don't eat alone

Not long after we moved into our school building last year, Borders went broke and sold everything in their stores including the fixtures. The tables in my room are the very ones that held stacks of books for customers’ perusal and my walls are lined with the book shelves that made corridors of what are now giant empty brick and mortar boxes. One of the parents showed up one day with boxes of books that belonged to her father, who is quite a reader it seems, to fill up the shelves so the room looked learned in. Last week, one book caught my eye tucked away on the bottom shelf in the corner: a first edition hardback copy of A Circle of Quiet, one of my favorites of Madeleine L’Engle’s nonfiction work.

Needless to say, the book doesn’t live on that shelf anymore.

Our regular staff meeting was cancelled this afternoon, which meant I left school for the computer store and my evening shift earlier than usual, which meant I had time to read a bit when I got there. Berger, of course, who has laid patiently for several days. He told a wonderful story of a woman who had escaped from Kampuchea (now Cambodia) as the Khmer Rouge took hold. Berger described the Kampuchean people of that time as people who were

on the point of being tyrannized and massacred by their own political visionaries, who transformed them into fanatics so that they could inflict vengeance on reality itself, so they could reduce reality to a single dimension. Such reduction brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart. (127)

In the margin I wrote, “our politicians.”

I know it’s an overstatement in the sense that none of our national figures come close to resembling Pol Pot or have any intention of unleashing the kind of wholesale violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, yet what resonated in the quote was the note about reducing reality to a single dimension and leaving us with nothing but polarities from which to choose. As I read, I remembered words Madeleine had written about the dangers of reducing our vocabulary, so I went looking for them when I got home.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think. Try to comprehend an abstract idea without words: we may be able to imagine a turkey dinner. But try something more complicated; try to ask questions, to look for meaning: without words we don’t get very far. If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality. (149)

When we reduce our political discussion to who’s red and who’s blue, when our primary word for describing any foreigner we don’t understand is terrorist, when we live in such a sound bite culture that most every news story headline is almost a brand name by the time it is repeated verbatim by most every news outlet, we are left without the depth or nuance it takes to be human to and with one another. The tenor of the recent debates has been Orwellian: “Two legs bad, four legs good.” And, as the pigs in Animal Farm knew, if you get the sheep to shout the slogans loud enough you can control the discourse and rob everyone of their freedom.

Our state, North Carolina, is a good example.

In May, we are voting on a constitutional amendment that, when allowed to be stated in the limited vocabulary of our limited legislature, is designed to “defend marriage” by banning equal marriage. Those who are promoting the amendment have reduced the discussion to the single dimension Berger described, fomenting fear of gays and lesbians as if they were dead set on destroying society. What they don’t talk about the parts of the amendment beyond its obvious discrimination of gays and lesbians that take away rights from any domestic partnership – those who share in adoption, or share their lives at all. They won’t even have legal standing to visit each other in the hospital. Our draconian politicians promoting the amendment don’t do much more than shout “Straight legs good, gay legs bad,” and hope that limiting the discussion will do the trick. They are lying through their teeth.

I have several words for them, trust me, but before I let my anger get the best of me I want to find the words to try and get them or anyone else to see that their reduction the discussion “brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart.” They are not doing their jobs, they are not doing God’s job; they are doing damage – deep, hurtful, who-know-how-long-it-will-take-to-undo damage. Their amendment is not about protecting marriage or promoting morality; it is about preserving power. They want to keep things the way they are because that means the straight white men get to keep running things. Gentlemen – and it is a room packed with men, from one straight white guy to another, those days are over. Thank God.

What I love about Jesus’ vocabulary was his words were expansive. He didn’t reduce large ideas into controllable slogans, instead he took simple ideas and blew the roof off. When he told us to “consider the lilies,” he called us to contentment with who we are and put us in touch with our mortality in the same sentence. The lilies bloom and don’t worry about what’s next and they bloom for about three weeks and they die. He ate with sinners and the One Percent, the prostitutes and the Pharisees. He talked about the poor more than he did the powerful. And he welcomed people every chance he got.

Time is too short and this matters too much to let the discussion around the amendment be reduced to one that comes disguised as sanctified and entrenched morality. Amendment One is draconian and destructive. It robs people of rights they already have and promises to inflict deep pain on any number of North Carolina families. We cannot allow ourselves to constitutionalize discrimination. Let’s defeat the amendment and choose better words that invite and include.

Peace,
Milton

Durham is the most encouraging place I have ever lived.

This is a city full of people who pull for each other, which is good because it’s also a city full of people with dreams and things they want to see happen. In our town of about a quarter of a million people we had a Food Truck Rodeo this afternoon and there were twenty-nine trucks from around the area, each one a dream on wheels. One of vehicles in the bunch is not motorized: Bike Coffee.

