Ginger and I spent most of the day today at my parents’ house going through things and identifying stuff we want as they prepare to move from their house where they have lived for thirteen years, to a much smaller apartment. The journey through boxes, shelves, cabinets, and closets was a roller coaster of discovery and memory, and a chance to tell stories. One of the surprises was this old blue suitcase, which I found in the closet under the stairs and remember using when I was very young; inside were quilts my dad’s grandmother made out of his mother’s dresses. His mother died soon after he was born.
And that was just one of the surprises.
pokea kwa utaratibu (handle with care)
in the closet under the stairs of your heart is an old blue suitcase even though you are in the middle of moving the idea of more baggage is never appealing still you set it down snap the silver locks and lift the lid to find hand stitched quilts made of dresses your grandmother might have worn to visit had you ever had the chance to meet you take the blanket out of the baggage and wrap it around your shoulders pulling it up over your nose to smell for even a trace of what might have been or what is to come and then you fold it and put it back close the suitcase and try to prepare for the next journey to say goodbye
We have made a quick trip to visit my parents—we being Rachel, Ginger, and me – and I say to visit my parents rather than going to Texas because we are spending the sixty-four hours we are here in the Lone Star State with them. The trip was not precipitated by an emergency. It had just been too long since we’ve been here. The trip is short because these were the days we had to get here. It is difficult to be here and not cast a wider net of friendship.
Our day started this morning about four when we got up to catch a flight that took us from Raleigh-Durham to Orlando to San Antonio to Dallas. Sunday morning, I dutifully set an alarm clock to get up at six so I could save a place in the boarding line. Our printer was ailing, so I just checked in, knowing I could pick up the passes at Southwest when we got to the airport. When the Skycap handed me the passes they were in the last boarding group. She knew nothing of my reservation. Once we got through security, I went to the customer service desk to get it straightened out. I told my story and the woman behind the counter answered, “I have no record of any activity on the account since you purchased the tickets.”
I bristled. “I feel like you’re calling me a liar,” I said and we both kind of squared off, though neither of us lost our composure or sense of tact. She was intractable, other than offering to get her supervisor. I took her up on it and told my story once more. I got the same response. It wasn’t any more helpful than the follow up question: “What would you like me to do?”
In the frustration of the moment, I couldn’t answer well. We got in line and got on the plane. Though I was hardly awake, I began writing to release the tension I was feeling. I made notes for a letter to Southwest customer service to let them know it was the first time I had ever had dealings with them where it left me feeling like they were no different from any other airline. I was disappointed, confused, and, well, put out. Then I wrote in my notes:
I would like to answer your question now. What I wanted you to do was admit your computer had made a mistake. I wanted you to ally with me, to help me feel like you were on my side rather than make it feel like it was my fault. Maybe you were too worried about liability so you spit back rehearsed corporate speak. Maybe someone tries to pull this stunt everyday and I’m naïve to think telling the truth is enough. But what I wanted was for you to be on my side.
I relaxed and fell asleep. I may have even dreamed about sending the email and getting a response. I will have to push myself to really send it because I am not the least bit hopeful when it comes to expecting big companies to act with any humanity, regardless of how they are viewed by the Supreme Court. I kept telling myself I needed to send it because that’s the only way things do get changed, but I get caught in a sort of quixotic resignation that expects little from going through such motions.
We were sitting at lunch in San Antonio when Rachel said she thought she heard our name called over the intercom. Ginger went to check it out at the gate and came back with a smile and a handful of papers. The gate agent told her the people at RDU kept trying to figure out what had happened after we left. They went back through their records and found the glitch that had not only messed up our check-in but had also charged us for the trip three times over, leaving us with bad boarding passes and a bunch of debt. They had gone through and cancelled the redundant charges, made sure the real reservation had not been cancelled in the process, and gotten everything ready for a refund. All I had to do was call Customer Service.
Which I did and they straightened it all out.
The obvious thing to say here is, “Thank you, Southwest” because they turned out to be different than the other guys and they did a great thing. Learning to be an ally on the front side of the issue still needs to be part of their education, and I am grateful for their tenacity. The more obvious thing to say to myself is remember to listen. I know how I felt this morning; I don’t know how the two women on the other side of the counter were. They both seemed defensive and terse. Who knows how much of that belonged to our interaction and how much to someone else. Since I managed to not lose my cool I also managed to be the beneficiary of their continued work on my behalf, even when they knew they would probably never see me again. They managed to make me hopeful when I saw little hope.
