there are some nights
when the sky turns
the color of friendship
and fades into the crisp
darkness of gratitude
we ate with friends
drank and talked as well
and then walked away
dropping bit of hope
like breadcrumbs
along the sidewalks
and silent porches
finding our way home
to our porch light
our beacon of belonging
summer will come
and winter will follow
and footprints will fade
but not this indelible
wisp of memory
Peace,
Milton
If you haven’t heard, Rob Bell has written a book
I haven’t read it, but he apparently has a lot of nerve claiming God loves everyone. What I have read are any number of blog posts, articles, and straight out rants claiming that Bell’s argument that Hell might not exist is not just wrong but evil or dangerous – or both. A Facebook acquaintance posted a link – without irony – to an article by John McArthur entitled, “Rob Bell: A Brother to Embrace or a Wolf to Avoid?”
Seriously?
I used McArthur’s own search function on his blog to see if he ever called Fred Phelps into question and found nothing.
Michael Morrell is a Facebook friend I have never met, but I count him as a friend because he sends me books, thanks to theOoze.com. The latest one will probably make John McArthur invite Rob Bell over for dinner just because of the title: If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics
Within the miracle of a living and evolving universe, our understanding evolves regarding God, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, what it means to be a faith community, and what it means to be human. There is no final, un- changing form of Christianity. God’s last word was not uttered two thousand years ago in Nazareth. We can detect in the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and in the stories of His resurrection, the evolutionary bias of an eternal, loving Presence. The failure to update our theological and liturgical models has resulted in modes of worship, spiritual practice, and images of God, that are out of sync with reality (and Reality) as we know it to be.
I’ve been meaning to write a review for awhile, but reading McArthur’s post – and my acquaintance’s willingness to pass it along – gave me the impetus to pass along some words intended to foster faith and community. Sanguin wonders aloud in his opening poem how Darwin might have responded had faith been framed differently for him. Though the poem is long, I’m posting the whole thing here because I couldn’t figure out what to cut.
If Darwin Prayed
I wonder, if Mr. Darwin
had imagined a God
bigger than the theist’s puppeteer—
and less aloof
from nature’s ways—
how he might have prayed.
I wonder,
if he had viewed the great march of time
with a mystic’s eye—
as Spirit’s unhurried play with form and function,
not creation leaving God in the dust
and pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—
if his heart might not have burned with faith.
I wonder,
when the push of Eros
and the pull of the possible
caused him to close the City of God
and leave the dreary seminary
to set sail on board his Beagle destiny,
if he ever imagined that he embodied Spirit’s
irrepressible urge to evolve.
I wonder,
when he reflected on the mystery of a finch’s beak
and the glories of the Galapagos,
if Mr. Darwin considered his own adaptive brilliance
that brought forth The Origin of Species
(his great gift to theology)
an occasion of an even deeper Mystery—
evolution awakening in him.
I wonder,
if, hunched long years
over beetles and mollusks,
he ever considered
St. Paul’s self-emptying God,
touching all with a rising,
noncoercive Presence,
and then going on ahead of us—
as did the Galilean—
calling from an undissected future,
beckoning this sighing creation
toward freedom and fullness of being.
I wonder, Mr. Darwin,
if your beloved Emma might have worried less
over your apostasy
if you could have played the prophet
and announced, with the Baptist,
evolution was filling every valley
making low the mountains,
preparing a highway
through Descartes’ desert,
for the advent,
and not the end,
of God.
(If I were God,
I too would keep my presence hidden,
an allurement of love that predestines no fixed future,
conferring maximum dignity upon life,
as together all that is
joins in the great procession
of the formless,
assuming forms most glorious,
crowning the human ones
with a distinctive diadem—
the capacity to select our own future,
naturally).
I wonder
if Darwin prayed.
The rest of the book offers prayers that follow the ecclesiastical seasons, each tied to a scripture passage, with most of them having been used in worship at Sanguin’s church. The overarching sense of the prayers is one of wonder and openness. These are not the prayers of people convinced they have the answer, or that they need to protect God, but people thriving on questions and committed to being lost in wonder, love, and praise.
I want to be dangerous like them.
Peace,
Milton
One of the signatures of my life are pockets of unfinished things.
