin on, but also Pain and Grief and Hope and Joy and Despair incarnate. We are people deciding to be together, which means to be both comforted and uncomforted. It means we ought to be looking at one another and at our world with the same holy gusto with which our children sang.

Though Gallagher had changed subjects somewhat as I moved on to the next chapter, I found a connection between Augustine’s admonition and her thoughts on prayer:

I have always been wary of the “surrender to God” school of prayer, which seems to make one more passive than is necessary in a relationship that doesn’t seem to encourage passivity. (39)

Listening is not a passive act. If I’m paying attention – attending to my life – I am engaged and alive. “Be still and know that I am God” is not a call to being a blessed blob, but a direction for discernment and intentionality.

Be still and know.
Come and see.
Take and eat.

Together, we inhabit the Mystery, we incarnate the Love: we are the Church. Together.

Peace,
Milton

In order to survey, Kit said, you always have to have two points. In a photo, he leans over his tripod looking through the scope, high above Otowi Bridge in northern New Mexico, sighting a distant point on the other side of the river . . . I thought of him as making sense of geography. (Nora Gallagher, Practicing Resurrection 27)

survey

I learned Kit’s lesson from my friend,
Doug, who was a surveyor until
he looked through the scope
and saw he was a painter.

On more than one occasion,
we held the pole for one another,
usually over Indian food,
mapping our hearts’ desires,

scoping to make some sense of
the geography of middle age,
a landscape littered with enough
forks in the road to supply silverware

for anyone hungry to know where
they were, or what lay across the
ridge of reason, beyond the forest of
failure, and under the sheltering sky.

Peace,
Milton

I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had been gone a good thirty years, had sold their land to the Wilsons, who in turn had passed it on to the Smiths; but it still the old Turner place, named for someone even the old timers had a hard time remembering.

Ginger and I spent the afternoon with a friend who had come for his daughter to look at Duke. She is a junior in college and beginning to think about where she wants to study. After they had seen the campus, they came to our house so we could go to dinner. Ginger had a meeting first, so I played tour guide to share what I knew about Durham. Thanks to the Neighborhood History Walk our neighborhood association does, tours friends gave us when we moved here, and a little reconnoitering of my own, I can put together a pretty good little tour of our fair city, though, after I talked about the old Erwin Mills buildings on Ninth Street and the old tobacco buildings at Brightleaf and American Tobacco, I wondered if I didn’t sound like I was giving directions to the old Turner place. I was telling history that I didn’t experience as though I knew what it meant.

Pick any church building with stained glass windows over a hundred years old and there will be names most folks in the congregations would be hard pressed to recognize. Within the last year, the last survivor of the German concentration camps died, meaning those chilling stories that compel us never to forget can no longer be told in the first person. As a collective, the human race has forgotten more than it has remembered; there are only so many things we can carry. As a youth minister in the mid-eighties, I remember my shock when one of my seventh graders, who would have been born in the early seventies, picked up a Beatles record of mine and said, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Alas, the trivial example best makes the point.

emotional archaeology

the bones of a building don’t have
the guts to tell you the whole story
the faded cigarette sign painted on
the wall isn’t the whole picture

I’m digging in the used bin at Offbeat
Records in Brightleaf a tobacco building
turned into a tune shop whose days
are numbered thanks to itunes

the vacant lot at the end of our block
once held the house where John Loudermilk
wrote Tobacco Road and I find myself
hard pressed to sing more than the title

the day is coming I know when someone
will ask about a new place and I’ll say
it’s where the old record shop used to be
mourning both music and memory

Peace,
Milton

we pass the silver plate
of broken bread with
less confidence than
we pass the peace

easier perhaps to hug
than to admit our hunger
we take and eat without
a word and wait for

the wine’s weaker friend
shot glasses of salvation
we place the empties
in the pew racks causing

the clicking sound of
solidarity to rattle
our hearts and shake
awake the resonance

that runs through all
the saints and suppers
that we might remember
that we might be one

Peace,
Milton

We’ve been spending Saturday mornings during Lent with Job at our church: coffee, fruit, pastries, and suffering – what a way to spend a weekend. I’m the discussion leader and the guy who starts the coffee pot, so I get there early to get both the pot and my mind percolating. This morning we looked at the first cycle of conversations between Job and his three alleged friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar (Zogood).

