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lenten journal: blessed are the skunks . . .

As I drove to work this morning, I heard a story on NPR about advances in 3-D technology that would make it possible to watch without “those ridiculous glasses.” They interviewed an ophthalmologist, Dr. Samuel Marsh, who has pioneered a surgical procedure that alters the eye so glasses are no longer needed to watch TV. They interviewed a woman who said the surgery was life-changing and then mentioned some people had their complaints. Marsh responded, “Some patients have complained of blurred vision when they are not looking at 3D screens. So we’re actually working now on some special corrective lenses that will allow our patients to see real life normally.”

It was then I remembered it was April Fools’ Day and NPR had done it again.

As much fun as the pranks are, April 1 sticks in my mind for another reason: it marks the beginning of National Poetry Month. I think it’s worth noting that the month kicks off on April Fools’ Day as if some might wonder if a month-long emphasis on poetry is not some kind of joke. My response would be to quote lines from William Carlos Williams’ poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

A poem and a joke share something in common: neither benefits greatly from explanation. We laugh hardest at the jokes we get instinctively; as comics often say, if you have to explain them then they aren’t funny. We might finally understand the joke, but there’s little chance we will fall over laughing. A poem is doing its best work when it evokes a visceral response, whatever the emotion. An explanation may bring understanding but won’t bring anyone to tears or laughter. Trust me. I’ve done my share of explaining, and have had poems explained to me. None of the poems whom I have met by way of explanation have remained favorites. The ones I carry with me enticed me with metaphors, evoked spiritual connections, and challenged me to invest time and effort in unpacking their treasures. Working to understand is different than having it explained.

The more I read the Gospels, the more I see Jesus as a poet, yet we keep trying to explain him.

The lectionary passage for this Sunday tells the story of the blind man whom Jesus healed by making mud from dirt and spit, rubbing it on the man’s eyes, and telling him to go wash it off. The formula was not the key; Jesus had healed others with a word or a touch. Jesus also healed the man on the Sabbath. When the man went to the synagogue to have his healing verified, the folks there wanted explanations. All the man could see was poetry. They kept pushing for rationality, and he kept pointing out that he could see. They wanted an explanation and he wanted to tell them the story of how he came to see a world for the first time that he had only heard about.

In “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” Naomi Shihab Nye responds to a young student who asked her to write a poem for him.

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

“Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems.” I find myself carrying that line back to my reading of the Beatitudes for a study at church. And I think about the once blind man trying to get those around him to see. What poems are curled up in my eyes, in the eyes of my students, in the hearts and lives of those I meet and pass on a daily basis?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, those that mourn, the meek” – and the list goes on, each statement a poem that both defies explanation and yearns for a story. Instead of breaking down the phrases and beating them into submission, we could start by sitting together and waiting to see what skunks come crawling out of scripture with stories to tell.

Blessed are the skunks for they shall be called poets.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: an open letter to an old friend

for David Gentiles

it’s not the anniversary
of anything other
than the second March
without you here
still you showed up
unexpectedly at a meeting
I had with some people
to talk about a dream

and then again tonight
in Nathan’s new book
though I had a hunch
you might be in there
but you snuck up on me
when I sat down to write
with the innocence mission
as background singers —

one friend writes,
everything is changing
while the day sky stays blue
changing around him
and me without you
waiting for you to arrive
where does the time go
where does the time go

— and then I remembered . . .
it’s opening day
your Indians are in first
for at least a few days
at least that’s what I said
to the picture on the desk
both of us smiling at Christy’s
wedding like old friends

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: lenten acoustics

I spent the day packing boxes, loading them into the U-Haul, and unpacking them in their new location. In this year when I’m not going to have to move to a new house, my school decided to move to a new building. We’ve anticipated the move since the beginning of the school year, but permitting and bureaucratic issues with the town (not Durham) have delayed things, to put it mildly. We went into high moving gear when we got the clearances we needed in order to not have to pay April rent in our current location. We divided into groups, each teacher taking on a team of kids and a list of assignments, and we got it done – or at least got a lot of it done; tomorrow we will finish and I will drive to the new building when I go to work on Friday.

