don't eat alone

I came across this post by Tim Suttle tonight over at The Huffington Post and, as I read down, found one of my favorite Annie Dillard quotes:

God asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. You do not have to do these things unless you want to know God. They work on you not on him … you do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

The quote stuck out to me because I had been thinking of it only a few minutes before as I stared at a blank page trying to figure out what to write. My thought process began with the news stories I saw today about the full moon being the biggest one we’ve seen in twenty years. That reminded me of Italo Calvino’s wonderfully odd collection of short stories called Cosmicomics. One story, “The Distance of the Moon,” recalled a time when the earth and moon came close enough every night for people to jump between them.

Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high that nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the moon was very, very low and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair;’s breadth; well, let’s say, a few yards anyway. Climb up to the Moon? Of course, we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder up to it and scramble up.

The story goes on in even more fantastical fashion. Ever since I first read it, I’ve wanted to write a song called, “Ladder to the Moon.” Calvino and Dillard both understand the value and importance of going out into the dark to see the light. I imagine Dillard’s words have shown up in any number of Lenten meditations since she first wrote them. On this Big Moon Weekend, I’m happy to hear them again.

The reason, however, that her words came to mind in the first place was because I was thinking differently about the dark. There is the dark we allow to envelop us like fading house lights in a grand theater so we can better see the stars and ourselves. There is also the dark that descends like weighted rain, that painfully surprises us, that isolates and discourages. These first few days of Lent this year have held more of the latter than the former. I have friends who are hurting and grieving, who are out in the dark and the stars appear to have abandoned them. All I know to do is keep calling their names so they know, at least, they are not alone.

A designated season of preparation in the darkness is one of our underappreciated luxuries. Those who walked and lived with Jesus didn’t know it was Lent. There was no Ash Wednesday. But there was darkness. Incomprehensible, alienating, devastating darkness. The closer Jesus got to the cross, the darker things became. They didn’t look at stars. They slept and wept at Gethsemane. They ran away. They betrayed. They denied. They grieved.

The disciples didn’t know the tomb would be empty as they watched Jesus die and then buried him. They shared the same sense of failure and loneliness I hear and see in my friends. None of them is without faith, but they are without relationships they had counted on to last. They are sitting in the dark, but not star-gazing. Though I’ve had my seasons where the darkness was crushing, this year the darkness is a backdrop to the stars. I’m well aware that I cannot change their circumstances, nor can fix much of anything. I can sit in the dark with them, as others did with me. If I don’t go out into the darkness, I won’t see the stars.

Neither will I find my friends who need to be found.

Peace,
Milton

— Albert Camus (quoted in Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light)

The beginning of pollen season is killing me here. I found the above quote as I was reading Dunn’s book and waiting until it was time to take my next Benadryl.

allergic reaction

allergies are anathema to thought
there is no room for rumination
in my mucus-muddled membranes
eyelids dropping like garage doors
nose clogged like a rush hour street
all of my ideas are weary immigrants
unsure of who can be trusted
to lead them to free expression
all I can tell them is show up again
tomorrow and the day after that
come back everyday until your
faithfulness acts as antihistamine
come back the morning after rain
or the evening of the first frost
the afternoon we plant vegetables
and the day that nothing happens
soon we will know each other well
enough to create between sneezes

Peace,
Milton

the lingering light of spring
loses to the descending dark
despite our best efforts to
hold the night at bay

(there’s no way around it)

the only way to daylight
is to live through till dawn
which all works fine until
I tell you this is metaphor

(it is a poem, after all)

the dark is undaunted
the dawn’s in no hurry
we’re going to hurt like this
for the rest of our lives

(is there any good news?)

we must answer slowly
as deliberately as snails
holding hearts and hurts
for as long as it stays dark

Peace,
Milton

One of the photographs of Jesus I keep
in the wallet of my mind is of him
looking out over Jerusalem.

