don't eat alone

A number of years ago a woman named Martha, who went to school with me at Nairobi International School (NIS) when we were both in ninth grade, contacted as many of us as she could and compelled us to get together again. The invitation was too good to turn down: I had not seen most of the people in thirty years. NIS was a small school made up of students whose parents moved around the world for any number of reasons. Many of us were only there for a year or two. All of us spent most of our childhood and adolescence outside of America and moving around. We met at Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. Ginger and flew from Boston to El Paso and then drove the four hours to the hotel hidden in a valley in the middle of nowhere. As we passed a sign on the interstate that said, “Next exit 65 miles,” Ginger and I spoke simultaneously.

“This is beautiful,” I said.
“There is nothing out here,” she said.

Both statements were true. By the time we got to the hotel, most of the others had arrived. We walked into a room of twenty-five or thirty folks who were talking and hugging and laughing. When we got to our room that night, Ginger reflected on what she saw. “The healing was visible,” she said. “You could see it on all the faces — as though it was the first time in a long, long time that you were in a room where you were understood, where everyone understood what you had gone through, where you felt normal.”

She was right. I had not known that feeling since my family had come back to the States for good the middle of my junior year in high school. I’m not sure I’ve felt it again in quite the same way, but I thought about that night as I took part in the Wild Goose Festival which happened last weekend about an hour outside of Durham. The festival is self-described as one of spirituality, justice, music, and art. People came and camped in the woods and sang and talked and ate and looked for ways to connect. To me it felt like a cross between Woodstock and church youth camp. When I looked out over the field of participants, I heard Ginger’s words about my NIS reunion because most any direction I looked I saw people who didn’t look like “church folks” who were lost in wonder, love, and grace. For these four days, they got to feel understood. “Normal.” None of us was asked to do more than be ourselves and welcome one another.

And it was good.

I don’t want to overly romanticize it. The days were hot, the woods were filled with chiggers, and some of the speakers and performers remained quite impressed with themselves. The swath of inclusion still needs to be wider. We Christians who were raised to proclaim still have work to do in learning how to listen. And I loved who I saw gathered together at Wild Goose. The name reflects a metaphor for the Holy Spirit taken from Celtic Christianity. From the first time I heard it, I thought of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” Even though I have never heard anyone refer to it at the festival, the words are resonant.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Announcing your place in the family. And what a family gathering it was: the pious and the pierced, the tattooed and the trendy, the charismatic and the questioning, the earnest and the edgy, the philosophical and the pragmatic, the sarcastic and the sensitive, the devoted, the depressed, and the determined. Yes, I’m glad I’m a part of the family of God.

Both this year and last I was one of those who drove people — mostly speakers and musicians — back and forth from the airport. On most every run someone would ask if there were more people here than last year. The answer was yes and the festival goes mostly unnoticed by Americans, much less most American Christians. Somehow, in both arenas, working to be inclusive will get you marginalized. One afternoon, sitting at a picnic table in the afternoon sun at the festival, I read these words from yet another book by John Berger that is blowing my mind:

The larger is not more real — if we tend to believe it is, the tendency is perhaps a vestige of the fear reflex to be found in all animals, ion face of another creature larger than themselves. If is more prudent to believe that the large is more real than the small. Yet it is false. (53)

The challenge is not to become larger but to become truer. To be more committed to listening than speaking, to noticing rather than wanting to be noticed, to making room rather than making points. It is a harsh and exciting call. In the “Invitation” on the festival web site it says:

We are called to embody a different kind of religious expression than has often dominated our institutions and culture.  We believe that the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better; so we refuse to merely denounce the shadow of the tradition and abandon it.  Instead, we humbly seek to both tear down and build up, walking a path that embodies love of God, neighbor, and self.

We dream of a movement where everyone is welcome to participate.  We are intentionally building a space in which we invite everyone to value, respect and fully affirm people of any ethnicity, age, gender, gender expression, sexual identity, education, bodily condition, religious affiliation, or economic background, particularly the marginalized.  We are committed to fair trade, gift exchange, ecological sanity and economic inclusion. We strive for high standards of mutual respect, non-hierarchical leadership, and participative planning.

That’s not the kind of talk that builds mega-churches. It is the kind of talk — and action — that might help us all find our place in the family.

Peace,
Milton

“Until I met you, I would have been unable to name the transformation that was taking place. Today, at my late age, I name it — the fusion of love.”
                — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

 bejeweled

I have spent the afternoon in Old Havana
(the sandwich shop, that is)
with my Cafe Americano and mantecaditos
and the empty chair that is yours

the Caribbean rhythms danced around
the young couple sitting on the couch
as I wrote and wished for you
(not necessarily in that order)

and thought about the shine of silver
in your hair that matched the spark
in your eyes as you kissed me
this morning when you left

Yes — silver (better than grey):
sought after, valued, refined,
transformed, even earned;
the jewelry of well worn love.