As someone who has spent my life moving, I’ve learned a thing or two about place. A few years ago, I wrote a post called “cooking acoustics,” which was about the power of the room when it comes to baking bread. Many years before that, I remember a conversation with Rhealene Stewart, who was the organist at University Baptist Church most of my life. She was there when the church moved into the “big sanctuary” and used to talk about how the room changed the people. “We became more formal from the very first service,” she said, “not because we talked about it or decided to do it, but just because we moved from church in the Fellowship Hall to church in a room with stained glass windows and a pipe organ.” Church acoustics.

Ginger and I have lived in seven residences in our marriage. In each one, we have developed traditions that were site specific, not because we were intentional about leaving them behind as we moved but because a different space offered different “marriage acoustics,” if you will. In Marshfield, the set up in our living room with a u-shaped couch turned, somehow, into our putting a futon mattress down on the floor – we called it the palette – and sleeping there from Thanksgiving to Christmas (or New Year’s). It was one of our favorite things. We moved to Durham and the living room was neither big enough for the couch or a mattress. When Thanksgiving came, we just didn’t do it, and remarked to each other of the passing of the ritual but the futon seemed to belong in Marshfield in a way it didn’t find a home here in Durham.

So as I stood in what will be my room, which tonight is filled with furniture to be placed and boxes to be unpacked, I wondered what the school acoustics will be. The traffic patterns between classes will change, how the rooms are set up will be different, the options I have in teaching are increased. Also, there are more windows, it feels like there is more space, and the building is located in a much more populated area (with a bakery next door!). I have to learn a new route to and from school and figure out a new time to leave each day to get there on time.

As I drove home this afternoon thinking about the day, I began to think about Durham’s acoustics and the resonance my life is finding here. Part of what has shaped me here is missing Massachusetts, and the grief is not the whole range of feelings. The sanctuary at our church here is a small A-framed building that is wood and brick on the inside. I love to sing in the sanctuary because of the way my voice expands in the space. It feels effortless to me. I can feel my throat relax, my muscles ease, and I become connected to the room rather than someone just standing in the middle of it. Walking the street of this city feels the same way. Connected.

Lent reminds me that there are liturgical acoustics as well. These are days of focus and forgiveness, of preparation and intentionality. Eastertide rolls in as the stone rolls away and bursts in our hearts like a big bass drum. Pentecost is Snoopy dancing in the leaves. Lenten acoustics for me thrive on resonance and memory in much the same way I can hear a song I love but have not heard in years and the melody comes up from inside of me out of muscle memory bringing with it not only words and music but the sights and smells and feelings and faces of all the times I have heard or sung that song.

long ago a young man sits
and plays his waiting game

I remember buying the record as a sophomore at Paschal High School in Fort Worth — 1971. Tonight, some forty years later, it swam to the surface on this spring night as I write about the acoustics of place because I’ve been packing boxes once again. What reverberates most is the gratitude.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: holding pattern

the reason we don’t
go spinning into
space as the world turns
they say is gravity
as though being weighed
down is what does it

we sat around the
dinner table with
one who wrote a book
that mattered to Ginger
and was held in place
by the power of words

we helped serve dinner
at the shelter with friends
for folks weighed down
but still spinning away
and offered a tether
in our breaking of bread

we burst in on belly
dancers down at the pub
of all shapes and sizes
writhing for a room full
of friends who found who
resonance in the rhythm

what matters most is
weightless — gossamer
grace or glee – you know:
old trails of love and tears
fresh new lines to trace
held on to not held down

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: cloud of witnesses

the eighth grader who wants to know
if I’ve graded the paper he turned in yesterday.
the neighbor ranting on the listserv
taking out his frustration on the rest of us.

the guy at the shelter who helped me
carry in the chicken for tomorrow night’s meal.
the woman in front of me at Costco
who didn’t seem prepared for the check out line.

the President who spoke about Libya
trying to explain what our country is doing.
and I’m sure there was at least one
whom I walked by without even noticing.

the cloud of witnesses of my day to remind me:
be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #23

The passage for today was Jesus meeting the woman at the well. My sonnet was particularly affected by the following video. Thanks to my friend Down Under, Simon, for posting it.

sunday sonnet #23

a woman of no distinction, she
came alone to the well at noon;
engaged her in conversation, he
came her reputation to impugn –

at least that’s what she thought when they met,
then his questions gave her pause to think
their meeting might be more than a threat
for he turned and asked her for a drink.