The sun is burning the last bits of blue
out of the Palestinian sky as it sets,
making room for the night.

There is enough light to see the tears
running down his cheeks as he
talks about mother hens.

The gospel accounts would have me think
that I possess a one of a kind photo,
but — after a day like today

when I’ve sat with my friends and heard
the grief harbored in their hearts,
I begin to understand

it could have been taken on any one
of the nights he walked the earth,
at most any sunset.

Peace,
Milton

Today was a long day.

I watched as one of our students learned the very hard way that actions have consequences. Big consequences. In this case, they will have to find another school. The details are not my to tell, for both personal and professional reasons, other than to say they did serious enough damage to others with their words that it could be called a hate crime. I know, those are incendiary words, and may seem extreme as a label for what might have started out as a middle school prank. But the words were no joke and we, as a faculty, felt it mattered that we take what they did seriously and let the one who was attacked know they were not alone. It is a risky move for a small private school, and one that could have economic repercussions, and it was the right thing to do.

My Documentary Studies class and I finished watching Ghosts of Rwanda, a Frontline documentary produced ten years after the genocide ended in that country. 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by the Hutus, Rwanda’s larger ethnic group, in 100 days. That’s right: 100 days. (You can follow the timeline here.) The rest of the world let it happen. American and European planes came to get their citizens out. The UN pulled most all of their troops out after eight Belgian soldiers were killed. In the aftermath of all that had gone wrong in Somalia, President Clinton explained we would only intervene where we had a specific “national interest.” As with most of Africa, Rwanda didn’t qualify. For all our Holocaust memorials inscribed with “Never Again,” we sat back and watched it happen. I watched footage of State Department officials debating the definition of the word genocide so they could not be painted into a corner to have to act. When it was over, Western diplomats and government officials made their penitent journeys to the sites where so many had been brutally murdered, offered their empty regrets, and gathered around tables at the UN to talk about what they should have done. I have to say, if I were a citizen of most any African nation, I wouldn’t count on anyone showing up when it happens again. Diplomacy is about expediency rather that truth, when it gets right down to it.

As the evening draws to a close, I find myself back at the prayer of confession, and the line about forgiving us for the things we have left undone. Part of me reads those words and wants to take off on a bit of a rant to ask how we as Christians can sit silently while there are still people held without being charged at Guantanamo, while our immigration policy allows for people to be held in prisons without any civil rights or due process, while our government debates the definition of torture much as they did the definition of genocide to cover their actions, while we continue to cut programs to help the poor and hungry in our country while we continue to feed our military appetites. It’s a worthy rant and we need to be speaking up, yet it is not the word for tonight.

Both the middle schooler and the movie remind me, as a straight white Christian American male, that I’m at the top of The Privileged List. I’m the one Western civilization was cut to fit. I’m the one Western Christianity has catered to. And I am called by God to level things out. God loves me and the rest of the straight white guys, but God doesn’t love us more than anyone else. And God calls me and the rest of the straight white guys to incarnate that indiscriminate love in a way that costs us, a way that loosens our grip on power, a way that doesn’t feed on self-interest, a way that goes out to compel everyone to come to the table for the feast.

It’s too raw to say much more.

Peace,
Milton

The lectionary passage today was Matthew’s account of Jesus being tempted in the desert. In Reading Jesus, Mary Gordon talks about Jesus’ experience in the desert demonstrating how he was growing into who he was becoming, which stuck with me.

sunday sonnet #21

He had been forty days without food
when the Tempter showed up for the test;
this “messiah” was no match for shrewd —
he could cause him to crumble when pressed.

It didn’t end with the quest in the queries —
The temptations were not “three and done.”
Of integrity, Jesus could not grow weary
If Messiah was who he would become.

Jesus growing into his mission –
that’s the picture here painted in sand;
his strength calls to our own volition
to be true in each moment at hand.

Who we are is so easy to lose –
Everyday comes the call to re-choose.