There is a new recipe.
Peace,
Milton

for fireflies, while we sit in the dark
after another evening of almosts has
fallen all around us, all around us

for a walk, since the storm that was almost
a hurricane has done little more than
threaten to bring rain, to bring rain

to write a poem, you said as we walked
knowing it would do me good to search
for words in the dark, in the dark

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

I had thirty minutes to kill so I wandered
through the mystery novels and how to books
until I found myself among the remainders

books on their last legs making one final
appeal to be something other than compost
words someone meant once upon a time

in between two volumes I cannot recall
I found last year’s Chinese horoscope and
bought it, hoping to find out what happened

Peace,
Milton

Tomorrow, the State of North Carolina where I live is voting on a proposed constitutional amendment that reads:

“Constitutional amendment to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”

There are many of us who have been working hard to do what we can to defeat this insidious and cynical and poorly written piece of legislation, but tonight before I know whether or not our efforts have successful, I want to say that regardless of what tomorrow brings, I want to say to our short-sighted legislators, we already have a law against equal marriage. If the point is to make sure gay and lesbian people can’t get married, that point has been made. But that’s not your point. You are playing to the fears and prejudices of those you think will keep you in office. Fear always needs an enemy. But fear is not an ultimate force. Love is.

You l should know we will not allow you to devalue marriage by acting as though it has a mere legal definition, or determines who gets tax breaks. We will use it as a relational word and a theological word and we will gather to watch our friends get married and dance at their weddings until the walls of your fortresses crumble down around you.

We will have the audacity to include everyone and love one another and bust through whatever ridiculous divisions you try to foster. We will march in the streets and sing on your steps, but more than that we will wear you down with the courage of our convictions and tenacity of our determination to include every last one — including you.

I pray we defeat the amendment because I don’t want any more damage done to my friends and to others in this state who already feel marginalized. I hope it goes down because it is immoral and wrong. But if it passes, don’t smile for long. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Love lives in North Carolina. Big-hearted, big-tent, all-ye-all-ye-oxen-free-you-can’t-keep-us-from-being-together, world-changing love.

And it’s coming for you.

Peace,
Milton

Last night I worked down at Fullsteam Brewery for their “Take a Pint Out of Crime” fundraiser to help replace the smoker someone stole a week or so ago. I was happy to help out because they are my neighbors and it is The Friendliest Room in Durham. I want to help make sure they are around for a long time. During the course of the evening, I got a text message from Leon, of Cocoa Cinnamon fame (they are $800 dollars away from $30K on their Kickstarter campaign that winds down at 2:45 EDT on Monday, in case you were wondering), asking if we were still in Waco. I wrote back and told him I was at Fullsteam until eleven; he showed up about 10:30 so we could have a beer together before I went home.

We are in the beginning stages of what I trust will become a friendship because of the resonance I feel with him even though I don’t know many of the stories that brought him to the stool next to me last night, nor does he know many of mine. But we did our best to tell at least a couple of them last night. As we talked about life and faith and coffee and beer and food and community, I said, “We do our best work when we start with what we share in common, with what bonds us to each other. Once there is trust and a relationship, we can talk about differences. We put up with a lot of crap from our friends we would never tolerate from strangers because they are our friends. We have already made the decision to stay.”

“You have that written down somewhere, don’t you?” he asked.

Well, I do now, Leon, I do now.

God didn’t roll away the stone on Easter morning so we could pick it up and throw it at each other. The gravity of faith pulls against the centrifugal force of most of the rest of life: we are called to be together, to include everyone, to love, love, love one another. The world doesn’t need any more self-appointed judges or experts, any more distributors of shame or guilt, any more zealots with clear consciences. We don’t need anymore fundamentalists, whether they are liberal or conservative. What the world needs are people committed to loving one another. The core message of the Resurrection is that Love conquers death. Not morality. Not orthodoxy. Not anything else. Love. Love. Love.

God is Love.

The point of our lives is not to be right or first or richest or more powerful. The point of our lives is to be together. To tell stories. To make memories. To drink beer and coffee and eat together. To feed and clothe one another. To make sure everyone is taken care of.

There you go, Leon – I wrote it down, my friend.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – Over the next month my blog posting will be intermittent at best because I have to meet a manuscript deadline for a book on Communion that will be published in the fall. I will give more details as the time draws closer and, of course, will be happy to take preorders. Peace . . .

Today is a day much like any other day.