That’s right. Coffee – hand ground, fresh poured, awesome coffee – served from a bike. The purveyors, Areli and Leon, are peddling their way to a dream of opening a brick and mortar shop right here in our neighborhood that will be called Cocoa Cinnamon because along with their coffees they have chocolate, spices, and teas.

More later about tour opportunities for you to come and visit Durham, but first I want to use my space tonight to offer encouragement of my own because I believe in what my neighbors are doing. They have begun a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money they need to open their shop. It will be in this building. It will be the neighborhood coffee shop we have been hoping for. It will be where you will be able to find Ginger writing sermons most any afternoon once it opens and where I stop on my way to work in the mornings. It will be awesome.

Here is how Areli and Leon describe what they do:

So What is Cocoa Cinnamon all about? Here’s how we think of it: Craft. Create. Engage. Impact.

CRAFT – excellence in preparation of coffee, espresso, chocolate and tea.

CREATE – a creative nexus of people, places, and ideas; this includes making all sorts of people smile!

ENGAGE – a place for all people to be with family, friends, together or alone in diversity, health and relaxation.

IMPACT – a dynamic community space that strives towards and embodies sustainability, peace, democracy and human flourishing.

They have a great video on their Kickstarter page explaining more about what they want to do. What I hope you will do, if you can, is help them out.

And then come to Durham and I’ll take you to coffee.

Peace,
Milton

sometime in the night I will be
robbed of an hour of sleep in
order that we might save daylight

the thieves will leave nothing but
the promise the hour will be saved
kept safely and returned in the fall

still — what if this was the night
I was to sleep deep enough to wake
truly rested and somehow relieved

or I was to dream of a sheltering sky
over that single day at the seaside
with just you and me walking along . . .

or perhaps of a night when I walked
into the Hopper painting before daylight
and took my place behind the counter

Peace,
Milton

A couple of nights ago, I posted what has come to be known as the Kony 2012 Video as my blog post. I learned of it through my eleventh graders. One of them was in a documentary studies class I taught last year in which we watched “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a Frontline piece looking at the Rwandan genocide ten years later and “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which is about the human tragedy in Darfur. They know I grew up in Africa and that I am moved by stories of a continent with which I identify; they were moved by what we saw last year. And so, instead of the work I had planned, we watched Kony. They had lots of questions, not the least of which was, “Why don’t we do something to be a part of this? It seems important.”

I came home and made it my blog post on the basis of the residual sadness and anger I carry because Africa does not really matter to Americans as a general rule (as demonstrated in Rwanda and Darfur and mostly because our media have chosen to make connecting us to Africa less important than most anything) and because of the emotion I shared with my students in class. I had heard of Invisible Children but had not done any research on the organization. I knew of Joseph Kony, but not in any current sense. I was moved. I responded – just as the folks who made the video wanted me to do.

This morning, one of the folks I work with at the computer store posted this graphic 

with the caption,

For all of you who posted the Kony video, rather those about to post the video…

Then, from a number of sources, I began to read insight from folks who had also been moved by the video but who didn’t allow their emotion to control their first move. They asked good questions and looked beyond the well crafted call to immediate and specific action. Some of the questions were about the organization, some were about the veracity of the information, some were about the perspective from which the story was being told, some were about the choice of solution being offered. I offer three perspectives that are speaking to me today, all of whom are seeking to do more than criticize or cast suspicion and all of whom have personal ties to Africa.

I was pulled, in particular, by this video of a Ugandan woman who challenged those who would tell a story that is not their own:

Ethan Zuckerman writes at “My Heart’s in Accra”:

I’m starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?

As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response.

That’s a story worth watching.

Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay writes,

Most people don’t want to feel like they are being rescued. That can be humiliating. So… what do we do with a movement that does not work toward dignity?

Do we simply applaud it for the marketing genius that it is? Do we buy into it and support the cause even if it turns out to be misguided or misinformed because we don’t want to be the poop in the punch bowl?

In closing, I do applaud the western world for looking at this situation in the world. It is far beyond our backyards and it does not encroach on our drive into work, or our gaming, or general lives… We have shown in our immediacy that we do have pulses and hearts. We have shown that our reflex toward justice is still strong. What we should do is match our passion for justice with wisdom and humility. It was Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, who told me, “ Justice without mercy is tyranny.”

Thank Invisible Children for bringing this issue into the public conscience. Please take a breath and walk humbly into the realm of action.

How do we keep the work from hurting more than helping? These are the questions that we must ask. These are the questions that I wish Invisible Children was asking before they launched this campaign to coincide with our election year. It is a good marketing idea. It just isn’t a great and dignifying form of action.