Peace,
Milton

When I was youth minister at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas many years ago, I started thinking about Youth Camp around this time of year, beginning to work on a theme for the week and to recruit adults who wanted to go hang out with the kids for a week. I loved going to camp. Still do. One year, some of the kids said the hardest thing about the week was having to get up so early. They wished we could flip the schedule around so that we were up all night and slept all day. So we did – at least figuratively. We reset all the clocks in the camp and rewrote the schedule so that breakfast was served around noon, according to the schedule, and the day went on from there. In actuality, things happened in the same part of the day as they always had, but we just decided what time it was. After a day or two, we believed the schedule we had created was true and we had a great week, until I got home and couldn’t figure out what time it was.

I think about that week most every year on this night because “springing forward” into Daylight Saving Time is basically doing what we did at camp on a national scale: we just decide what time we want it to be and go from there. Tomorrow the sun will go down an hour later than it did today not because the sun did anything different, but because we decided to make it an hour later. I heard parts of an interview on NPR with Howard Mansfield who has written a book called Turn and Jump: How Time & Place Fell Apart and thinks Daylight Saving Time undermines our understanding of time:

Daylight Saving Time is like sitting in a room and listening to that gap between the two clocks go. We’ve all agreed. We’ve all accepted the clock is the truth. We always just want to get on with our day. And all of sudden we’re changing it back and forward. And it’s like saying the inch is going to be one length in winter and the inch will be another length in the summer. So wait a minute. So now we’re forced back to say, well, what is time? What is really time? And we don’t know. And it’s just as if we – OK – we all agreed that this is what 6 o’clock looks like and then we change that. It’s unsettling.

Now I hear Chicago singing in my head,

does anybody really know what time it is
does anybody really care

What Mansfield went on to say was we are at a loss because time has become disconnected from place. People used to know it was noon because the sun was overhead. Now, we don’t even walk to the window. We just look at our clocks or watches or smart phones. The clocks keep time and time holds us hostage.

One of the things I remember about growing up in Africa is how differently the people there thought about time. Take church, for instance. In most every church I’ve been a part of in America, worship is on the clock. If we go over an hour (or whatever the designated length is supposed to be), then we’ve shattered the sacred schedule. I remember one Sunday in high school when my father took some time at the end of the service to honor one of our youth sports teams. It was after twelve o’clock and people were restless. They were losing their place wherever they had planned to go for lunch. They were missing the first quarter of the football game. Dad recognized their disquietude and said, “Quit looking at your watches. Ten years from now you won’t remember what time we got out of church today but these kids will remember we took time to say we were proud of them.”

The people got quiet, but I don’t think he convinced them to change their perspective.

In the African churches, the service started when we all got there and it finished when, well, we were finished. The point was not to keep time, or even tell time, but to spend it. Together. If we sang for an hour while the crowd gathered, what mattered most was the singing and the gathering, not the ticking of the clock.

We do our best work with time in the church when we think in spans of time rather than in seconds. This season of Lent is a good example of finding the time that matters. We mark time by the events in Jesus’ life, by the places in scripture where he walked and talked and healed, and then we make of it a season, a time of year where we can expect thin places to encounter the Spirit much like we expect the blossoms on the fruit trees that are harbingers of harvest. Maybe we should give up clocks for Lent.

One of my favorite time phrases in the gospels speaks of Jesus’ birth and says he was born “when the days were accomplished,” which is a wonderful and poetic way to say when the moment was ripe. In these days, when a woman is pregnant beyond her “due date” (according to the calendar), we think the baby is late, as though the kid missed his or her birthday instead of seeing things happening all in good time.

