they catch me
coming and going
my eyes itch
my sinuses clog
like an old drain
whether the trees
are budding
or the leaves
are taking their
parting shot
on their way
to death
how can some
thing as simple as
coming and going
budding and falling
cause so much
pain and discomfort
in the midst of
beauty and color?
I think I’m still
talking about leaves.
Peace,
Milton
At church last Sunday we lit the first candle for hope. At school this week, we are preparing to send out midterm progress reports. At my school, the reports have both a grade and a narrative. Most all of my students struggle in one way or another; some more than others. One boy is new this year and is having a hard time. Even at a school aimed at the kids that don’t fit in a more conventional structure, he is an outsider. It’s painful to watch. He had been at school about a month when he asked me at the end of class one day, “Mr. B-C, am I a bad person?”
“No,” I replied, “you’re not.”
“Then why don’t people like me?”
I didn’t have an answer. This term, he has stopped doing most all of his homework. Today, I pulled him aside, along with our academic dean who is wonderful with kids, not to chide the boy but to see if I could find some way to reach him. Over the past several days, when I have asked for his homework, his head drops, he lets out a deep sigh, and his body physically deflates. He looks defeated and disgraced all in one motion. As we talked this afternoon, he sank deeper and deeper into the chair as he talked about feeling paralyzed by perfectionism. He wasn’t turning in the work, he said, because he didn’t think it would be good enough and he would feel like a failure.
Three different times I told him the homework assignments (reading journals) were things he got full credit just for turning them in. If something was not right, he could revise it without penalty. Then I would ask him what he heard me say and he would talk about not being good enough. We talked long enough to agree that his best way out of the hole he has dug for himself was one assignment at a time. Bird by bird, if you will. I didn’t ask him to make any promises other than he would turn in the next reading journal, which is due on Friday. He agreed. As I drove home, I remembered a poem I wrote a decade ago about a young man who was being beaten down by high school. I dug back through my files and found it.
high school
say you start with
a thousand candles
tiny little beacons
beaming together
in adolescent brilliance
say you blow out one
it doesn’t take much
this one here
at the edge
in the back
say you blow out one
no one will notice
one each night
just one
how could it matter
come back
in a thousand nights
the eyes
will have nothing
left to say
only the light over
the kitchen sink
goes out
with the flick
of a switch
the light inside
dies incrementally
My student thinks failure is the default setting for what it means to be human. No matter how hard he tries, sooner or later he is going to come up short – too short – and be exposed for the failure that he is to the core of his being. And he’s not alone, which makes me wonder if perhaps grade reports in the middle of Advent are not so out of place. One of the most powerful implications of the Incarnation is what Jesus being born “fully human” says about what it means for any of us to be human. Yes, we are all capable of doing damage to our selves and to one another, but because of the birth in Bethlehem, because the Word became flesh, I am reminded that my student is not most human when he is deflated and despairing and neither am I.
It is good to be human. Jesus said so with his birth.
Keep lighting candles.
Peace,
Milton
Madeleine L’Engle would have been ninety-two today.
I think of her every Advent (and a number of other days as well) because she is the one who taught me about the Liturgical Year – through her writing, that is. I never got to meet her, though I had a couple of near misses. If you click her tag in the sidebar of this blog you can get a sense of the way she has been a mentor to me in faith, life, and writing going all the way back to my fourth grade year when I read A Wrinkle in Time
I said I think about her, but that’s not the right verb. She haunts me during Advent the way a spirit haunts an old house. I’m not trying to conjure up a spooky vibe, but haunt is the right verb. In these days of brilliant darkness, the night is full of shadows and saints, the substance of things hoped for brushing up against us in the hallways, their whispers sliding down the banisters and slipping into the corners of our hearts. Thin places the Celtic Christians called them, where the divine and the human can touch.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
)
Her statement is so over the top that it captures the subversive nature of Jesus’ birth. To celebrate God with us is to grasp to all that is good about being human. The Word became flesh on purpose, with purpose, and it was good. Then Jesus walked from town to town, eating and drinking, talking and healing, as if he had all the time in the world. There was no strategy to employ other than to love people face to face. In A Wind in the Door
“Progo,” Meg asked. “You memorized the names of all the stars – how many are there?”