Loving kindness, doing justice, and walking humbly with our God calls for us to live in the creative tension between immediate response and thoughtful action; it also calls us to learn how to let listening be our primary posture. (You realize, I hope, I’m talking mostly to myself here.) I’ve written recently about wondering what Jesus would ask; I wonder, in this case, if the questions might include

Who is telling the story? and
To whom does the story belong?

Then I can ask — ask them and ask God, “What is my role in their story?” and become a part of the cast.

Peace,
Milton

“The difference between
joy and despair,” she said,
“has little to do with
circumstances and
everything to do with
what you choose to see.”

“You’re making that up,”
he replied.

She took his face
between her hands
and stared into his eyes
as if they held galaxies.
“I love you,” she said,
“with all of my heart.”

And he believed her.

Peace,
Milton

I don’t want you to read today. Watch instead. Then do something: Kony 2012.

Peace,
Milton

Twice, today, I got to feel like a teacher.

My school is understaffed, which means I teach a couple of courses out of my area. OK, out of the six classes I teach (out of six periods of the day), four of them are not English. My schedule, this term, looks like this:

Period One: English I and II
Period Two: European History
Period Three: Music Appreciation and Expression
Period Four: Government and Economics
Period Five: Financial Literacy
Period Six: English III

I will pause until the laughter over my teaching economics and financial literacy has had time to subside. I will also say it’s exhausting and I have to be intentional about letting my life and my job be about something other than feeling tired.

The music class is a euphemism. I have taught an eighth grade elective all year that began as media literacy and then changed to film studies last term. When we started talking about a music class, I offered to teach the history of rock and roll and the academic dean came up with the name. The class is my largest – ten kids – and my most energetic. We’ve had a good year so far and I’ve had a blast introducing them to songs, singers, and songwriters they didn’t know about. Last week we finished up their presentations on the British Invasion and then watched “A Hard Day’s Night” as we talked about the Beatles (we’re not done with them just yet); this week we moved on to Bob Dylan.

I wanted them to encounter the songs this time, where their work thus far has focused on personalities, so I went through Dylan’s catalog and tried to pick out songs that would match the kids. The ten I chose were:

Blowin’ in the Wind
Chimes of Freedom
Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)
Gotta Serve Somebody
Hurricane
Knocking on Heaven’s Door
Make You Feel My Love
Like a Rolling Stone
Mr. Tambourine Man
The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Their instructions are to listen to the song and read the words until they can begin to respond to it, look up what others have said and felt about it, find out who has covered it, and then write an essay about the song and create some sort of art project. I created a web page where they could find links to the song and the lyrics. The computer lab has never been as quiet as it was as they listened through their headphones and dug into their songs. At lunch, an hour or so later, one of the boys who is working with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” made a point to come by my room and say,

“Mr. B-C, this guy is a poetic genius.” I smiled and he continued. “He repeats lines, but he changes a word or two so it means something different. It’s really good.”

Bob Dylan was old before this kid was even born. His parents weren’t alive when “Mr. Tambourine Man” was first released and yet today the song was new – to him. Though the song is bumping up on being sixty years old, it was new in his ears:

hey, mister tambourine man play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to . . .

I have a student who deals with mild autism and is very concrete. He is a diligent and bright young man who works his butt off in class. He loves the feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing an assignment and presents it to me with almost an air of formality: “Mr. B-C, may I give this to you now?” His class, which is actually during first period, had a vocabulary quiz. Since they finish at different paces, I gave them an assignment related to To Kill a Mockingbird, which we are reading right now, and it listed the characters and asked the students to describe the ways in which each one felt trapped and how they responded to that feeling. The final section asked the students to write about a time they felt trapped in their lives and describe what they did to handle it. During sixth period, when the boy has a study hall, he finished the work and brought it in to me with the usual ritual, “Mr. B-C, may I give this to you?” Then he paused and said, “I put a lot of emotion into that essay.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

There is nothing new under the sun, said the writer of Ecclesiastes. Yes, and life is filled with discoveries of stuff that’s new to us. I’ve read Mockingbird twenty times if I’ve read it once. I learned how to play “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1970 and it’s far too easy for me to agree “the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” But it’s not about me. They don’t know what I know, which means it’s yet to be discovered. Scout is still dressed like a ham and Dylan can almost carry a tune. The coolest thing is, thanks to them, I get to see with new eyes as well. What a gift.

hey, mister tambourine man, play a song for me
in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you

Peace,
Milton

One of the joys of teaching English is vocabulary study. Every week or two, I turn the page to a new list of words for my students – expunge, bequeath, cogent, supercilious – and then put them through the paces of the exercises that come in their books hoping that a few of the words take hold somehow. I’m caught between knowing that a random list of words apropos of hardly anything is not much of a way to learn new words and knowing that the structure, however arbitrary, does help. And so we soldier on through the definitions, the completion of sentences, the synonyms, and the antonyms. When we start talking about what a word means, we learn from what we consider its opposite. If I say the opposite of high is low, I offer one meaning. If I say the opposite of high is sober, well, I mean something quite different.

