It has rained all day
what snow was left has lost
its frozen self in the moisture
saturating the soil at every step
I am walking down to my car
with questions lining up like
sparrows on the lines of my mind
waiting for you to answer
as you do most every afternoon
when I call to say I am walking
and you smile into the phone
and you say my name
which matters on any afternoon
though today the sparrows are
thick as thieves I am cold and
it has rained all day
Peace,
Milton
I love being married to a good preacher.
Sunday, she knocked it out of the park – or at least knocked me around a little bit, prophetically speaking. My musings tonight owe much to what she had to say yesterday.
I knew going in to church that her sermon was based on the Luke 5 passage where Jesus first gave fishing advice to the guys in the boat and then called them to drop what they were doing and follow him and “fish for people” instead. I don’t know the lectionary by heart, so I didn’t know the Old Testament reading was another favorite – Isaiah 6 – that begins with the sentence, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” The verse intrigues me because of a sermon I heard many years ago (I cannot remember the preacher) that challenged me to see the sentence as more than a marker in time. Isaiah wasn’t describing a chronological coincidence; he was making a statement of cause: something about the death of the king opened his eyes. Though I hold no attachment to any dead royalty, something about the circumstances of my life right now brought me to the same sense of sight. These are days that rumble with the distant thunder of change.
Ginger then invoked a third voice that made for a formidable trinity (small t, but powerful nonetheless): Annie Dillard, with this quote from The Writing Life
The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years; attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.
From there, Ginger went on to paint the scene at the shore: Jesus calling out to the fruitless fishermen to drop their nets on the other side of the boat, they can hardly get to shore with their oversized catch, and then he says, “Leave your nets (yes, that would be the ones filled with fish), follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people.”
Growing up Southern Baptist, I was taught this story was about evangelism, hook, line, and sinker. Jesus calls us all to catch people and reel them in. Fair enough. But Ginger took a step back from the whole fishing metaphor to look at what Jesus asked the disciples to do, which was, in Annie Dillard’s terms, knock out a load bearing wall. Fishing in Galilee was lousy work. I would imagine it was a career you were born into, rather than being a chosen profession. You went out everyday in your little boat (read that literally) and took your chances, unsure of the fish, the nasty little sea, and the storms. I suppose Jesus could have gotten them to follow quite easily had he asked when the nets were still empty at the end of a long night: “Your life sucks; come with me.” But he showed them what it felt like to come in with all the fish sticks Mrs. Paul could have wanted and then said, “Leave your nets and come on.”
He called them to courage: come and see.
I know my sense of God’s presence has been heightened by the courageous moves my friend Gordon has made over the past couple of weeks. He has heard Jesus’ call and he has answered. After twenty years, yesterday was his last day as pastor of his church. He resigned to see what God has next for him. He’s knocked down most every wall around him. I am proud of and challenged by my friend.
Annie Dillard is actually talking about writing as she uses the metaphor of home deconstruction, the idea being that you can’t get too tied to any one sentence or paragraph. You have to be willing to lose them all and start over. Another writing book I read years ago suggested, when it came to rewriting and editing, to find the sentence you loved best in what you had written and discarding it to prove to yourself nothing you had written was sacrosanct. They’re right, unfortunately. Of course the other side of the page is being so self-critical that none of it feels worth keeping and you become paralyzed by even the smallest thing, unable to see beyond the minutiae that fill the page.
When it comes to writing/telling/living our life stories, the metaphor works fairly well. We have certain things about our lives that we cannot imagine doing without, and some of them are things we shouldn’t discard. I have no intention, for instance, of spending my life any other way than married to the aforementioned great preacher. Beyond our defining covenants, though, we are called to be willing to leave our nets, to pull down the house, to do what it takes to go when God calls. In that year that King Uzziah died, the passage ends with Isaiah answering, “Here am I, Lord; send me.” We cannot let ourselves become so convinced that we are living our best life that we are not willing to see what else God might have for us. And we have to find a way to an “Uzziah moment” when the despairing details of life pull us to a place where we see only empty nets and long nights and have no ears for those calling from the shore.
The other piece to Ginger’s sermon had to do with the four young African-American men who walked into the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina and sat down to be served at the all-white lunch counter, sparking a national sit-in movement. That happened fifty years ago this past week. The anniversary was marked by the opening of the International Civil Rights institute and Museum in the now renovated Woolworth’s building, and a group from our church drove up there after services yesterday. I had to work, but I did hear a piece on the radio that included interviews with a couple of the men. I was taken by this clip:
“We were totally exhausted,” he said, spending time—as college students always have—discussing “society in general, specifically people we loved and admired.” They gave their parents a hard time “because of what we thought they had not done.” The young men couldn’t understand how they could live with segregation. “To us, that didn’t make sense. Why not do something about it?”