Mark Heard’s song “Nod Over Coffee” has been playing in my head since I read about the consequences of the invention of the minute hand in Adam Frank’s book, About Time. I clocked in for my nine hours at the computer store today and clocked out tired and worn and happy to come home. I will let the song be my melody for sleep this evening with this clip from Pierce Pettis, Grace Pettis, and Jonathan Kingham. First, Mark Heard’s lyric:
nod over coffee
all the unsaid words that I might be thinking and all the little signs that I might give you they would not be enough no they would not be enough
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye smile over coffee and turn to go we know the drill and we do it well we love it, we hate it ain’t that life
ain’t that the curse of the second hand ain’t that the way of the hour and the day
if I weren’t so alone and afraid they might pay me what I am worth but it would not be enough you deserve better
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye do whatever has to be done again today get in the traffic and time will fly look at the sun and pray for rain
ain’t that the curse of the second hand ain’t that the way of the hour and the day
the dam of time cannot hold back the dust that will surely come of these bones and I’m sure I will not have loved enough will not have loved enough
if we could see with wiser eyes what is good and what is sad and what is true still it would not be enough could never be enough
so we nod over coffee and say goodbye bolt the door it’s time to go into the car with the radio on roll down the window and blow the horn
ain’t that the curse of the second hand ain’t that the way of the hour and the day
On my first day of Spring Break, I worked in the garden pruning trees and pulling up weeds and then went with Ginger to a relatively new coffee shop, Straw Valley Café, to sip and read for awhile. We walked into a little coffee shop and found it opened up on a meandering puzzle of small gardens and patios that wrapped around a renovated farm house filled with cozy little rooms – all of it available for whomever needed a place to sit and read and think. It is a beautiful place. As is our custom, Ginger and I settled down in different parts of the place with our respective reads. I continued in Adam Frank’s About Time, which is a sweeping history of how our understanding of time got to where it is today. I read today about Copernicus and Galileo, among others. Of the Copernican concept of an heliocentric cosmos, as opposed to the Ptolemy’s geocentric one, Blank writes:
The difference in size [of the universe] between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models was startling. The heliocentric cosmos was at least four hundred thousand times bigger (in terms of volume0 than Ptolemy’s. This vast enlargement of the universe would be the first of many times that scientific astronomy would inflate the cosmos. With each step outward, humanity appeared to shrink in significance. (77)
One of the things Frank does well is navigate the creative tension between cosmology and daily life, for time matters to both. He continues a couple of paragraphs later:
But in a changing world new cosmologies were dangerous. There was a background of political, theological, and economic tumult that made debates over the Copernican universe flicker between metaphor and cosmic reality. Europe had been pushed off the center of the map with the discovery of the New World. The Vatican was being pushed aside as the sole arbiter of both earthly and divine power. And the Earth had been pushed aside to make room for a new cosmic architecture. (78)
“This is the motion of history,” I wrote in the space between the end of the sentence and the edge of the page. I suppose there are actually two motions that follow Frank’s ideas of cosmological time and daily time, one arc being that of human growth and evolution as we become more educated and technologically evolved, and the other – growing out of the first – being that of coming to terms with our diminishing importance in our ever-expanding universe. The more we learn, the more we are asked to come to terms with how small we actually are.
I thought of a poem I wrote almost a decade ago (now, old enough to be new again?) that I wrote in response to a billboard announcing the new planetarium at the Science Museum in Boston.
daily work
In the crush of afternoon traffic I sit In an unending queue of cars, staring at the stoplight. From my driver’s seat I can see the billboard: “Come visit the new planetarium, you tiny insignificant speck in the universe.”
When the signal changes, I cross the bridge over river and railroad yard, turn left past the donut shop, and park in front of my house. Only my schnauzers notice because they are home alone.
I have been hard at work in my daily orbit, but I stopped no wars, saved no lives, and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning. Today would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart, to have some angel show me I matter.
As I walk the puppies down to the river, I wonder how many times have I come to the water hoping to hear, “You are my beloved child.” Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit, “I am not the one you were looking for.”
I stand in the stream of my existence, between the banks of blessing and despair, convinced that only messiahs matter, that I have been called to change the world and I have not done my job.
Yet, if I stack up the details of my life like stones for an altar, I see I am one In the flow of humanity, in the river of Love. I am a speck, in God’s eyes, of some significance. So say the schnauzers every time I come home.
Once upon a time, maybe even in the days of Copernicus and Galileo, the point of education was to learn everything, which is not an option in the world we live in. The best we can do is to learn how to learn, how to be open, how not to cling too tightly to what we know to be safe as we flicker between metaphor and cosmic reality. To learn, to truly grow in understanding is to lose power because it means coming to terms with our finitude, which has been the reality all along. Being willing to learn means being willing to let go of what we have held to be true so we can see the world with new eyes. As the world changes the truth will still find us, as it did Galileo and Luther and Gandhi and King, to name a few, and it will continue to remind us of the limitations of our perspective, our language, and even our theology.