I have shelves of unfinished books, stacks of papers to be gone through, any number of unfinished household projects, and – thanks to an attempt, at least, to finish unpacking one corner of the guest room in our house – a folder of unfinished songs. At the end of the last century, I was a songwriter, collaborating with a good friend. I wrote lyrics and contributed on the harmonies. When that chapter of my life came to a close, I came away with the idea that I was not a melody maker, so the not-yet-songs found their way into folders and unfinished stacks and have stayed hidden for so long that I find it hard remembering them. Some in the stack have stayed with me in one form or another, but others were a complete surprise. This is one that caught my attention:
a world away
on a road outside nairobi
someone’s walking home
someone’s burning dinner
someone’s about to go
half a world away from me
I don’t know any names
on a road outside nairobi
it happens just the same
on a subway in st. petersburg
someone has to stand
a woman’s having trouble
another lends a hand
as the five o’clock train fills up
like a mobile sardine can
on a subway in st. petersburg
they’re heading home again
name a town pick a place
take a lap in the human race
find yourself a world away
in the people you won’t see today
in a house in yokahama
the little one’s asleep
while parents balance bank accounts
and say the rent’s too steep
grandma’s on the telephone
asking how’s my little girl
in a house in yokahama
it’s not such a different world
name a town pick a place
take a lap in the human race
find yourself a world away
in the people you won’t see today
Part of the reason this particular text struck me is the theme, which is one I’ve carried with me for many years. I can remember saying to friends in college, “Sometimes it bothers me that there are places I’ve never been – whole cities, countries – where no one has ever waked up and said, ‘I wonder what Milton is doing.’ They have never missed me and they’re doing just fine.” As long as I’m printing older works, I even wrote this poem a few years back:
spokane
a family is gathering for a meal
outside Spokane
the daughter is still
wearing her soccer uniform
the mother is chatting
as she passes the potatoes
the father is nonverbal, tired
trying to engage the dog is
waiting for someone to share
they will finish their dinners
their conversations
their homework
they will turn on the television
the phone will ring several times
It will not be me
no one in that house knows
I live across the continent or
I have tales to tell of my youth
of my life, of what I did yesterday
they don’t know I can cook or play
guitar, or that I’m writing a poem
they don’t know I’ve never
been to Spokane and
they’re not concerned
they are finding their dreams
building their lives
breaking their hearts
living out their days
without knowing me
and they are not the only ones
in all my years
the phone has never rung
and a voice declared
“come quickly to spokane
we just realized we can’t
go on without you”
the same could be said
for the table across the room
from me here in the coffee shop
the gossamer tether of humanity
doesn’t appear to reach as far
as the next booth unless the light
is just right and I can see the lines
I’m not sure which view
is easier to live with
The other reason I was caught by the folder I found was there were several poems/lyrics that were fairly complete and yet had sat in the blue cardboard folder with the picture of Pooh reading to Piglet while each one of them sits on a stack of books and the inscription, “Words and Such.” On the bookshelf next to the desk where I’m writing tonight are three more binders of unborn and unfinished songs, a whole stack of journals with snippets of insight, a couple of folders with articles and quotes, five icons that need to be completed, and a draft of a novel that I finished, but never could figure out what to do next. Within arm’s reach is an archaeological exhibition of the layers of my writing life with almost as much left undone as done, I suppose.
The last phrase takes me once more to the prayer that has traveled with me through much of this Lenten season: “forgive us for the things we have done and the things we’ve left undone.” I’m not sure I need to ask forgiveness in this case – except for a couple of the lyrics – as much as I need to attend to my past, to regard it. Some things pass by for reasons we understand and others for reasons we cannot explain. Sometimes we walk away on purpose and other times we just let things fall away. I look over at the bookshelf and I think of Ezekiel standing over the valley of dry bones and watching God reanimate those who had been lost and left for dead. What he thought was over wasn’t over.
Though much of what I found in my excavation might be considered, in the parlance of The Princess Bride, to be “mostly dead,” I’m doing good work to go back through the layers of my life and remember, as best I can, not only what and why I wrote, but for whom and with whom. Whether any of the songs are ever finished, or any other of them are seen by anyone else but me, living in the layers, as Stanley Kunitz pointed out, is how I continue to move towards wholeness. Here are the closing lines to his poem:
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
In this trinity of existence – archaeologist, settler, explorer – I re-member my life in what has been, what is, and what is to come. I cannot see beyond the borders of my limitations and can reach farther than I can imagine.
Thanks be to God.
Peace,
Milton
First the news of Lazarus dying
before Jesus had time to get there —
Then the image of Jesus crying
must have giv’n the disciples a scare . . .