We talked about opposites on Sunday morning in our Bible class. I am helping to lead a class that is using Walter Brueggemann’s great book, The Bible Makes Sense, to help us get a better handle on our scripture. Many in our class are not familiar with much of the Bible and the class has been interesting and inspiring. We talked about opposites as we looked at the stories of the manna falling to feed the Israelites and Jesus using the little boy’s lunch of loaves and fishes to feed a whole hillside of folks. Somehow in the discussion we got to opposites. I don’t remember how exactly, but I do remember saying the opposite of love was not hate. Hate is similar to love in that it takes a lot of energy. When you hate someone, they matter to you. The true opposite of love is apathy. You just don’t care, or even more you don’t even notice. In the judgment scene in Matthew 25, Jesus admonishes those gathered by saying, “I was hungry and you didn’t feed me. I was in prison and you didn’t come to visit . . . “ and the people responded, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or in prison?”

And Jesus replied, “Exactly.”

Another mistaken antonym shows up when we come to faith. I think the popular answer is often doubt, but I think Frederick Buechner had the right idea when he said doubt was “the ants in the pants of faith.” Then again, faith is a hard word in English because we’ve made a noun out of something that is really a verb. Faith is about trust – wholehearted, chips-all-in-before-we-get-to-the-casino (thanks for that one, Jules) trust. When the stakes are that high, doubt rides sidesaddle. The opposite of faith – of trust is fear because it propels us to run and hide rather than to leap and know that love will catch us.

The two Bible stories centered around bread and brought us to a discussion of Communion, which we share on the first Sunday of every month. We talked about what the Bread meant and what metaphors moved us at the Table. As our discussion continued, I remembered one more pair of antonyms that I have carried for a long time — thanks to an old friend, Kenny – and mentioned in this blog on more than one occasion, I’m sure. Jesus’ command as he passed the bread was to eat and remember. Who knows how many times I have heard the call to take the meal seriously so that I might not forget what God has done in Christ. And that’s a good word. But, perhaps, the opposite of remember is not forget.

Jesus said, “This is my body,” and then Paul said we, the people of God, are the Body of Christ, the incarnation of love in the world. When we remember Jesus, we put the Body back together again. Re-member, as in the opposite of dismember. The centrifugal force of life pulls us apart day by day and flings us to the edges. When we take and eat together, when we gather in close and trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God no matter how painful life is we re-member Jesus: we put the Body of Christ back together again in love so true that it casts out fear.

Peace,
Milton

Our former foster daughter came to Durham this weekend because she is hurting and needed to be cared for. The only words I can find tonight belong to Patty Griffin and her song, “When It Don’t Come Easy” because it is such a tangible description of what love is: “if you break down, I’ll drive out and find you.” I know it is not the first time I’ve mentioned this song, but tonight it’s time to sing it again.

red lights are flashing on the highway
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight
everywhere the waters getting rough
your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight

but if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
if you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stay by you when it don’t come easy

I don’t know nothing except change will come
year after year what we do is undone
time keeps moving from a crawl to a run
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home

you’re out there walking down a highway
znd all of the signs got blown away
sometimes you wonder if you’re walking in the wrong direction

but if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
if you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stay by you when it don’t come easy

so many things that I had before
that don’t matter to me now
tonight I cry for the love that I’ve lost
and the love I’ve never found
when the last bird falls
and the last siren sounds
someone will say what’s been said before
some love we were looking for

but if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
if you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stay by you when it don’t come easy

Peace,
Milton

saturday night at ben and jerry’s
they were the only ones in the place
beside the two behind the counter
they could be identified by
the flavors they had ordered:
peanut and banana greek yogurt
new york super fudge chunk
chocolate with sprinkles
jimmy fallon’s late night snack
but that doesn’t tell the whole story
there’s also the flavor of pain
one lost her husband not long ago
another broke up with her girlfriend
one’s longtime friend had a stroke
the last one’s job is tentative
but that doesn’t tell the whole story
which is ok by me because I was
talking about this particular night
full of rain and fluorescent lights
when the ice cream was stronger
than the pain – for a little while

Peace,
Milton