“How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.”
“I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that’s a great many.”
“But how many?”
“What difference does it make? I know their names. I don’t know how many there are. It’s their names that matter.”
We had a discussion around the dinner table the other night about what the word “normal” means and whether or not that word is useful or helpful. For me, it depends how its used. If it is used to describe what can be expected in a given situation, it offers something of value. However, when it is a means of comparison, the word does far more damage than it does good because it becomes a semantic weapon: I am normal (meaning straight, white, and male – or whatever the dominant power group) and the rest of you don’t measure up. No need for names because the un-normal don’t count. In the face of normalcy, Jesus came from the very womb of the Great Unwashed and turned a feeding trough into an altar where everyone is welcome.
And the angels called him by name: Emmanuel – God with us.
Two of the central callings of Christianity are to wait and to remember. Both require us to come to terms with time, which is the quintessential thin place. In A Wrinkle in Time
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide…
Her image stayed with me such that in one of my rare forays into short fiction I wrote about a man in a doctor’s waiting room:
I am fourteen at my brother’s military funeral;
I am seven putting a tooth under my pillow;
I am twenty-eight and my son has survived the surgery;
I am sixteen pulling out of the driveway for the first time;
I am fifty-four holding my first grandchild;
I am thirty stretching to touch a name on the Wall;
I am nine going to the principal’s office for cutting off Sally Jeffrey’s pigtail;
I am twenty-five laying down next to my wife for the first night in our first home;
I am seventy-two being pushed down a colorless hall to a semiprivate room;
I am eighteen registering for the draft;
I am forty-five with my Christmas bonus;
I am sixty-one at my wife’s funeral;
I am thirty-seven waiting to hear the results of my brain scan.
Remembering is putting the stack of time back together again; waiting is being content to sit in the thin place as though time were more essence than schedule, more holy than hurried. When time stands sacredly still, waiting and being are the same thing and I can see the shadows and saints that haunt me with their hope.
and you beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along the climbing way
with painful step and slow
look now for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing
o rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing
Peace,
Milton
The night is far spent . . .
Yes, there’s another half to that sentence, but it’s too early to write it down. We still have weeks of days growing shorter, of darkening afternoons, of lying down to sleep in the middle of all that is not yet. While the new year we mark with our shared calendar comes with countdowns and confetti, the new year that begins with Advent starts with a pregnant pause and silence as thick as the dark.
We are waiting: preparing, anticipating, getting ready.
Last night, Ginger, Jay, and I walked down to Fullsteam, our neighborhood pub, with Ella, our most social Schnauzer, in tow. She was the hit of the bar. One guy came over to pet her and stayed to talk to us. His wife is eight and a half months pregnant. “This is my last night out before the baby comes,” he said, with more excitement than regret. He was already marking time by the birth.
I got home last night and realized today would have been my friend David’s fifty-ninth birthday had he not died suddenly last December. He was one who incarnated the presence of Jesus as much as anyone I know and he died for no good reason. When I sat down to write tonight, I got word that the son of a friend here in Durham died on Thursday. He was born only two weeks ago. Even as I prepare for Christ to be born again in my time and in my culture, I am marking time by who is not here, by whom I have lost, by death. As we talk about Advent as a season of waiting in the best sense of the term, I realize I am waiting for and watching as my father-in-law disappears due to his Alzheimer’s. He walks the halls of our home, lost in the short passageway between his room and the sunroom where he watches television, lost in the corridors of his mind, trapped in the excruciating pause that is now his life. Sometimes when he’s moving down the hall, we ask where he’s going and he says simply, “I don’t know,” and then waits for further instructions. This is some of the pain I know of, and I am barely scratching the surface of the shared pain of humanity.
The night is far spent and its taking names.