I was rereading passages, browsing through commentaries, and trying to pull my thoughts together when I came across a section in one of the commentaries that talked about the significance of Job’s physical sufferings. The world came crashing in on Job first, with the loss of his possessions, then the loss of his family, and then the infliction of the seeping, painful sores that left him scraping his skin on the dung heap. The reality of his crumbling body brought him face to face with his physical finitude. But there’s more to it than that. The commentator said the significance of the bodily ailments pointed to the fact that our bodies are “organs of perception”: each of us understands the world physically, through our senses and our experiences. We are not objective. What we see and taste and smell and touch and hear and feel is what we experience.

One of the most fascinating things about reading This Is Your Brain on Music was Levitin’s explanation of what happens physically in our brains when we hear a song, and when we are moved emotionally by a melody. The Hebrews understood something we are having to relearn as Westerners drenched in Greek dualism: body, mind, and spirit are intrinsically connected; they cannot be separated. What we experience spiritually has physical ramifications and vice versa. Our bodies are not merely temporal shells for our eternal souls; every last bit of our beings makes us who we are and influences who we can become.

When Ginger was doing her doctoral work at ETS in Detroit, she took a class called “The Body as a Means of Grace.” The textbook was Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork. I remembered the title as I was reading the commentary. During our study time, Ginger talked about the physical work they did – movement, Reiki, meditation – and the spiritual experiences that came about as a result. Our bodies’ knowledge is intimate and direct. It even shows up in our language in ways that slip by us: we are touched by songs and books, moved by music and movies. The words are as physical as the experiences.

When I was on staff at University Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas, one of the pastors from University Christian Church, down the block, came to our staff meeting to talk about similarities and differences in our worship services. When we asked why they observed Communion every week, she answered, “Because we want to experience Christ with all of our senses in worship, not just by sight and hearing.” Then she quoted Psalm 34: “O, taste and see that the Lord is good.”

My Australian blog buddy, Simon Carey Holt, just began a new pastorate and writes beautifully about his first taste of community there:

Once installed last Sunday as the pastor of Collins Street, the very first thing I got to do was to lead the church at the table … the breaking of bread and sharing of wine. I am glad that’s where it began.

For me, there is no better image of salvation than of a table prepared by God. It is a place of open invitation where all estrangement disappears. It’s a place of extraordinary intimacy but never exclusivity, one of challenge but never judgement; a shared table of healing, sustenance and hope. What’s more, as people of that table we are called to beckon the stranger with the same open hospitality that draws us.

Communion is both a metaphorical and material image of the physicality of our faith. We eat together, we feed each other, and there are always leftovers. The reality that my perception of the world, and of God, is only available to me through my physical senses, meaning there is no way I can be objective and that truth is always going to be larger than I am, means faith, like life, has to be a team sport. Figuring out our faith is the live action version of the fable of the blind men and the elephant: each of us hold of a different part and we need each other for a more complete view.

Don’t eat alone; don’t faith alone, either.

Around our table this morning were some who know firsthand the despair of depression, some who are living through the pain of broken relationships, some who are grieving over the loss of loved ones, some who are living with cancer and other serious illnesses, some contemplating major life changes, and there were only ten of us around the table. As we read aloud what the three friends had to say to Job in the midst of his pain, we found ourselves on both sides of the conversation. We knew what it felt like for well-meaning people to say things that did not help because they felt like they needed to say something to cope with their own sense of helplessness and we knew what it felt like to be one of those well-meaning people wondering what to say and wishing we could do something to help. Sometimes, the best we can do is remember a line from Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something; stand there.”

Tonight, I am reminded of an old story from Martin Bell’s wonderful book, The Way of the Wolf, called “The Porcupine Whose Name Didn’t Matter.” I offer it here, even though it makes for an extra long post, because it belongs.