Daylight Saving Time would make a good band name, but the true time of our lives is not marked in minutes or saved by daylight. Renaming the hours will not help the days accomplish anything. The apostle Paul talked about “redeeming the time” and making the most of our days. In that light, Lent becomes a way for us to save time from the arbitrary arrogance of the schedule and what Mark Heard so eloquently called “the curse of the second hand.”

so we nod over coffee and say goodbye
bolt the door it’s time to go
into the car with the radio on
roll down the window and blow the horn

ain’t that the curse of the second hand
ain’t that the way of the hour and the day

Come, let us take time and spread it out like a blanket; let us make time like we make bread, giving it room to rise to its fullness; let us tell time we are here just as we would tell a friend we had arrived for dinner and had come to stay until it was time to go.

Peace,
Milton

“It is finished,” Jesus said, and then (according to old King James) he gave up the ghost.

I know I’m getting ahead of myself, as far as Lent goes, but unfinished things have been on my mind and I find myself looking at that sentence once again. Like any pronoun that begins a sentence, it begs for an antecedent. What, exactly, is finished? Did he mean his life was over? That’s about all that actually ended in that moment. Perhaps he meant he was finished with what he came to do, though he didn’t exactly tie up all the loose ends on his way out. Those who write commentaries and such often look for a more abstract antecedent and some grander theological theme. Bill Gaither wrote a rather moving gospel song, putting the quote to music:

it is finished the battle is over
it is finished there’ll be no more war
it is finished the end of all conflict
it is finished and Jesus is lord

The song builds to a glorious crescendo yet, for all the song’s certainty, the antecedent still lies unexplained, or at least not explained enough. If Jesus was speaking in some cosmic sense, as the song suggests, he was leaning into the future. Even now, two thousand years later, what was supposed to be finished ain’t done just yet. As we walk this Lenten road to the Cross once again, part of the reason is we are living out an unfinished faith: everything was not completed at Calvary, or even at Easter. Such is the nature of our faith, which thrives more in its questions than it’s answers, which takes root in relationships rather than in concrete certainty.

Last week, Elvis Costello wrote a review of Paul Simon’s upcoming record, So Beautiful or So What. The essay is actually going to be the liner notes for the album. He says of Simon’s songwriting:

These days it might court shallow mockery to sing so openly of our humanity, mortality and divinity but not with music to make these themes fly or words containing such wit, grace and humility.

The musical shapes and shades arrive from all over the world and back in time to illuminate the heartfelt intelligence of the writer.

Central to the picture is Paul’s vivid singing and own beautiful guitar playing – which doesn’t always get full measure in the shadow of his writing.

Throughout the record, I kept coming up against what I can only call, rock and roll surprises; not some orthodox formula but indelible, hypnotic guitar motifs and swinging, off-center rhythms tipping your expectations into a new kind of thrill.

After over fifty years of songwriting, Paul Simon is unfinished, and doing some of his best work. Costello provides a link to a song off the new record called “Waiting for Christmas Day” (now I am getting ahead of myself) that I am willing to predict will show up as a part of Advent in many churches. But it’s Costello’s description that grabs me tonight and how he spoke of “rock and roll surprises:” not some orthodox formula but indelible . . . off-center rhythms tipping your expectations into a new kind of thrill.

Into the unfinished.

Every so often in Christian circles, someone writes a book that becomes a lightning rod and a litmus test and the best new thing and the reason God is going to destroy the earth all in one volume. This week, it’s Rob Bell and his new book that questions the reality of Hell and whether or not God is going to send anyone there even if there is one. First of all, I’m not trying to critique the book here because I haven’t read it. Second, I’m not sure I understand why it would be so terrible for God to throw open the doors and yell, “All ye, all ye, oxen free.” Third, neither of those is my point. I wish we could work out our faith and theology together with the same mind that is in Elvis Costello, willing to be surprised, to have our expectations tipped, to be thrilled by the off-center riffs of the rhythm of our God.

The story of God we have so far is one of God showing up in unexpected places from making Sarah laugh to singeing Moses’ expectations in the burning bush, to meeting Elijah in the silence and the Israelites in the manna, to being born in a barn, to lighting Paul up on the road to Damascus, to letting Tom Waits write songs, to speaking through Rob Bell and Elvis Costello.