As our view of time and most everything else changes as we find new material engagements, so was God changed by the material engagement of the Incarnation, which I don’t see as a unique crisis for God because I think change is fundamental to God’s nature. Or let me put it this way: in the same way that we feel the universe changes as we find the ways to see parts of it we have not seen before, so God “changes.” As we see galaxies far, far away, as we are drawn closer together in a world where white people aren’t the ones who matter most or straight people aren’t the only ones who are normal, we are called to come to terms with a God who is bigger than the Bible, bigger than our descriptions, bigger than most anything we can imagine, which is to say, a God who is the essence of creativity and change, the only kind of God who could blow the doors of the tomb and make the dry bones dance.
Spring Break began today for my school, along with many schools in our area. Usually it begins on Easter weekend, but this year they scheduled it earlier, which has thrown off my calendar a bit. The best news is I will get to play catch up a little in the garden tomorrow, or at least until the pollen pushes me back indoors. As Lent prepares to stretch out in the Last Long Week, I must admit to being caught a little off guard by the approach of Palm Sunday, even with writing everyday.
You would think I’d be ready.
The pace of life and my unpreparedness for What Is To Come makes me mindful of the gift we are given in being able to get ready: to prepare, to practice, to ponder. Easter has been on the calendar for a long time. We have scheduled the sacred into our lives, and scheduled around it. To be caught by surprise, even by what I know is coming, is a gift – a chance to catch a small glimpse of what it might have felt like the first time around.
A couple of nights ago, I sent a message to an acquaintance here in town whom I need to see for some advice on a project. I suggested we get together next Friday (as in next week) and he wrote back agreeing to meet, thinking I meant tomorrow. When I clarified, he wrote back to say his mother-in-law was dying and he needed to go with his wife to be with their family as they said goodbye, commenting that she was an only child so she was carrying the bulk of the burden. After walking through the past year with my father-in-law Reuben’s descent into Alzheimer’s and death, I understood in a very visceral way. I wrote back to tell him to take the time he needed and then “I will see you after the Resurrection.”
“Ahhh, yes,” he answered, “after the Resurrection . . .”
An old friend whose heart has been broken sent a message tonight asking for prayer to be able to face the silence of the night the lies ahead. Those are the two stories of pain that come to mind most quickly tonight; I know more. So do you. We are tired, we are weak, we are worn.
And we know whatever pain we know is not the last word.
Growing up Baptist, I didn’t know about Lent, or, I should say, I thought Lent was something Catholics did that meant that had to give up stuff. Thanks to a long list of teachers and fellow pilgrims, I learned to tell time liturgically, which has made my Resurrection mornings even more powerful because, I think, I learned to take the darkness more seriously. I’ve learned that the direction our faith takes us through pain and grief, not around them. And I’m reminded almost daily that we go through them together.
yeah, I’m talking to me you, too – and anyone who never had to worry about being followed stopped or accused because of our skin who never thought twice about a hoodie making us a threat listen right now we need to listen don’t speak of what the boy might have done wrong don’t explain make excuses or offer solutions just listen for a long time we have much yet to understand
Lent is almost over and I am just now digging into the stack of books I got for Christmas. The one on the top of the heap was About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang by Adam Frank. Ginger gave it to me because she knows how fascinated I am with time and how deeply tied it is to theology for me. Her gift was a true act of love because I don’t have to talk about time for very long before her eyes start to roll back in her head; my interest is not shared. Appreciated, but not shared.
The book fits in well to my life these days because I have to be keenly conscious of time and how I spend it. I am working two jobs, trying to keep up with lesson plans (I’ve never kept up with grading), finish a book manuscript due in a few weeks, stay true to my Lenten practice of writing this blog daily, do more than merely smile at Ginger as I pass by, do my due diligence with the Schnauzers, keep up with the cooking, try to stay familiar to at least some of my friends, and hope to get at least six hours of sleep a night. As I said, I am keenly conscious of time. Tick, tick, tick.
In the two years I have been teaching at my little school, I have never had a wall clock that worked. There has been a blank space where a clock was supposed to be or a clock that neither keeps nor tells time has been hanging next to the door, as is currently the case. Every so often, one of my students awakens to the reality that the reported hour has nothing to do with our time zone; today was such a day.
“Mr. B-C,” she said, “why don’t you just take it down?”