He got to the tomb and called out his friend,
with the others saying, “He stinketh” –
they had no idea death was no end,
Jesus said, “Death is not what you thinketh.”
God showed Ezekiel a valley of death
then gift wrapped bones in new life and skin –
God’s subversive pow’r in every breath:
in our endings is where God begins
touching that miraculous circumstance
where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance*
Peace,
Milton
*with grateful appreciation to Mark Heard
I spent the morning and early afternoon at the Third Annual Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry at Avent Ferry United Methodist Church in Raleigh. My primary connection to the event was through my friendship with Ryan Rowe, who is a member of the church and the organizer of this year’s conference. He asked me to help with the food.
The conference is named for a former pastor of the church who was responsible for helping the church to galvanize its identity in the midst of the civil rights struggle. In 1958, they were meeting in a dairy barn that belonged to a rich benefactor. The church was an all white congregation. Crum invited James Lawson, an African-American and fellow Methodist, to come a preach. The man who owned the barn, and who was also going to donate land to let them build a church, said if Lawson came he would evict them and take back his land.
Ryan read part of the sermon Crum preached the following Sunday, prior to Lawson taking the pulpit. “Money cannot buy our witness,” he said. And then he repeated himself. Then Crum went on to say the second galvanizing principle was to stand against those who were wrong but “to love them in the midst of their wrongness.” “Speaking the truth without love,” said Crum, “is not Christian.”
And then, fifty-three years later, James Lawson himself stepped once again into the pulpit of Avent Ferry UMC. This man who went on from that Sunday in 1958 to pastor in India, to study with followers of Gandhi, to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to train civil rights activists in nonviolent actions, to ride in the last stages of the Freedom Rides when the early riders had been beaten down, to pastor in Memphis and work with Martin Luther King to organize the sanitation workers stood up today to stand with those working to keep a well integrated and successful school system in Raleigh from being taken apart by forces reminiscent of those who opposed him fifty years ago. He spoke with a gentle and calm authority, not as one who had something to prove nor as a hero in the fading light, but as one who knew how to speak the truth in love and still had some truth to speak.
He talked about how hard it is to read the gospel stories of Jesus because we find it hard to let him be human, to really see him in the stories. “If you want to understand the stories of Jesus,” he said, “read a biography of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.” The fact that we were sitting in a room with no stained glass windows seemed perfect to me in that moment: he was calling us to see in new and clear images.
His words reminded me of something I read in Nathan Brown’s book, Letters to a One-Armed Poet, which chronicles his grief in the loss of one of his best friends. In a piece called “Nip and Tuck,” he writes,
I’ve buffed out so many scratches and dings in the paint of our stories, I now worry about their cosmetic integrity.
At the same time, “the truth” has always felt like salty taffy in my mouth – the way it yanks on loose teeth and takes forever to digest. And “the facts” of any matter seldom make people lean forward in their customary seats . . . seats on the front rows of lives that are filled enough already with the hassle and boredom of “what actually happened.”
Right now I’m reading The Great Gatsby
I love to tell the story
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest
So sings one of my favorite hymns. Thinking about what Lawson had to say this morning, what Gatsby thinks about looking across the water at Daisy’s green light, what Nathan meant by “buffing and shining,” I wonder what are the stories of Jesus – the ones with the scratches and dents of humanity and hope?
We’ve often done a pretty good buffing job on the gospels over the years to make them fit nicely into our anthology of culture and faith. We can talk, for instance, about the gruesomeness of the Crucifixion and focus on Jesus’ suffering because he died for us and also, perhaps, because we don’t have to feel it firsthand. When the call of the story is for compassion and voluntarily taking on the pain of the poor and marginalized, we’ve move more quickly to metaphor. When it’s something we can’t fit comfortably into our categories, we explain it away as being added by church tradition or later inserts. When it comes to our weekly lectionary readings, we just skip over the hard parts. The prospect of a “taffy” truth that leaves us toothless and disquieted is more than we want to face on most days.
I was reading Marcus Borg’s blog tonight, looking for information on his new book, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power – And How They Can Be Restored
But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make the afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.
Violent revolution? No. Non-violent revolution? Yes.
Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.
Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.
Yes, and we have church buildings and jobs and families and debts and obligations and other stuff we want to do. In the jukebox that is my mind, I cue the Beatles:
you say you want a revolution
well you know we don’t want to change the world
My friend Burt called tonight while I was cooking dinner. We’ve been close friends since college – a long time ago, now. It had been awhile since we talked, so we both had stories to tell along with new scratches and dents to share. When we were younger, we thought we would change the world.