Then they realized they were judging the wrong people. “Our parents didn’t do so badly; after all, look at us. All these months we had been talking and giving our parents hell,” he remembered. And with all the opportunity in the world, “I haven’t done one thing.” To walk away would be irresponsible.
And the walls came tumbling down.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m rehashing the sermon because I need to hear it again. I can hear the voice and I’m trying to figure out which wall needs to go, and praying for the courage to knock it out and the sense to duck.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — There’s a new recipe.
take the umbrella,
she said
but I was not going
to be
gone for long and I
don’t mind
getting a little wet
I dry
off rather quickly
the rain lasted most
all day
a background of soft
applause
to a thoughtful day
and I
must say I concur
there aren’t many days
like this
when hope clings to me
like rain
and love runs freely
like rain
in a storm of thanks
Peace,
Milton
I’m watching midnight come and go
the same way I do most nights,
sitting at the keyboard with a glass
of wine wondering what to write
and listening to some old friend
sing me into the solitude that
sows some sort of word play.
some nights I know the very song
I want to hear, but then some
send me searching for just the right mix
of moment and memory that
lets the words start wandering
into shape and sequence singing
in harmony, I suppose
because though the house is quiet
and I am the only one awake
I rarely think of myself writing
alone; I am panning for words
on the banks with anyone
who would find simple words and
polish them into brilliance
by listening and learning from
those who have panned and penned
already, because they show how to
line up words in ways that break
open hearts in ten words or less:
I was taken by a photograph of you
how did you do that, Jackson?
Peace,
Milton
*the lyric is from “Fountain of Sorrow” by Jackson Browne.
I was getting ready for work yesterday morning when I heard the teaser on NPR about a story to play that afternoon asking, “Why does time fly when you get older?” I smiled, one, because I knew I would have to find the story later to hear what they said (I don’t get to listen at work), and, two, because I have my own working theory. I’ll start with the latter.
When you’re four years old and summer seems to last forever and birthdays take forever to arrive, time moves slowly because each year is such a significant fraction of life as a whole: at four, a year is a quarter of your existence. When you’re, say, fifty-three (as I am), that same year is one fifty-third of your total life – a much smaller fraction – and that year flies by. I think it also makes a difference that a four year old has the afternoon to chase butterflies and play in the yard (though today’s four year olds appear to be much more tightly scheduled, I’ll admit) and the days at fifty-three are pretty full. I had a prep list that made my afternoon move along quite briskly, thank you.
When I got home tonight and had a chance to read the story on the NPR website, I was pleased to see that my theory of how time flies made the short list, along with a couple of other ways of explaining how we understand and remember the days we live through, which were all very interesting. There’s another reason time appears to be gaining speed, or perhaps even gaining ground, that the article didn’t mention: death. At four, and for several years afterwards, life is an unending prospect, therefore any sense of having to keep time is way down the list. Everyday feels like it lasts forever because you feel like you’re going to last forever. Again, at fifty-three, not so much. And I’m not just talking about aging.
My friend David has been gone a little over a month now. For whatever reasons, Facebook keeps inviting me to reconnect with him, which I would love to do and I have even written on his page in the last week, but the truth is I can’t. I’m out of time. Time feels shorter because I ran out of it with him. Davy died too soon, yet I am aware I am entering a phase of life where saying goodbye to friends is going to become part of the fabric of my existence with greater consistency, and I’m left wondering how time could pass so quickly as to bring us to a closing scene.
My reading of Genesis has lead me to think of Eden as Paradise partly because there were no clocks. Time was not an issue. God came and walked with them in the cool of the evening and it didn’t really matter what day it was, only that it was time to walk. Sunrise brought a new day, sunset brought a new night, each one a link in a chain of eternal possibilities. The serpent promised the fruit would give Adam and Eve knowledge and what they learned was how to tell time. Well, they learned they couldn’t tell time anything; they learned how to tell time was passing. When Cain murdered his brother and death became part of the picture, it was time for a calendar: what day it was mattered because there weren’t that many of them.
Yet, if we only think of time as the string of moments that take us from Beginning to End, we’re not getting the whole picture. When we talk about light, we can describe it as both a particle and a beam, a point and a progression. Both things are true, though we aren’t capable of seeing both things at once. Time, I think, is much the same. It is a particular moment, a sequence of events, a span of emptiness, a culmination of a lifetime, a river of existence, a circle of gratitude. Perhaps time passes more quickly as we age because we begin to understand more of what it is, more of the layers of our lives.