He knew her past and stayed to hear her —
the ways that she’d been hurt and been wronged;
she’d made sure no one could get near her
now he was saying that she belonged.

This is how God’s grace is sown:
to be loved is to be known.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: blessed are those . . .

I spent the better part of the morning with some friends from church as a part of a Lenten Bible study. We are focusing on the Beatitudes. As I was preparing to lead the group, I was struck by the fact that Matthew takes just four chapters to move from Jesus’ genealogy to his birth to his baptism to the temptations to calling the disciples and then spends the next three chapters on one sermon. I’ve been reading through a couple of commentaries that talk about understanding the blessings of the beatitudes as Big Picture: an eschatological perspective of the realm of God, which is both now and not yet. I thought about the commentator’s word when I sat down this afternoon with Stephen Dunn again and his essay on “Poets, Poetry, and Spirituality.”

The classic spiritual journey is from travail to understanding to acceptance. (168)

That classic journey is the one on which I was raised. As the old gospel song says,

farther along we’ll know more about it
farther along we’ll understand why
cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
we’ll understand it all by and by

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews proclaimed, “the evidence of things not seen.” Yes and I have come to see that life is more nuanced and more complicated that the stepping stones in the classic journey. Dunn offers another thought:

Spirituality in poetry. Here’s another attempt at a definition: A journey from travail toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” (170)

Though Dunn is not writing from a Christian perspective, he informs mine because he asks good questions. I have found that I need the questions of those who are not insiders to my faith perspective to challenge me to see more than I can find on my own or within my community of insiders, particularly when it comes to dealing with pain and struggle. Take, for example, Tom Waits’ song, “Georgia Lee”:

cold was the night, hard was the ground
they found her in a small grove of trees
lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
she’s too young to be out on the street.

why wasn’t God watching?
why wasn’t God listening?
why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?

When I was in the deepest part of my depression and trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to begin to make meaning of it, most Christian writers were not much help because they had a hard time coming to terms with despair without offering how I let Jesus fix me. I didn’t need someone to fix me. I needed someone to listen, to resonate, to sit there in the dark with me and admit it was real and that I could survive. Dunn, again:

I know that despair often can be a ticket to an unchosen journey, and to survive it is to come back with glimpses of what was not available to us before. (160)

As Lent began this year, I observed – no, I celebrated two years that I have been off of my antidepressants. Life is lighter these last two years than the eight years before them and I am grateful. I worked hard to understand what depression was and how I could deal with the darkness and I don’t understand how or why it let up on me in many ways. I live now with the prospect that this is a season of relief, which may last a long time and which may not, and I must continue to let my faith and my life be informed by what I saw and felt and learned while riding the monster. I see what Dunn means by catching glimpses of “what was not available to us before,” just as I have a deeper appreciation for the prepositional phrases that complete each of the Beatitudes:

blessed are the poor in spirit FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven
blessed are they that mourn FOR they shall be comforted
blessed are the meek FOR they shall inherit the earth
blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness FOR they shall be filled
blessed are the merciful FOR they shall receive mercy
blessed are the pure in heart FOR they shall see God
blessed are the peacemakers FOR they shall be called the children of God
blessed are those persecuted for righteousness FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Jesus’ words feel like an invitation to the journey Dunn described: “from travail to toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” To begin to grasp the blessing means to be first acquainted with grief, with loss, with suffering. To begin to understand the substance of things hoped for is to find resonance first with the pain that is the substance of human existence. Such is the paradox of blessing, the opening to the deeper mystery of God.

After eight years of depression, I know experientially more about emotional pain than I did before. I also know that love did not let go of me. I didn’t learn that because someone told me to trust Jesus or told me that love wouldn’t let go of me. I learned it because people who love me – Ginger being at the top of that list – didn’t let go. They didn’t try to fix me or correct me; what they did best was not leave. They incarnated love in a way that gave me room to trust that I would be comforted, that God was somewhere in the dark as well. As REM sings in one of my favorite hymns,

when your day is night alone
and you feel like letting go
when you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on
‘cause everybody hurts
take comfort in your friends
everybody hurts
don’t throw up your hands
don’t throw up your hands
if you feel like you’re alone
no, no, no – you’re not alone

Despair is the seedbed of hope. Hope is more profound than explanation or reprieve. Love never lets go.