I think there’s still time.
Peace,
Milton
it is a dark and stormy
night the sky is angry
flashing and bellowing
yet refusing to dissolve
into tears and weep its way
into ushering in the dawn
our middle schnauzer
runs under the bed at the
first sound of thunder
I’m typing in the dark
to better see the light show
trying to beat the deadline
imposed by my itchy eyes
and generic antihistamines
that aren’t keeping promises
any better than the lightning
Peace,
Milton
In the opening lines of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas sings
every time I look at you I don’t understand
why you let the things you did get so out of hand
you’d have managed better if you’d had a plan
why’d you choose such backward time and such a strange land
if you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation
people in 4 B.C. had no mass communication . . .
I’m sure Jesus would have broken the record for followers had he been able to Tweet, though shrinking the parables to one hundred and forty characters would have been a challenge, even for the Messiah. Even if he could have reached the world, the quality of the encounters would have been fundamentally different. Judas criticized him for lack of a plan yet, it seems to me, that is what is perhaps most essential about the gospel stories. The disciples didn’t greet him every morning with a papyrus Day-Timer and say, “We’ll start with healing a blind man after breakfast, on the way to town a woman will touch your cloak, at lunch you’ll feed the five thousand, and then raise Jarius’ daughter from the dead in the early afternoon before you catch the boat for a little ‘me’ time.”
Jesus walked. And Jesus was interrupted.
In fact, the context for most of his ministry was interruptions. He walked – occasionally with somewhere specific to go – and people stopped him. Love is more easily transferred by analog. Tonight, Ginger and I planned to go to the opening of The Cookery, which bills itself as “Durham’s Cooking Incubator.” Read their words:
Starting a food business can be daunting. We are here to foster creative culinary minds as they set out to become the next big thing on the local food scene. With our certified facility and regulatory expertise, you can jump-start your culinary venture today.
Though Durham is known as the “Bull City,” I think we could more aptly be called “City of Encouragement” because of the way people pull for one another around here. Durhamsters are good at cheering each other along and helping to make each other’s dreams come true.
Since we knew parking would be tough and the evening was amazingly beautiful, Ginger and I decided to walk from our house down West Trinity Avenue to Buchanan, along side of Duke’s East Campus, through Brightleaf Square, and down to Old Chapel Hill Road where The Cookery was ringed by food trucks, not the least of which was Pie Pushers, Durham’s latest addition and the dream of our friends Becky and Mike.
We were not far from the house when we met a woman walking an old black dog whom we could tell had been at the vet because on leg was shaved where he had had an IV. (Lola is sporting the same style right now.) The rest of the way down West Trinity took us past a plethora of pink dogwoods in full bloom, parents out walking with children, some people waiting at bus stops, and folks coming home from work. The turn on to Buchanan took us alongside the brick wall that rings the campus and past all kinds of walkers and runners making the loop. We crossed the tracks in Brightleaf and passed the houses along the lower part of Buchanan, some that have been restored and others still boarded up. One old house that we had looked at when we first moved to town was on the market again, still looking for the tenacious love that will help it heal.
When we got to The Cookery, we were preceded by a couple of hundred of our fellow citizens and four or five food trucks. I got my slice from Mike and Becky and Ginger and I both got a couple of “garlic knots” – Mike’s creation of a roasted garlic clove (with some cheese, or pesto, or sausage) wrapped in a lovely little blanket of pizza dough (his recipe) and baked. As we stood in line, we saw Sean from Fullsteam (one of our best community encouragers and damn good beer maker), Brian from Housing for New Hope, a couple Ginger knew from her exercise class, Derek (a photographer for the Indy), and then we met the folks from Berenbaums. They are a bakers who are just starting out and selling their wares at the Durham Farmer’s Market. Their cookies and cheddar biscuits (oh, my) are offered on a sliding scale: you pay what you can. The folks at Ninth Street Bakery, who are very established, are helping them get their start.
On the way home, we turned left on to Main Street when we got back to campus and looped around to Ninth Street so we could make a stop at Chubby’s Tacos for some chips and queso and a couple of frozen margaritas. On the way in we met a young woman wearing a Baylor t-shirt and she and I had a brief “Sic ‘em, Bears” moment. We walked home down Markham to Watts Street and back to Trinity. At about the same place where we had met the woman with her dog, we saw a man about a hundred yards in front of us who was having a fight with a plant, evidently, because he tore up the leaves and stomped on them and then punched at the air above them as they lay broken on the sidewalk. When he walked past us, he reeked of anger and he kept on going. We finished climbing the hill, and walked down out street and home to our waiting puppies.