Then again, perhaps it passes more quickly because we begin to see how little we understand. Look at the verbs we use: we tell, take, make, spend, waste, save, do, have, lose, mark, and keep time, to name a few. Still, our predominant perspective is one of a ticking clock: we are on a limited schedule; time is running out. I’ve been reminded this week of the old gospel songs about heaven because I’ve been immersed in Patty Griffin’s new gospel record, Downtown Church
I have heard of a land on the faraway strand
’tis a beautiful home of the soul
built by Jesus on high, where we never shall die
’tis a land where we never grow old
never grow old, never grow old
in a land where we’ll never grow old
never grow old, never grow old
in a land where we’ll never grow old
Many of those old heaven songs grew out of the first twenty or thirty years of the last decade, during The Great War and The Great Depression. I’ve mostly thought of them as escapist, but tonight, as I try once more to understand time, I wonder if I have sold them short. Instead of wanting out of this world, perhaps they see time as a dimension, a layer of life, that is clouded by clocks in this phase of our existence. What eternity offers is a return, or better a restoration, of time in its wholeness, meant to be something full of possibilities rather than being relegated to regulating how close we are to death. OK, so that was a little esoteric. My point is we are not held hostage by the clocks counting down to this life, as we know it, coming to an end. Yes, the limits and obligations of our existence are real, but they are not the final word. One day we will get to a place where we know the four year old’s endless afternoon was truer than our sense of impending doom. What Jesus defeated on the cross was death, which means clocks don’t count when it all is said and done, and life is too short to be consumed with what’s next on the schedule.
Peace,
Milton
Since we can’t get to church this morning because of the snow and ice, I’ve put together a service of poems, songs, and a film clip. So, having gathered, let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Our call to worship is “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver.
Every morningthe worldis created.Under the orangesticks of the sunthe heapedashes of the nightturn into leaves againand fasten themselves to the high branches —and the ponds appearlike black clothon which are painted islandsof summer lilies.If it is your natureto be happyyou will swim away along the soft trailsfor hours, your imaginationalighting everywhere.And if your spiritcarries within itthe thornthat is heavier than lead —if it’s all you can doto keep on trudging —there is stillsomewhere deep within youa beast shouting that the earthis exactly what it wanted —each pond with its blazing liliesis a prayer heard and answeredlavishly,every morning,whether or notyou have ever dared to be happy,whether or notyou have ever dared to pray.
Julie Miller will now lead our time of confession: “Broken Things.”
Our first reading is “Poem” by Mary Oliver.
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morningin the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would ratherplumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinctand imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
Our second hymn will be led by Emmylou Harris and Robert Duvall: “I Love to Tell the Story.”
Our second reading is “Thanks” by W. S. Merwin.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank youwith the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
Let us now come together for Communion.
The Gatlin Brothers will offer our closing hymn.
Let us go out with joy as Lyle Lovett and his Large Band offer the postlude.
Go in peace, live in grace, trust in the arms that will hold you.
Peace,
Milton
for Ginger
It doesn’t matter how long it has been.
Most any night, I can pick up my guitar
and my fingers will find their way to fret
and strings, and my voice meet the melody,
so familiar: “People smile and tell me
I’m the lucky one . . .”
The picking pattern is muscle memory,
which is my working metaphor this evening,
twenty-one years on since the first time
I saw you (I had my guitar then, too) and
we just began what has become a lifetime
of love together . . .
So even though we ain’t got money,
I am still so in love with you; I’ve learned love
from you, with you. The song and dance
of togetherness moves my heart in ways
as familiar and surprising as an old
friend of a love song . . .
You’re the girl who holds the world,
as you hold my heart, with tenacity
and tenderness, the one who is home,
who finds me in the morning as we rise
(you can sing along) and tells me
everything’s gonna be alright.
Peace,
Milton
It’s been close to ten years since I taught high school English, and yet this week I’ve had two occasions to go back to the Reading List and two occasions to mention Robert Burns. Three nights ago, I wrote about Of Mice and Men, thanks to Burns’ Night. Now, just three nights later, I am stopping to say thanks and farewell to J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye
Holden: “You know that song, ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’?…”
Phoebe: “It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!… It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”
Phoebe is Holden’s little sister, and an awesome person at that. Their discussion leads to one of Holden’s most honest moments, when he talks about what kind of seed the misunderstood line had planted in his heart:
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
I have loved the image since the first time I read it, and I think I love it more because its built on a misunderstanding. Here’s this kid in Manhattan who had no idea what a field of rye wheat looked like, much less why anybody would be coming through it, but he gets captured by the verb caught, the verb that wasn’t there, and all of a sudden what compels him most is saving the children from running to the end of their childhood. All he could imagine was catching them before they fell.
It seems fitting, then, that Ray Kinsella kidnapped Salinger in Shoeless Joe
The first class with whom I read the book was a tenth grade class in Winchester. Every class is a bit of a dice roll, when it comes to the group personality that developed, and this one began as a lovely collection of misfits, in a way, and became one of my favorite collections of students of any year I taught. There were Pat and Phil, two friends. Pat was extremely depressed and Phil was a big Labrador of a kid who loved life and cared for his friend. Pat got out of high school because Phil cared for and about him. Brigid was as free as free spirits come (still is, I’m sure) and dove into the book with as much enthusiasm as she had when she led the class in celebrating Rex Manning Day. And celebrate we did. I think all three of them, in one way or another, recognized parts of themselves in Holden. Me, too.