Our Hanging of the Greens service, which marks the beginning of Advent, centers around the various traditions that Christianity appropriated over the years to make them part of our expression of the hope and faith we find in Christmas. As the holly, evergreen wreaths, poinsettias, and lighted trees were brought in and we heard the stories, I realized I am a part of a faith tradition, a citizen of a country, and a speaker of a language all of which have thrived on appropriation, by which I mean they have found ways to take what they find interesting around them and make it part of themselves as a way of improving and growing – and, sometimes, conquering.
The particular point in the service where it hit me was when two children brought in the poinsettias. The legend, which came from Mexico, told of a little girl who had nothing to bring the Baby in the manger, so she picked a plain branch. By the time she gave it to Jesus, it had blossomed into the beautiful flower we see at Christmas. The story has the same magic realism as a good Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story, where healing happens because something is transformed by hope, or pain, or tears, or love.
The Gospel passage for today wasn’t pointing to Bethlehem quite yet, a reminder that endings are prelude to beginnings. Jesus was talking about the end of the world, using a break-in as metaphor:
But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.
Whether with a bang or with a whimper, the world ends with about as much warning as Reuben’s Alzheimer’s or the little girl’s flowering branch. The world ends over and over everyday all around us without much regard for purpose or preparation. We know the thieves are coming and we can’t stay awake because we’re exhausted.
The night is far spent and has dragged us with it.
Ritual, as an act of faith, is meaningful repetition. The words we read and the songs we sing invite us to move with the sacred and subversive muscle memory of all those who have come before us lighting one candle at a time in the face of the gathering dark, telling the stories over and over, sharing soup and bread and hope, and waiting as the world ends again and again for another beginning.
The night is far spent . . . .
Peace,
Milton
A couple of years ago, I recorded a story I wrote some years before that for a Christmas Eve service at our church in Marshfield, Massachusetts. I have some of the CDs available for purchase, should you wish to share them, or have one for yourself. Paypal says you can buy one by clicking the button below.
You can read the text of the story here.
| Gift message |
Peace,
Milton
When it comes to spiritual metaphors, kingdom is problematic for me. I’ve written about it before. Thus, my sonnet offering for today.
When Jesus talked of God, he spoke of shepherds and of kings –
the metaphors held meanings people knew;
they’ve survived the centuries when we speak and when we sing,
yet the original meanings struggle to get through.
So let us ask why, when we’re trying to speak in present tense,
we chose to cling to things that are archaic?
When we see that no one’s laughing, it certainly makes sense
‘Cause we keep on telling jokes in Aramaic.
With any of the parables, the reader has to work,
and that labor deepens with distance from the telling;
our interpretations must be more relevant than rote,
less compliant, more subversive and compelling.
Jesus wasn’t kidding when he warned about new wine,
New eyes and new wineskins are needed by design.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — In preparing for Thanksgiving, I also offer new pie recipes here, here, here, here, and here.
I don’t remember the first time I heard a Bob Dylan song. I do, however, remember the first one I learned on my guitar. It was 1970, I was a ninth grader with a new guitar, and my friend Jim had the words and chords:
come gather ‘round people wherever you roam
and admit that the waters around you have grown
and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
if your time to you is worth savin’
Dylan’s words and music have been part of my soundtrack ever since. An email from a friend offered a new stanza to the refrain a few nights ago: could I go with him to sing Dylan songs for a friend?
The man in question has throat cancer that has cost him his voice and is bringing him to terms with his mortality faster than the rest of us fifty-somethings. He also loved to play and sing Dylan, but the latter was no longer an option. So my friend, who plays harmonica, invited me to be the voice for the evening. I said yes to my friend, yes to Dylan, and yes to more than I could imagine.
The man met us at the door just as we climbed the stairs up to the deep wooden porch of his home, his neck bent slightly forward and wrapped in a white bandage, making it look as though he was wearing a turtleneck out of season. The old, restored home was illuminated by the quiet, personal light of various lamps around the room; the couch and chairs were circled in anticipation of our evening together. He sat down and began typing on his laptop, which vocalized for him:
“I have Stephen Hawking’s voice.” Even the computer seemed to smile as it spoke.
“Have you seen any new universes?” asked my friend.
“Of course,” said the voice.