Once upon a time there was a cautious Porcupine name Joggi. Joggi lived with the mystery of his own life, much as any other porcupine, but he was exceedingly cautious. Joggi lived and loved, laughed and cried tentatively. One might say that anger, frustration, and tenderness had been so delicately woven into the fabric of his person as to make it difficult for us to perceive.

Joggi was cautious in the face of the mystery of life. So cautious, in fact, that almost nobody knew his name. Most of the animals in the forest who had seen the near-sighted porcupine moving slowly about, poking his pointed black nose into the vegetation, bristling and puffing, squinting and stumbling. Few had spoken to him.

Now and then, someone would say hello and attempt to strike up a conversation. It never really led to anything. When asked what his name was, he would answer: “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what my name is, can’t you see, what difference does it make? It doesn’t matter”. More often than not, that would be the end of the conversation.

Joggi could not embrace another, he would not tell anyone his name. And the result was almost always the same — the other animals avoided him. With one exception, this was Gamiel, the raccoon. It did not bother him when the prickly little porcupine was silent for hours at a time. And he never even thought to ask about Joggi’s name. Gamiel could remember very little before the accident, and much of what had happened since was blurred somewhere in the recesses of his brain, all but lost to memory.

Raccoons are generally alert and resourceful creatures with keen perceptions and excellent memories. But all of this had changed. There had been a flash of light and then something hard ripped into the side of his head. His whole body convulsed with pain, white-hot, thrashing, ‘God-when-will-it-stop’ pain, that pitched him bleeding from the tree into the under-bush. Screaming pain that shrieked behind his eyes the one and only word of hope he knew, and then as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

Everything changed. He did not even look like a raccoon. The whole left side of his head was missing, he could barely pull himself along with his right front leg. Gamiel had only to look at himself in the forest pond to realize why everyone hurried past when he called out to them. Except, ever since the accident, Gamiel had been totally blind.

Joggi found Gamiel about 2 days after the pain had stopped, and approximately 3 hours after the raccoon had given up all hope. “Is someone there?”, Gamiel whispered. At first, Joggi didn’t say anything, the near-sighted porcupine moved closer. “You are a raccoon”, he said out loud. “Oh yes, indeed I am”, Gamiel stuttered. “Only I think something awful has happened to me. I cannot see anything at all, and I can barely move. Please tell me what has happened to me. Am I going to die? Why won’t anyone stop when I cry out? Why can’t I see? Please, I’m afraid”.

And in Gamiel’s searching, empty, sightless eyes, tears began to form. Joggi sniffed and said to himself: answer him. Don’t just stand there with your spines bristling and your heart pounding, answer him. Joggi spoke with a steady and quiet voice: “I believe you have been shocked. I cannot be certain, of course, but that is my opinion. Are you in a great deal of pain?” “No, at first there was pain, but I can’t feel anything now. In fact, my whole left side is numb. No, no more pain. Just, well, nothing”.

Joggi was silent. His tiny body shivering, breathing labored, short, difficult breaths. Gamiel spoke in a hoarse voice: “Are you still there?”. Joggi’s heart beat faster. “Yes, I’m here. I was just wondering what to do now?”. “Oh, you don’t have to do anything. Honestly, I mean that, you don’t have to do anything at all. Just stay with me for a little while. Just stay there. Just don’t go away. Please. I’m afraid. You won’t go away, will you?” Joggi swallowed hard. “No, no I won’t go away”. “Thank you”, Gamiel said quietly. And then the wounded raccoon fell asleep.

Joggi stood beside Gamiel all that day. Then when evening came, a cool breeze made his spines whistle slightly, the sound woke the raccoon. “Are you there?”. “Yes, I told you I wouldn’t go away”. “I’m hungry”. “I thought you might be”, Joggi replied. “Can you move at all?”. Gamiel stretched his right leg forward and pulled himself along the ground. “Good for you”, said Joggi, “that will do nicely. I can bring you food, but you will need to maneuver for yourself in order to get water. I believe you have enough strength to reach the pond, it isn’t very far, and I can guide you directly to it. Come on, let’s see how it goes”.