In the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, this is the day in the middle. Most stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our Easter story goes the opposite direction, in a way, starting with the ending and then moving to beginning again. Either way, Saturday is the day in the middle. Much like any other day.

This morning, I sat around a table at church with ten Pilgrims (as we call ourselves) who had come to walk the Stations of the Cross set up in our sanctuary by our wonderful pastoral intern, Kyle. The stations were both thoughtful and tactile, involving a number of our senses to get the full picture. Before we gathered to eat, we gathered in the sanctuary for prayer and Ginger asked me to sing “Were You There?” Our connection to the song goes back to our days in Winchester, Massachusetts when Jim, a wonderful man with an amazing voice used to close the Maundy Thursday service with the first two verses of the song (as I sang them this morning):

were you there when they crucified my lord?
were you there when they crucified my lord?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble
were you there when they crucified my lord?

were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble . . .

He always stopped short of finishing the last verse and we left the service in darkness to go and wait for the ending to come. The question in the song is interesting because it begs to be answered. I don’t hear it as rhetorical. And the answer is, “No. I wasn’t there.” I try to get close, to learn, and to remember what has been passed down, but I was not there.

I am here in the in-between of Saturday afternoon, a day much like any other day.

And much like any other day, I have been mining for poems, which I believe to be why God created the Internet. I was looking for poems that spoke to the middle, to the unfinished, to living in the everyday. (I am also quoting excerpts; please follow the links to read them in their entirety.) I went first to an old friend, Stanley Kunitz. I actually met him at the one Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival I have been able to attend. It was a year or so before he died. “The Layers” is one of my favorite poems. The last part of it reads:

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

In the wreckage of the Crucifixion, I love the call to live in the layers of grief and hope and not on the litter of what might have been. We are not yet done. As I continued mining, I found another Kunitz poem that was new to me called “Passing Through.” The closing lines read:

Maybe it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

At the Waco Mammoth Site the other day we learned there were layers of mammoth bones, each one from a different cataclysmic flood event that drowned and buried the animals. The dust we borrow for our days has been handed down. Though we weren’t there when they crucified Jesus, those who walked with him have been turned into words that have resonated down the days through the passing of the Bread and the Cup, through the telling of the story, through the living of these days that are one much like the other. And so at breakfast this morning one of the women at the table began talking about the “Mary Magdalene Moments” she had had during the day, things that had made her stop and wonder, “I wonder if this is how Mary felt?”

We may not have been there, but we can find the feelings, the resonance, the continuity in the layers of life than make up our faith. One more poetic gem. James Galvin end his poem, “The Story of the End of the Story,” with these two lines:

Real events don’t have endings,
Only the stories about them do.

We are five days away from marking six months since Reuben, my father-in-law, died yet his story is not over any more than our grief is complete. Though many years separate me from my days in Lusaka or Nairobi or Fort Worth or Boston or Winchester or Marshfield those stories don’t feel finished either. There have been endings, yes – and changes. And losses. Plenty of losses. But looking back on those days is more than an archaeological dig through bones of days gone by. Something still lives in those layers, something that gives greater significance to these days much like any other day, these days in the middle between endings and beginnings and beginnings again. I was not there when they crucified Jesus, or laid him in the tomb, or even when he rose up from the grave.

But I am here on this day, much like any other day.

Peace,
Milton

The early spring has been at cross purposes with my schedule. When the beds were ready to be cleared and prepared for spring vegetables, I was not prepared to plant. When the regular rhythm of rain and spring sunshine made everything in the garden explode, I was not prepared to prune branches and pull weeds to channel the new growth into its most productive channels. The garden went on without me, bursting with growth and green, with flowers and fragrance, and has been doing so for some time to the point that what are normally walking paths were covered up with all manner of green.

Today I tried to catch up.

I spent about two hours in the garden pulling weeds, pruning trees and bushes, and preparing for planting that will come as soon as I get a chance. My primary focus was to clear the walking paths so the pups had a way to navigate from the back door down to the back of the yard where they move among the wood chips and ivy to make sure the squirrels are under control. As I pulled and pruned, I was mindful of it being Good Friday afternoon and I thought of John the Baptist’s words, “Prepare the way of the Lord; clear a straight path for him.” Perhaps it is not the freshest of metaphors, but I found a connection as my hands pulled the plants, hoping the ground would yield its grip and let me clear the way. Some gave up more easily than others. Though the paths are cleared, the roots of several of the weeds are still intact, meaning I will be out again on at least one more afternoon making sure we have room to walk.