“Because,” I answered, “I’ve decided to view it more existentially – as a work of art. I mean, do any of us actually have any sense of what time it is? We make our own time.” She rolled her eyes in a move vaguely reminiscent to Ginger. I chuckled to myself and by myself as they humored me. Yet, if the clock were “correct” it would only be so because I set it to what time we have collectively decided it should be so we can be on time, know when to expect one another to show, or rush outside to meet the carpool at the end of the school day.
It has not always been so. The word timekeeper first appeared in 1686.
Frank builds his argument on the premise that cosmological time (how we think about the universe) and human time (how we think about our lives) have “always been intertwined, and there was never an age when they could be closely separated.” However, in these days we are living “the time we imagine for the cosmos and the time we imagined into human experience turn out to be woven so tightly together that we have lost the ability to see each of them for what it is.” (xv)
As I read those words, I thought of Psalm 8:
when I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made— the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place— what are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them?
When I read those verses, two things happen. First, I hear the Chapel Choir from University Baptist Church singing “The Majesty and Glory of Your Name,” an anthem based on the psalm and one of my favorite choral pieces. Second, I lament I was born in a time of human history when gazing into the night sky doesn’t offer the chance to be put in my place that it once did. And so I live caught between the stars and the Bull City, if you will, trying to find the rhythm of my life. As I try to come to terms with the differences in the meaning of time for the Psalmist and me, I learn from my Christmas gift:
Changes in material engagement redefine culture by altering what are called its institutional facts. Institutional facts define the human world into which we are each born. . . . With the advance of material engagement came new ways of experiencing time. . . . Just as each invention made new forms of culture possible, cultural imagination also developed alongside the technology. Because time always exists at the interface between the physical and the imagination, it would be closely tied to material engagement and the changes it drove in culture. (20)
I can feel the eyes beginning to roll back – and not just Ginger’s. But don’t bail on me just yet. Give me just a little more, well, time. Another of my students is obsessed with time. He has Aspergers and a strong need for order; knowing the exact time matters because, it appears, he worries about being able to get finished with his work on time. Part of my job is to offer grace the clock cannot. When he asks for the time, I look at my smart phone. I used to carry a pocket watch, but that has given way to the phone which is sent the time from a satellite somewhere, as are all the phones and computers in the school; we all agree down to the minute. Our schedules thrive on the specificity. Second period ends at 10:25. The day is over at 3:15. I have to be at the computer store at 5 o’clock. Tick, tick, tick.
Changes in our material engagement make it difficult for us to see beyond the immediate. The exactness of our timekeeping puts the dead in deadline. We are scheduled down to the minute because we can be. And we are still figuring out what it means to our humanity. Or perhaps I’m just figuring out what it means for me. I started by saying time has theological implications. That’s the place where I find Frank’s words compelling because if every material engagement changes what it means to be human then it also changes how we see God. The Psalmist could gaze into a night sky devoid of ambient light and see layers of light; I can see street lights, hear sirens, a catch a couple of stars. Seasons like Lent and Advent have become more crucial for me because they set my heart to a different beat and lift my eyes to see beyond the curse of the second hand to remember to sing along.
Who am I that you are mindful of me? Alleluia.
Peace, Milton
P. S. — Here’s one of my favorite time songs for good measure.
Lesley Duncan’s lyrics came back to find me today (I know the song because of Elton John’s cover on his Tumbleweed Connection record) partly because I went back to that disc since it is Elton’s birthday and mostly because of the way it felt to be a part of the bluegrass service we had today. (I wrote a little about it here.) Several of the songs were ones I sang at my father-in-law Reuben’s funeral because they were songs he loved; singing them today made the grief palpable in a way it had not been for awhile. We closed our service with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which, after today’s service, I took to be a rhetorical question.
question(s)
why do I feel more at home here when I sing this world is not my home? why does singing about heaven make me want to plant trees? why don’t the gospels talk about what Jesus liked to sing? our lives go on as endless song . . . how can I keep from singing?
Ginger and I spent most of the day today at my parents’ house going through things and identifying stuff we want as they prepare to move from their house where they have lived for thirteen years, to a much smaller apartment. The journey through boxes, shelves, cabinets, and closets was a roller coaster of discovery and memory, and a chance to tell stories. One of the surprises was this old blue suitcase, which I found in the closet under the stairs and remember using when I was very young; inside were quilts my dad’s grandmother made out of his mother’s dresses. His mother died soon after he was born.
. I clocked in for my nine hours at the computer store today and clocked out tired and worn and happy to come home. I will let the song be my melody for sleep this evening with