I don’t know what made Salinger become such a recluse, but it does create rather amazing irony that an almost hermit-like author could give birth to such a people magnet of a character. Salinger didn’t really want to meet or catch anyone coming through the rye, or even the door; to Holden, it was all that mattered.
If Howard Zinn worked to speak for the common people and tell their stories, then Salinger stumbled into speaking for American adolescence. I say stumbled, because I imagine that’s how he came upon Holden: he met a young man coming through the rye and decided to tell his story. Burns was the bridge between them.
Tonight, I am grateful for a man willing to listen long enough to hear a mistake underneath the lines of a poem, and to let that mistake give birth to a character that will now out live him for years and years to come, and continue to catch us before we fall over the cliff.
These are hard goodbyes to say to Zinn and Salinger. I never met either one, yet our chance meetings on the page caught me by the heart.
Thank you.
Peace,
Milton
After a busy night at the Duke restaurant, I went over to watch what was left of the State of the Union address with friends at the same house where we had gathered to watch the debates and the election night returns, which meant I was even later than usual getting home. When I got to my email, I found an alert telling me that Howard Zinn died today, at the age of 89. That he died on the day of the State of the Union seems somehow fitting.
I first learned of Howard Zinn through his book, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present
Howard Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants, fought in World War II, taught at Spelman College, was active in both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (alongside Daniel Berrigan): he was a man of passion, action, and deep resolve. He criticized his country because he deeply loved it. I love this description of Zinn by James Carroll:
Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream, but above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful.
And that is why I’m taking time to notice that one of our most passionately burning lights has gone out: I have been inspired by his dedication, tenacity, and compassion, regardless of whether or not I agreed with him on a particular point. He was a man who trusted people, ordinary people, to grow and change. He is one who knew how to speak truth to power without becoming bitter or superior or cynical. Here he is, recently, talking with Bill Moyers.
Thanks, Howard.
Peace,
Mlton
Tonight is Burns’ Night.
Two hundred and fifty one years ago, on this night, the Scottish poet Robert Burns was born. Though I have a wee bit o’ Scottish blood in me, I’ve never been an avid celebrator of the anniversary, which Garrison Keillor describes as an evening when, “They read Burns’ poems, sing his songs, eat haggis, and drink lots of whiskey.” Alas, the only whiskey in my house is Bushmills.
Burns stays with me for a different reason. As one who taught ninth grade English for a decade, I’ve read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley
which is often paraphrased in English as, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
You may not remember much about the book. The fact is George and Lennie never had really big plans. Lennie was mentally disabled and looked at life with brutal simplicity. If George had had plans before Lennie, he had already laid them aside to take care of his friend. When they did talk about schemes, they had to do with saving money to get a place together, a dream that hangs in front of them until the very last scene of the novella. George explains it this way, when Lennie coaxes him to tell how they are different from the other guys working alongside them.
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. . . . With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.
What ultimately shapes us are not the plans we make, but the people we choose. I thought again today about the anniversary party I went to the other night. Though some attention was given to the various positions Rev. Cheek had held during his forty year ministry at his church, the stories that mattered were told by family and friends about family and friends, the laughter was as deep and resonant as the love that filled the room. Burns was right: the best laid plans won’t work out, mostly. What gives life its meaning are not our successes, for the most part, but those with whom we chose to share the failures, as well as the fun times. We call them our life stories, after all, not our life maps.
Here’s something Steinbeck wrote in his journal about a year after he published Of Mice and Men:
In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men; if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.
If I think of my life in terms of plans, and plans gang aft agley, it makes about as much sense as a street map of downtown Boston. I’ve gone from being a pastor to a chaplain to a youth minister to a high school English teacher to a chef, with a couple of detours here and there. I’ve not gotten rich, to say the least. If life is some sort of distinguishable path, I’m hard pressed to show mine as a success. The good news is I don’t think of life that way. Life, to use a borrowed phrase, is a journey without maps. We have to pay attention to the people around us in order to find our way.
Every chapter of my life has been filled with those who have offered love and encouragement far more profound than I have deserved, as well as forgiveness. As we close in on twenty years of marriage (this April!), I feel more than ever what I have said before: whatever any kind of final judgment may look like, I believe simply saying, “I was with her,” will be enough to validate my existence, for she is the love of my life.
I have had plans along the way; I still have some. To this point, none of them has worked out as I either hoped or expected. Still, I spent the evening cooking with Abel and Arnaldo and came home to Ginger and the Schnauzers, so I understand exactly what George was saying: I got a future because somebody gives a damn about me.
Peace,
Milton