We then faced our first challenge: how to get started. Of all the songs available to us, which one would we do first? My friend and I deferred, and the man chose “Girl of the North Country.” I realized, as I began singing, that every word was infused with the hope and futility of our circumstances.
well if you’re traveling to the North Country Fair
where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
remember me to the one who lives there
she once was a love of mine
Dylan’s lyrics are a catalog of love and loss, of mystery and misses, and we sat in our small circle of couches and lamplight – the eye of the storm, if you will – hearing new things in old words and melodies. We sang songs we knew from muscle memory (Hey, Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me/ In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you”) and even had a few moments of unabashed enjoyment:
whoo-ee ride me high
tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
oh oh are we gonna fly
down in the easy chair
We were four or five songs in when I began to catch a glimpse of the grace into which I had stumbled. The man’s wife pulled a chair into the circle just as I began to sing
they say everything can be replaced
yet every distance is not near
so I remember every face
of every man who put me here
I see the light come shining
from the west down to the east
any day now, any day now
I shall be released
She sat next to me, singing quietly in whispering hope, like the old gospel song, and I was captured by a sense of the sacred, a serendipitous thin place that opened because my friend had trusted me with his friends, and his friend’s pain; a thin place that opened onto a field of gratitude that I was privileged to sit in this circle of longtime friends, for I was an interloper to their intimacy, invited in to sing.
For over two hours, we played and sang and talked. As the evening progressed, so did the man’s exhaustion, despite his best protests. Still, he was unrelenting. My turn to choose, so I picked my favorite of Dylan’s catalog, though I didn’t see what I had unpacked until I got to the last verse:
I’ll look for you in honolulu
san fransisco ashtabulah
you’re gonna have to leave me now I know
but I’ll see you in the stars above
in the tall grass in the ones I love
you’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.
When we finished the song, I looked at his wife, her eyes glistening. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?” I wanted to respond. For answering my friend’s request because I love to play and sing with him? For stumbling into sacredness with my song choice? For being fortunate enough to be in the room to bump up against the well-worn love they shared? Instead, I said, “You’re welcome.”
Her request before she left the circle was “Forever Young.” We all joined in without irony.
may God bless and keep you always
may your wishes all come true
may you always do for others
and have others do for you
may you build a ladder to the stars
and climb on every rung
and may you stay forever young
Together, in a room where most of those requests fell empty to the floor, where the hope that filled the room like the lamplight could not chase all the darkness away, we sang. It was what we could do. And I left thankful for a friend who trusted me enough to invite me to help carry some of the burden.
Peace,
Milton
I’m a regular.
If Fullsteam Brewery were casting a remake of Cheers, I’d be in the running for the role of Norm. I don’t drink nearly as much as he did, but when I walk in, they know me. And I love it.
I’m also a regular at my church.
My friend, Jimmy – AKA my favorite carpenter-beekeeper-teacher-pastor-libertarian-crazy man often wonders aloud why we in the institutional church don’t get that we would reach more people if we were more, well, pub like. As long as I’m referencing Cheers, you remember the theme song:
sometimes you want to go
where everybody knows your name
and they’re always glad you came
you want to go where people know
our troubles are all the same
you want to go where
everybody knows your name
A Texas pastor friend of Jimmy’s was with us for our now regular Friday afternoon gatherings at Fullsteam and said, “They accused Jesus of being a glutton and a wine bibber and then, when it came right down to it, what did he tell us to do to remember him? Eat and drink.”
His point is cute, clever, and fairly well-worn, even in the Baptist circles where he abides. I can’t claim much originality either in the analogy between pub and parish. Still, finding my way to Fullsteam has brought it alive for me again. Something about the room makes people want to gather there – and they do, in all sorts of connections. Our neighborhood, which backs up on the brewery, had a happy hour there last week, inviting also the Only Burger truck to join us, and we had over fifty folks, along with children and dogs, talking and chewing and drinking and relishing the time together. And I felt there like I want to feel when I walk into coffee hour at church.
No – I felt there the way I wish people felt when they visit our church and walk into coffee hour.