That was how it began. An unusual partnership perhaps, certainly the rest of the animals in the forest were surprised to see the pair of them moving slowly about, managing to live from one day to the next without really doing much of anything. Occasionally Joggi would describe something for Gamiel, or answer a question, or direct the crippled raccoon toward a tasty morsel of food. Gamiel, for his part, chattered happily, basked in the sun, and generally enjoyed his friend’s company.

They made a home for one another, Joggi and Gamiel. Not a regular home, exactly, not a place. More like a shelter from the excessive pain that each of them had known. A coming together of two lonely and frightened creatures. A bond of trust that asked no questions, expected nothing at all except the merciful being together that made waking up tomorrow possible.

Joggi was with Gamiel for one full year before the injured raccoon finally died. It was a quiet event, almost a surprise, but that Joggi had been expecting for so long. Gamiel’s strength just finally gave out. “You know, I’ve been expecting this for quite some time now”, Joggi said to the raccoon, who lay their on the ground no longer able to hear. “I’m surprised that you managed to stay alive as long as you did. I knew the day that I found you that it couldn’t last, and yet, well, I hoped it might have been a little longer. Do you know what I mean? You see, I never knew anybody very well before. Not that we ever talked much, or anything like that, but I felt like I knew you anyway, even without talking. I have a really hard time talking to anybody, or getting to know anybody. And nobody ever wants to get very close to me because of all these spines that I have sticking out of me. I don’t suppose that you ever knew that I had spines sticking out all over me, did you? They’re sort of like needles, and they’re sharp. I guess they scare everybody a bit. I hope you don’t mind my talking so much.”

“I really don’t know why I’m talking to you now. I really suppose it’s just that I had a little more to tell you before you died. I have been wanting to say this for almost a year and never quite found the right time to do it. It’s too late now, I realize, but I’ve been wanting to tell you that it has been an honor to meet you, and that you indeed are a very handsome raccoon. And that I would like to consider you my friend.”.

The porcupine cleared his throat. Tears dropped onto his nose. “Tell him,” he said to himself, “don’t just stand there with your spines bristling and your heart pounding, tell him.”

“Oh, and by the way, I’d like to tell you what my name is. It’s a funny name, I suppose, but I’d like you to know what it is. It’s Joggi.” Without another word, the tiny porcupine turned away from Gamiel’s lifeless body, and began to cry.

“Hospitality is salvation,” says Diana Butler Bass. I think she’s on to something, as are the rest of us.

Peace,
Milton

I had a little time to read this afternoon and began Peter Gomes’ book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. The opening quote read:

The great principle dominating the composition of Scripture is that of the ascent towards discovery. — Henri Daniel-Rops What is the Bible?

A half hour earlier, I was listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday and a segment on the Chilean earthquake that consisted of an interview with Ross Stein from the U. S. Geological Survey.

Last week’s powerful earthquake in Chile may have shifted the Earth’s axis and changed the length of a day, according to NASA researchers. The magnitude 8.8 quake of February 27 was powerful enough to alter the position of the planet’s figure axis, an imaginary line around which the mass of the planet rotates, by about 3 inches. That adds up to an Earth day that lasts about 1.26 microseconds less than it did before the earthquake.

In the interview, Stein talked more about mountains than moments, and how the way in which the Nazca plates are cramming themselves under the South American continent caused the shore line to rise several feet. The discussion then moved to Charles Darwin being in Chile for another large earthquake in almost the same place in 1835. He also saw the shore line rise and realized that the mountains had been born out of a series of earthquakes over many, many years. Stein concluded,

When you see a mountain, you are looking at past earthquakes.

The phrase, “ascent to discovery” and the idea that mountains are born gradually from earthquakes – the shifting of the ground underneath our feet significant enough to shorten our days and raise our coastlines – took me here.

Topography

Faith is the mountain range
Abraham climbed to kill Isaac,
Moses went up (twice) for tablets;
where Noah parked the ark, and
Jesus was tempted to test the angels;
where the disciples saw Jesus
transfigured and then killed.

Grace is the shifting plate
of promise underneath our feet,
raising the very ground we walk on,
changing clocks and certainty;
we are climbing without ladders,
through the strata of saints
who stacked stones and stories.