Tonight I am at the church with Ginger staffing our church’s prayer vigil. Our ministerial intern, Kyle, set up the stations of the cross around the sanctuary and created a thoughtful and meaningful path of devotion and focus, free of weeds. Jesus’ death is a struggle for me because of the explanations for it, more than anything. The traditional notions of the atonement, as I was taught them as a young Baptist boy, create an equation that has never added up for me. I don’t see why a God who is love had to kill the Son in order to make the accounting work. (I’m not looking for an explanation of it either, by the way – but, thanks.) Because of who I know God to be, I trust I could be forgiven without Jesus dying. What his death that matters most to me is to create the possibility for Resurrection. Jesus went to what we knew to be the limits of human existence and blew the doors off reminding us there is more to life than what we know. These days are not the last word. Death is a penultimate statement, the next to the last verse.

The longer I live on this planet, the more I appreciate Jesus’ visceral understanding of grief and loss. One of my favorite old hymns begins

man of sorrows – what a name
for the Son of God who came

The old King James translation spoke I poetic understatement of his being “acquainted with grief.” Then again, that particular acquaintance is one of the primary relationships in the life of most any person. Being human means to know loss and sorrow. What Jesus showed was being fully human was knowing how to fully embrace that relationship. Grief and sorrow aren’t something other than life – they are a part of the very essence of our existence.

We have one account in the gospels of Jesus being in the living side of grief and that is in the death of his friend Lazarus. His response is recorded in what is famously known as the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” In the face of Jesus’ own demise, some of the disciples denied him, some doubted, some despaired. They didn’t have the luxury of the liturgical calendar to let them know Easter Sunday was just around the corner. He was dead and buried. They were brutally acquainted with grief. They went back to their old ways and climbed in the boat to go fishing, doing anything to fill the void, or anything to go on living. This was the night of their deepest question: what do we do now? Even without the Resurrection, death is not the last word for those left behind to keep living. The weeds will grow back and I will have to go and pull them up again. Our losses will pile up like my compost heap the longer we walk on this earth. Grief will become more than an acquaintance. Before we get to Sunday, we must answer the call, as Jackson Browne said, “Get up and do it again. Amen.”

Amen, indeed.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger, Rachel, and I got up early to catch a flight from Love Field in Dallas back to Durham. The flight was fine, though the route required of us to stop in Austin and Nashville on the way. And all we did was stop. We never got off the plane. By the time we got to the house, it was around four o’clock and I had time to turn on the Opening Day game between the Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers. I started watching in the top of the ninth as the Sox came back from a 2-0 deficit to tie the game and raise my hopes. They went on to lose it in the bottom of the inning. I went on upstairs to change clothes and get ready for our Maundy Thursday service at church.

The Lenten road to Easter and Opening Day are intertwined rites of spring for baseball fans. Some years ago when I was serving as Associate Pastor of First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts we were beginning our morning worship on a Sunday that happened to mark the Red Sox opener when one of the men stood up with the hymnal open and said, “Here are the words we need for today” –

time like an ever rolling stream
bears all its sons away
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day

As one who finds deep meaning in the ritual of Communion as well as the game of baseball, I was grateful to also find a poem (poetry being the third member of my personal trinity, I suppose) that resonated.

Baseball
by Gail Mazur

(for John Limon)

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks
of in Breughel’s Icarus,
or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other and moving up and down
continuously for more beer

and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown,
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,
manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away

One thing can be said of both baseball and faith: if you make an error you can still come home.

Play ball. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My parents took us to the Waco Mammoth Site this afternoon. Some years ago, two teenagers stumbled upon some bones in a dry creek bed which led to the discovery of a “nursery herd” (meaning females and babies) of nineteen mammoths that had all died together in a flood during the Ice Age in Texas (in which Texas was still not very cold). Excavations at the site have found five layers of flood victims over thousands of years, each one stacked on top of the next. Along with the mammoth bones, they have found evidence of giant bears, armadillos, and even a camel. I found myself humming a song I wrote with my friend Billy for a UBC youth retreat. The lyric said

like dinosaur tracks down at glenrose
everyone’s leaving a trace
life is a hand’s on adventure
what marks will I leave when I’m gone from this place

Glenrose is not so far away from Waco and is home to an excavation that uncovered dinosaur bones. (I guess you’d already figured that out.) The chorus of the song said:

I have a fingerprint
it’s like no other one
I leave my fingerprint on this world
God has a fingerprint
it is a mark of love
God leaves that fingerprint
all over me and this world

I have been fascinated by our finitude for as long as I can remember. We are only passing through, as far as our time on this planet goes. Not even the mammoths could amount to much more than the dust between the layers of bones left behind when the creek dried up. None of us gets remembered forever. And – not but – and we leave our mark, our fingerprints in the dust. It matters that we are here not because of anything other than we are here.

Peace,
Milton