“This feels like our town,” Ginger said somewhere on the way home.
I know. What’s this have to do with Jesus? Well, I drive up and down many of the same roads we walked this evening and I don’t get to see the detail. Someone honked and waved as we walked, but I couldn’t tell who it was. They drove on, and we stepped into the middle of our city. If Jesus had better technology, the gospels would have been much shorter and much less interesting.
Peace,
Milton
as I write, Ella,
our Schnauzer
is stretched out
on the bed barking
at the sound of
our neighbor rolling
his big trash cans
out to the curb
she cannot see him,
only hear the rumble
of the plastic wheels
and she is convinced
her sound makes a
difference even though
he doesn’t stop
rolling along and
no one inside
of our house has
made any move
other than to say,
“It’s the guy next door”
and I think about
my barking at the
two boys after lunch
who wouldn’t clear
the tables because
the trash wasn’t theirs
and I wonder if
Ella and I share
something in common
in our futile attempts
to get someone to
keep the world from
filling up with garbage
Peace,
Milton
The Fifth of April is an unusual first day of school, but today was just that for my students and me as we began our new chapter and sat down together for our first class in our new building. In each of my three English classes, we were also beginning novels. Here are their opening lines:
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
(I’ll post the book titles a bit later; see if you know them.)
Reading the first lines of novels always reminds me of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks for “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” The contest is named for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote this jewel before there even was a contest:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. (Paul Clifford, 1830)
In 2010, this sentence won the prize:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
Speaking of bad beginnings, as I write my beloved Red Sox, picked by many to win the AL East if not the World Series, lost another game, which means they are now 0-4 to begin the season. All of us good Sox fans are quick to lean into what the old song says, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”
In the middle of this first day – during my free period – I read Letters to One-Armed Poet, which is the wonderful work of my friend Nathan Brown chronicling his grief before and after the death of his dear friend and fellow poet, Jim Chastain. In a piece called “Walking Shadows,” Nathan writes,
And I’d’ve liked an ending more like Butch and Sundance –
revolvers firing and flashing as we strut and fret our way out into a certain, yet glorious death.
But the disease forced you to follow the script, even though none of the actors in the screenplay liked it.
So, we played our parts. . . planted our poems like literary landmines in the red dirt and brimstone of the Southwest . . . until . . . your hour upon the stage was up.
Sometimes the endings aren’t what we hoped either – and often for reasons beyond our reach.
Here’s a shout out to the middles.
Nathan quotes from Jim’s poem “Folding the Laundry” in another piece:
Today is the future
if tomorrow never comes.
Why not insist on
a few interesting moments
every
day?
We have moved far enough into Lent for Ash Wednesday to be a memory, yet Resurrection Morning is still several sunrises away. This is gut check time for me in my journaling: am I going to keep my promise to write every night? In this particular venture, I don’t get a shot at a make up. Either I wrote every night or I didn’t. Granted, there’s not a whole lot riding on my writing, other than my promise to God and to myself. Still, the exercise and discipline has far reaching implications, should I be willing to lean in and learn, or re-learn, I should say. Every beginning has a back story, every ending a trail of preparation. In the middle is what makes all the difference.
My friend Joy Jordan-Lake has a blog where she explores the writing process. Recently she wrote about Kate DiCamillo, who wrote Tale of Despereaux
If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.
One hour.
Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.
One hour. Two pages. Coffee.
After my new first day of school, I went to get my prescriptions refilled, got some milk at King’s Red and White, happened upon my friends Mike and Becky and their new “Pie Pushers” pizza truck and got to see what it looks like in person, and then picked up my father-in-law from the Senior Center where he goes during the day as his Alzheimer’s continues to disappear him a little at a time, and then came home to cook dinner. The day held beginnings and endings, pasts and pendings, hopes and hurts and home, like most any other day in the middle of my life as far as I know.
It was a good day.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. The novels are Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and The Great Gatsby.
allergies are never mentioned
in any of the gospel stories
no one called out to Jesus
to ask for sinus relief
even in the desert’s dust
with my head as stuffed
as a dorm dirty clothes bag
and aware of the gathering
pollen storm I understand
the question – who sinned that
this man should be this way?
Peace,
Milton