Peace,
Milton

A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse,” which means the problem is not with the word or phrase in and of itself, but with the fact that it once was so original and true that we used it to death.

The problem for songwriters is there are only so many words and so many rhymes. Once a good one is found, it is almost destined to become a cliché – other than my favorite lines from Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”:

I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
Wanna tell her that I love but the point is probably moot.

The great songwriters of the Forties and Fifties could rhyme like nobody’s business (yep, that’s one): inside rhymes, circular rhymes, exact rhymes. Still, thanks to them, no self-respecting songwriter is going to rhyme moon and June with a straight face. It’s a beautiful rhyme, once full of possibilities, and it has lost its originality by overuse. Even though I like Vanessa Williams, her song, “Save the Best for Last,” is a good example of songwriters going to the same well once too often.

sometimes the snow comes down in June
sometimes the sun goes ’round the moon
I see the passion in your eyes
sometimes it’s all a big surprise


cause there was a time when all I did was wish
you’d tell me this was love
it’s not the way I hoped or how I planned
but somehow it’s enough


and now we’re standing face to face
isn’t this world a crazy place
just when I thought our chance had passed
you go and save the best for last

The melody is romantic, her voice is beautiful, and the song has nothing new to say other than David Foster, who produced the record, knew a hit when he heard one. Of course, there are some songwriters – OK, one: John Prine – who can turn a who handful of clichés into a song by using them on purpose. I give you “Big Old Goofy World.”

Up in the morning
Work like a dog
Is better than sitting
Like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners
Be quiet as a mouse
Some day you’ll own a home
That’s as big as a house


I know a fella
he eats like a horse
knocks his old balls
round the old golf course
you oughta see his wife
she’s a cute little dish
she smokes like a chimney
and drinks like a fish


there’s a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it’s a big old goofy world


now Elvis had a woman
with a head like a rock
I wished I had a woman
that made my knees knock
she’d sing like an angel
and eat like a bird
and if I wrote a song
she’d know ever single word


kiss a little baby
give the world a smile
if you take an inch
give ’em back a mile
cause if you lie like a rug
and you don’t give a damn
you’re never gonna be
as happy as a clam


so I’m sitting in a hotel
trying to write a song
my head is just as empty
as the day is long
why it’s clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I’d be wise as an owl
stead of stubborn as a mule


there’s a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it’s a big old goofy world

Prine’s sense of humor and irony fills the clichés with some new life. There’s more going on than just the words. Long overuse doesn’t automatically turn a word or phrase (or a song) into a cliché. Sing along if you like:

amazing grace how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
was blind but now I see

The rhymes are old, perhaps even obvious, the song used at most every occasion from family reunions to film soundtracks to funerals, and still their familiarity calls up something other than tired; it connects to memory. For most. I’m sure there are those who hear this hymn as clichéd as Vanessa’s song, which leads to my question.

How do we keep the words and phrases that matter to us from becoming clichés?

I should define “we.” I don’t mean it in a giant, cultural, what’s-going-to-go-in-the-dictionary kind of sense. I mean we, as in family, or partners, or spouses, or friends, or congregations. It seems to me that there is a fine line between ritual (meaningful and intentional repetition) and cliché (meaningless from repetition). When we sing, for instance,

praise God from whom all blessings flow
praise God all creatures here below
praise God above ye heavenly host
Creator Christ and Holy Ghost

are we engaging in ritual, or are we repeating a well-worn cliché?

One of the ways the words don’t get tired, I suppose, is to keep asking the question because the answer may not always be the same, even for the same group of people. What do we have to do to infuse the familiarity of our well-worn words and phrases with the tenacity of the truth they hold and the courage and comfort of the faith to which they call us?

I love to tell the story for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest
and when in scenes of glory I sing a new new song
will be the old old story that I have loved so long

When it comes to songwriting lessons, perhaps rhymes do get tired and worn. But then again:

prone to wander Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here’s my heart O take and seal it
Seal it for thy courts above

Perhaps it’s not so much the words as the hearts and minds that grow weary.

Peace,
Milton