Someday we shall see face to face.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: part of the story

Here’s more of Stephen Dunn, once again, from my reading today. These are the opening words to a chapter titled, “The Hand Reaching Into the Crowd.”

We live in a graceless age. Accordingly the word grace (in its various parts of speech) has lost power and significance, though it is frequently used. We have our saving graces, we are graced by one’s presence, we seek to be in someone’s good graces, and sometimes we need grace periods, which instructively, are given these days more by banks than by other higher powers. A recent headline read, Still Cheaper Chicken May Grace Our Menus Soon. The word is nearly unhearable, nearly dead, in that context in which it is familiarly used rarely compel us to engage its meaning. It might be said that all much-used, debased words are looking for restoration, for revivifying contexts.

In its Latin and Old French roots the verb means either to favor or to give thanks. In Modern French it means “to pardon.” . . . The noun’s theological definition refers to God’s free and undeserved favor, at once suggestive of beneficence and selectivity. We cannot earn it; we can only hope for mercy.

When I finished writing last night, I sat down next to Ginger in the adjacent room just to be together for a few minutes before we fell asleep. Between blogging and watching basketball, I had missed who had been voted off of American Idol. She picked up the remote to find the recording. “You can just tell me,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied, “you have to see it.”

What followed was the surprise that Casey, one of the more talented of this year’s crop, came in last in the voting. He was then given the chance to “sing for his life,” as Ryan Seacrest called it, though he was hardly through the first verse when the judges stopped him to say they were intervening to save him from elimination. They have one “save” per season and they were ready to use it. The young man was overcome. In the flood of emotion that followed, I heard him say to the judges, “You only have one save. Why would you use it on me?”

After that, all he could say was, “Thank you.”

Tonight, I sat down to dinner with three of our godchildren (and their parents). Jasmine, who is seven, was asked to say grace. She began a series of sentences, each one beginning with “Thank you, God,” that told the story of her day: what she had done, whom she had seen, what she had eaten, all the way down to our sitting around the table and the empanadas that were waiting to be consumed. By the time she was done, all I could say was, “Thank you.”

Dunn’s discussion of grace was a lead-in to a story and a poem about the aftermath of the 1993 World Series where Mitch Williams, a pitcher for the Phillies, gave up a series ending home run. Reporters descended on him in the locker room to ask the akward and agonizing questions reporters ask in the loser’s locker rooms because it was their job. “If the were better men with better jobs,” Dunn wrote, “they would have put their arms around him, asked how they might be of help.” Then, another Phillies pitcher, Terry Mulholland, reached through the mob of mic holders, took Williams’ hand, and led him away from the assault without saying anything to anyone. “Oh,” Dunn writes in the poem, “the luxury of failing in private.” Then in the next paragraph he writes,

Christianity has given us great stories of pardon and forgiveness, in other words of moral grace, but very few stories about the symmetries and felicities of art. We are our stories, which is why it is useful to know many. The scariest people I know are the ones who avidly subscribe to one story, one version of the world.

Perhaps one sign of our graceless age is fail has come into its own. We use it as almost its own part of speech. Epic Fail. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb all rolled into one. We are all each other’s band of reporters, pushing microphones into one another’s faces demanding to know how it feels to be such a screw up. Private is an anachronism. Context is of little consequence. We are being conditioned to think of life as a sequence of YouTube videos or news segments edited to show our failures from every angle without telling the story.

Jesus met the woman at the well and they talked. She had failure written all over her. She was alone at the well because that was the least painful way for her to get through her day. Jesus listened to her story and told her some of his. When she went back into the village, she invited the people who held the microphones in her face to come back with her to the well to meet the one who had offered her grace. Her statement has always been puzzling to me. She said, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done,” as if that were somehow a comforting statement. I’ve often thought perhaps the gospel writers left out part of her invitation. I want it to read, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.” Dunn’s description of Terry Mulholland leading Mitch Williams out of the ring of reporters gives me knew eyes. Mulholland knew what Williams had done and knew the way to forgiveness, to grace and gratitude. Not only did he know, but he took him there by telling his own story of failure through his actions.