And God is not finished.

God is not finished breaking down barriers, calling us to new understanding, breaking out hearts and healing them, opening our eyes, blowing the doors off of our theological cages, or letting us get comfortable thinking we’re finished working out our faith and can coast from here on in. There is more light yet to break forth.

It is not finished. And that’s good news.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — Here’s a little Simon for your soul.

One of the informal rituals of our marriage is Ginger asking me, usually apropos of nothing, “Give me three reasons why you love me.” And I do. I have a long list; this is not a difficult challenge. Sometimes, she rephrases the question: “Why did you want to marry me?” Again, easy answer, which is some variation on, “I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you.” We had not known each other long before I knew, whatever direction life was going to take, it mattered that I was with her rather than without her. I was not necessarily enamored of marriage, but I wanted to be married to her. From there, the last two decades have been about taking as many opportunities as I can find to say that over and over. I’m married to Ginger not because I don’t want to be alone, but because I want to be with her.

In a couple of weeks, our quirky little city is hosting an event called “Marry Durham,” playing off of the old playground taunt, “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” The organizers are invited to show their love for the Bull City by pledging their vows in the street between Motorco and Fullsteam, surrounded by food trucks, with the mayor there to stand up for them, Wool E. Bull (the Durham Bulls’ mascot) as “Best Bull,” and the proceeds from the event going to charities that work with those in our number who are struggling to survive for a number of reasons. As Spring officially begins, we will participate in a mass wedding that should make Rev. Moon curious, if not envious, all in fun and intentional articulation of what it means to live together in community.

Last night in our Ash Wednesday service, I was moved by the invitation to confession we said together:

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to struggle against everything that leads us away from the love of God and neighbor. Repentance, fasting, prayer, study, and works of love help us return to that love. We are invited, therefore, to commit ourselves to love God and neighbor by confessing our sin and by asking God for strength to persevere in our Lenten discipline.

We are called to struggle against everything that leads us away from love – from life together. We are called to intentionally work toward everything that galvanizes us that tightens the ties that bind, that reminds us life is a team sport, not an individual event.

One of the prayers of confession to which I continue to return is in the Book of Common Prayer. I go back there because of the particular phrase that asks forgiveness for “the things we have done and the things we have left undone.” In the call to do all we can to love one another and live together, often our omissions are those things that cause the cracks to appear, allowing us to drift apart without realizing what we have set in motion. Yes, we can and do inflict damage by what we do and say, still it seems what gets left undone soon becomes forgotten and paved over by life’s other demands, burying necessary relationships like ancient cities under the dust and layers of modern life.

Christine Lavin has an old song called “The Moment Slipped Away” in which she describes missed opportunities where she left things undone – small, significant chances – leaving both her and the person left unencountered lost in the wake of what might have been. In gestures both small and large, what we leave undone opens a gap that gets filled with something other than love. Consistent, intentional, determined, tenacious love that leaves no stone unturned puts the solid back in solidarity.

Jesus knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane to pray just before he was arrested for the last time and he prayed, “Make them one.” Not keep them safe or let them win or make them rich and powerful. Make them one. He knew what we all learn rather quickly as we grow up: the forces of life are fragmenting. We are pushed apart and pulled away from each other. We learn to blame and to betray. We learn to look out for Number One. We learn we can’t take care of everyone, so we have to take care of ourselves. Not long before he prayed, Jesus sat with his disciples around the table and, as he served them bread, he said, “Every time you do this, remember me.” What if we could hear those words as an invitation to communion and community in every meal, in every cup of coffee, in every beer at the pub: every time you eat and drink, look each other in the eye and remember me, remember the love that binds you and do whatever you have to do to forget the lies you have learned that tear you apart.