I love going to church and I love that is a place where I feel known and feel connected. But there is a difference between parish and pub and I think that difference is akin to trying to write a good poem when you’re carrying an agenda: it’s not that you can’t, but it’s damn hard work. At Fullsteam, the point is to get together; church can become getting together for a point, or a project, or something that feels heavier than simply being gathered together.
I am not required to think much about how to keep the doors open at Fullsteam while I’m there. Listen to the conversations at most any church coffee hour, and a fair amount of them – especially during this traditional stewardship season – revolve around how to keep our beloved institution going. The conversations are well intentioned and even necessary, to a point, and we can end up creating a place where it can feel as though you don’t want everyone to know your name because they will assign you to a committee.
A couple of Sundays ago in church, one of our members made a presentation of an historical church document she had found and had also taken the care and initiative to restore and reframe. Apologetically she declared, “I just did it. I didn’t go through any committees or boards.”
A knowing laughter rippled through the congregation.
In most every church I’ve been a part of, we do a weird thing when it comes to stewardship: we start to talk about the church as if it were not us, as though it were a foreign entity – an institution: “Give to the church,” we say; “If we want the church to be able to carry on,” we add, as though we weren’t the church itself, but instead are giving to something akin to the Red Cross or NPR. One church where I served led into the weekly offering by saying, “For the work of the church . . .”
And yet, our children sing,
I am the church
you are the church
we are the church together . . .
Sounds more like a pub song than an institutional anthem to me.
We are the Body of Christ, the incarnation of God’s love for these days called, as Ginger invites us to do each Sunday, to breathe in the breath of God and breathe out the love of God. We are the hands and feet and eyes and ears and arms and legs of Christ – of the one who ate and drank with people and rarely formed committees. The community we are creating is one born of the kind of explosive joy and grace that would choose an unknown peasant girl to bring Love into the world, drawing in everyone. And, in the week by week living out of our community, we often become connected primarily by the responsibilities we put on one another and church becomes serious business.
And church as business becomes the working metaphor.
I will be the first to admit business is not my strength and I’m not trying to throw the accountant out with the bath water, yet I wonder what we are missing when we think of church as a business – an entity other than ourselves – when it comes to how we share our money with one another, because that is what it means to be the Body of Christ: to share, rather than to give. We share our dreams, our sorrows, our ideas, our mistakes, and our money. We do it best, I think, without using last year’s giving records as a reference, or depending on the government to give us a tax deduction. When we give, we give to God, to one another: we are funding faith, not donating to charity.
We are the church. Together.
It wasn’t the room that made Norm feel at home at Cheers, but the way they called his name, and the way he knew they would be waiting for him. Of course, it was also a chance for him to toss one of his great one-liners – my personal favorite:
Sam: “Norm! How’s it going?”
Norm: “It’s a dog eat dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear.”
Aren’t we all. Here, on the cusp of Advent, I want to walk into Fellowship Hall and remember the Body of Christ that inhabits our stack of cinder blocks is born of extravagance, of brilliance, of unabashed creativity, of unrestrained inclusivity, of resilient hope, and redemptive failure. I want to remember that Jesus wasn’t joking when he said, “Consider the lilies.” I want to live thankfully, congregationally, joyful and triumphant. I want to share our gifts, our belongings, and our faith at full steam.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — I’m on a roll: here’s another new recipe.
The text today was Isaiah 65:17-25 and Ginger’s sermon ran the gardens from Eden to Woodstock. Here’s where it all took me.
The sermon was a mash up of Isaiah and Joni’s words:
how looking back can tell us where we’re going;
that the good old days were best is prophetically absurd —
nostalgia sets our cataracts to growing
so we can’t see much else but the way it used to be
and we lose sight of the prophet’s call to action;
to feed both the famine in the heart and the hunger in the belly
calls for us to do more than maudlin redaction.
By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong —
but then we traded our ideals for MBAs;
true faith’s not idealistic, but clings to hope that does the long
hard work of courage in the living of these days.
What defines our days of glory
depends on how we tell the story.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. I can’t pass up the chance to let Joni sing. Also, for the first time in a long time, posted new recipes here and here.