The point of life is not to measure up, or even to get it right. I don’t really know if life has a point anymore than a great story has A Lesson To Be Learned. Every story that moves us, that makes us more human is one of failure and forgiveness, of loss and redemption. Sometimes we are the ones who blew the game standing in the spotlight of the inquisitors. Then there are the stories where we get to take someone by the hand like Mulholland, or awaken hearts with our gratitude like Jasmine, or speak words of healing like Jesus. To be a part of those stories, we have to be paying attention.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: spring rain

It’s the end of the grading term at school, the students are frantically trying to finish the rough drafts of their research papers, I’m faced with grade reports – so I spent my free period reading poetry. This morning as I left the house, I picked up my well-worn copy of Poems to Live By: In Uncertain Times, which I bought eight or ten years ago and continue to mine for treasure. The one that grabbed me today was a poem by Robert Bly:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it’s been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Maybe it was the image of the deranged bear, the child-bearing moose, or the promise of forgiveness that reminded me of a poem by William Carpenter quoted in Stephen Dunn’s book, Walking Light. Both poems share the same sense of yearning and hope, offering voices that calm and encourage.

Rain

A man stood in the rain outside his house.
Pretty soon, the rain soaked through
his jacket and shirt. He might have
gone in, but he wanted to be wet, to be
really wet, so that it finally got through
his skin and began raining on the rooftops
of the small city that the man always carried
inside him, a city where it hadn’t rained
for thirty years, only now the sky darkened
and tremendous drops fell in the thick dust
of the streets. The man’s wife knocked
on the window, trying to call him in.
She twirled one finger around her ear
to sign that he was crazy, that he’d
get sick again, standing in street clothes
in a downpour. She put the finger in her mouth
like a thermometer. She formed the word idiot
with her lips, and, always, when she said that
he would give in. But now he stood there.
His whole life he’d wanted to give something,
to sacrifice. At times he’d felt like coming up
to people on the street, offering his blood.
Here, you look like you need blood. Take mine.
Now he could feel the people of his city
waking as if from a long drought. He could feel
them leaving their houses and jobs, standing
with their heads up and their mouths open,
and the little kids taking their clothes off
and lying on their bellies in the streams
and puddles formed by the new rain that the man
made himself, not by doing anything, but standing
there while the rain soaked through his clothes.
He could see his wife and his own kids
staring from the window, the younger kid
laughing at his crazy father, the older one
sad, almost in tears, and the dog, Ossian—
but the man wanted to drown the city in rain.
He wanted the small crowded apartments
and the sleazy taverns to empty their people
into the streets. He wanted a single man with
an umbrella to break out dancing the same way
Gene Kelly danced in Singing in the Rain,
then another man, and more, until the whole
city was doing turns and pirouettes with their
canes or umbrellas, first alone, then taking
each other by the arm and waist, forming a larger
and larger circle in the square, and not
to any music but to the percussion of the rain
on the roof of his own house. And if there were
a woman among the dancers, a woman in a flowery
print skirt, a woman wetter and happier and more
beautiful than the rest, may this man be
forgiven for falling in love on a spring
morning in the democracy of the rain, may
he be forgiven for letting his family think
that is just what to expect from someone who
is every day older and more eccentric, may he
be forgiven for evading his responsibilities,
for growing simple in the middle of his life, for
ruining his best pants and his one decent tie.

One summer night, when I was Youth Minister at University Baptist Church, a bunch of kids were over at my house for a Bible study or something. We were all sitting in the living room when a Texas thunderstorm blew in quickly and the rain fell in sheets. Everything was soaked in a matter of seconds. One of the kids caught my eye and, without a word, we got up, ran out into the rain, and started jumping up and down in the puddles. It was a moment of unadulterated joy. When I turned around, I saw that everyone else had followed us. We stayed outside until the rain left as quickly as it had come and then realized we had about fifteen minutes before everyone’s parents came to pick them up. I handed out every towel I could find in my house and we were still wet and laughing when the cars started to arrive. I remembered that night as I read about the man soaking the city inside him in the rain.

I don’t have a big point to make other than these are all stories that felt worth sharing.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: report card

I feel least like a teacher when I
turn in the grades and distill the
interactions with my students to
one single letter plus or minus

after weeks of asking them to
make their offerings take their chances
all too quickly all that matters is
one letter to somehow sum it up

to go on their permanent record
not the day we all laughed together
or we closed the books and sang out loud
conjunction junction what’s your function

I felt like a teacher on those days
this week I’m an accountant

Peace,
Milton