The point of life is not to be right, or safe, or famous, comfortable, or rich, or powerful. None of those is a sign of success or God’s favor or significance, particularly when our power and wealth and safety require someone else to be poor and weak and scared. The point of life is to be together. To love one another – all the one anothers – and to struggle against everything that leads us away from that love.

Peace,
Milton

Ash Wednesday showed up early for me this year because I was given the chance, thanks to my friends Lori and Terry, to hear Garrison Keillor tell stories. Though I have listened to him on the radio for thirty years, I’ve never heard him live. Monday, he showed up unadorned, without any of his Prairie Home Companion peeps or props, without even an introduction. Promptly at 7:30, he strode onto the stage wearing dark pants, a sports jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie that matched both his red socks and red sneakers, and he began to chant. That’s the best way I can describe it. He told a story with the cadence and melody of a priest inviting congregants to the Eucharist, his rhyme and humor calling us into community. Then, for a little over two hours, he talked of family, faith, love, death, and sex in a more intimate and vulnerable way than I had ever heard him on any of those many nights when he began his tale with, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown . . . “ – a phrase he never uttered in our time together.

Through the course of the evening, he invited a bluegrass singer to join him on stage, and for us to join them in song: Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “It Is Well With My Soul,” and, to close the evening, “Angel Band.” Our voices provided the connecting soundtrack to his stories, which eloquently told how he got from there to here: from childhood to writer, from “sanctified Brethren” to Episcopalian, from son to father, from wherever he was before to our Monday night in Durham, reminding me again of the power and purpose of ritual, or sacred road markers like Ash Wednesday and Lent and Communion that call us to ask and answer the question David Byrne asked best: “Well – how did I get here?”

“We tell two kinds of stories,” Keillor said. “We either tell bragging stories to show we’re better than everyone else, or we tell stories of confession, which are, I suppose, a kind of ostentatious humility to show we’re more honest than everyone else.” From there he meandered into a maze of faith and family, both confessional seed beds, I suppose, commenting almost in passing that Christianity “is a religion of failure.”

With those words it became Ash Monday: Lent began for me.

In the jargon of my students, Lent might be renamed “Epic Fail” – the season of coming up short, the season of stark reality, and the season of forgiveness because it is in failure that both our compassion and redemption take root.

Yes, I know God is both great and good. Yes, I trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Yes, I know we are only weeks away from that Great Resurrection Morning when the stone gets rolled away and up from the grave he will arise to show that Death is not the final punctuation mark on the sentence that is our human existence. Even though Death has lost its sting, our story – all the way to that Land To Which We Go – is marked, quite indelibly, by failure. The tenacious love of God calls us to faithfulness, not success. Jesus bent down to wash the feet of the disciples because, John says, he knew “he had come from God and was going to God, not because it was all a brilliant strategy for success and conquest.

The disciples left the Upper Room and failed epically in the hours that followed their gathering only to find themselves still in the circle, still called, and still loved. For the rest of their lives, they did their best work when they simply told that story. The same holds true for us. We do our best work for and with one another when we tell and listen to our stories – and that thought takes me to familiar words worth repeating: Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As Keillor differentiated between the bragging stories and the confessional ones, he said the confessional stories were the ones you could count on to be “mostly true.” When we come to the place, however we get there, that we share our despair in order to find one another and remind one another we cannot run out of or away from the love of God, we are true – even in our failure. In the longings and the losings of life we come back again and again to stones we have stacked up and songs we can sing together.

when peace like a river attendeth my way
when sorrows like sea billows roll
whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
it is well it is well with my soul


I’m gonna love you
till the wheels come off
oh yeah

I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
ever since I put your picture in a frame

We are not beginning a sojourn to success. When we get to Easter morning, or any other day for that matter, we will still be people of constant failure. Jesus didn’t come out of the tomb to take his place on the medal stand. He went to the beach and made breakfast for his bleary-eyed followers who had failed, once again. He loved them and he fed them. And he told them stories.

May we go and do likewise.

Peace,
Milton