Ginger and I leave in the morning to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary on the twenty-first, and we’re going to do it in New Orleans, thanks to our friend Jay. So I offer a little traveling music, that is to say, some of the songs we’ve carried with us in our wonderful journey so far.
Baby, it’s you.
Peace,
Milton
adjectives attach like
grammatical barnacles
explanatory sidecars
directing distinctions
guitars didn’t need them
until someone found
a Fender and plugged in
so we pulled out
acoustic and electric
to state the obvious
writing goes back
as far as the stories
and then one day some
scheduler needed a name
for a course and wrote
Creative Writing
legitimizing the mundane
and discounting words
it’s all creating whether
writing of stars or stones
Peace,
Milton
I have to admit I didn’t know it was a hymn the first time I heard it.
I was in tenth grade, living in Fort Worth, Texas during our year of leave from the mission field (as they used to say) and completely taken with American popular radio. It was the year of “American Pie” and “I’ll Take You There,” and “Morning Has Broken.” By the time I knew it was a hymn, it had also become the wake up music for any number of youth camps, beginning (for me, anyway) with First Baptist Richardson at Camp Ozark when Gene Wilkes and I would do a less than reverent, but nonetheless sacred version to call the young campers out into the day we had planned for them.
Our version broke morning wide open, I must say.
Last Sunday morning, the hymn broke in on me as I sat among our faithful to hear the first of the “Stories of Resurrection” we had been promised on the Sundays from Easter to Pentecost. We’re going off lectionary to look at particular stories both in scripture and in the world around us here in Durham. This week it was the Gospel According to Housing For New Hope, an amazing organization here that reaches out to homeless folks with tenacity and redemption. Three people told their stories and two others sang in between tales, ending with Terry, the founder and a church member and the best damn harmonica player I know, calling us all home with a medley of “Precious Lord” and “O When the Saints Go Marching In.”
And just before they began telling their stories we sang,
morning has broken like the first morning
blackbird has spoken like the first bird
praise for the singing praise for the morning
praise for them springing fresh from the word
It was also just after Suzanne, one of our church members who is a member of the Biblical Storytellers, delivered the story of Jesus and Peter at breakfast from memory and with meaning. The story is one of my favorites from the gospels. Peter, still despondent from his failure in the courtyard, had been fishing all night with his friends when Jesus called out to them from the shoreline. When Peter realized who was calling, he shucked whatever clothing he had and swam to shore, coming up in need of a robe and redemption, and probably in that order.
With the scene in my head as we began singing, I jotted down,
morning has broken
broken open –
like an egg
or heart
broken through
like a prisoner
or a prayer
darkness falls
but morning breaks
Peter at breakfast
broke like the morning
“yes, Lord, you know
I love you”
every day we live
is broken
before it starts
About the time I finished scribbling, we got to the third verse:
mine is the sunlight mine is the morning
born of the one light eden saw play
praise with elation praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day
When Cat Steven’s sings it, he pronounces the second word in the final line with a short e, the way we say the word when we mean something we do for fun rather than meaning to create over again. Though we usually sing the second meaning in church, it seems, I think Cat is on to something: God at play. At its very core, its very essence, creation is a reflection of God having fun.
I am in the process of becoming a morning person again, now that I am back teaching. I haven’t stopped being a night owl, which is causing some issues when it comes to getting enough sleep, but I am seeing more of morning than I have in a long, long time. I walked out into a beautiful spring morning and couldn’t help but find the hymn again as I walked to my car. I’m not sure what clicked – maybe it’s the part about being on my way to teaching English – but I realized the song was not about morning being broken, but about morning having broken, as in having broken through.
darkness falls
but morning breaks through
The day is not what is broken, but what does the breaking, scattering chards of darkness all over the place. Morning has broken like that first morning when God said, “Let there be light,” accompanied by a giant belly laugh with enough playful energy to burst that first dawn into existence. When it comes to playing, God means business. The juke box in my mind switched to Michael Been and The Call:
here’s to the babies in a brand new world
here’s to the beauty of the stars
here’s to the travelers on the open road
here’s to the dreamers in the bars
here’s to the teachers in the crowded rooms
here’s to the workers in the fields
here’s to the preachers of the sacred words
here’s to the drivers at the wheel
here’s to you my little love
with blessings from above
now let the day begin
There are days we break through or in or out, and then there are days we end up broken on the beach, like Peter, hoping for forgiveness and maybe some breakfast. Either way, most every day holds its share of broken places, as Leonard Cohen reminds us.
ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in
May it dawn on us that we belong to a God whose love and laughter are deep enough to fuel suns and forgive stumbling saints who wash up on the beach at breakfast, or stuck in traffic, or standing in line at Starbucks.
Here’s to you, my little love, with blessings from above.
Peace,
Milton
Through all of our years in Massachusetts, we had more than one Easter that left the children hunting for eggs in the snow. North Carolina offers warmer climes, but snow of a different sort: we’ve been knee deep in pollen. And I’ve sneezed and sorted and snuffled all week long. In my mind’s yellow haze there is room, however, to sing Paul Simon’s song, “Allergies” (from my favorite of his solo albums, Hearts and Bones):
I go to a famous physician
I sleep in the local hotel
From what I can see of the people like me
We get better
But we never get well
So I ask myself this question
It’s a question I often repeat
Where do allergies go
When it’s after a show
And they want to get something to eat?
Allergies
Allergies
Something’s living on my skin
Doctor please
Doctor please
Open up it’s me again
I am still in the transition from kitchen to classroom (seven more double shifts to go), so the days have been both stuffy and short. As one who has lived my whole life with allergies of varying sorts, part of the rites of spring is my asking why they have to be part of the mix. On some theological level, it does me good to ask the question because the question calls me to look beyond my misery to any number of more severe circumstances that people live with and through that don’t make any more sense than my sneezing. Not all pain is purposeful; some of it just hurts.
My relief came in being able to sit down to dinner with Ginger and Cherry and let the evening wind down and another layer of pollen fall while we tightened the bonds with pan-fried cod, good conversation, and a whole lot of laughter. I am looking forward to being home for dinner on a regular basis. While I was cooking tonight, I reached for a couple of James Taylor CDs I had not heard in some time, One Man Dog
Little David, play on your harp
Hallelu, hallelu, little David
Play on your harp, hallelujah
Little David, play on your harp
hallelu, hallelu, little David
Play on your harp, hallelujah
It’s late now. The darkness has fallen heavier than the pollen and I’m still snorting around, trying to the words out of my congested head and into some coherent shape. There’s no earth-shattering message to share, other than to say thanks for a good day and a wonderful evening, even in the middle of a pollen storm.
Peace,
Milton
we stood in the columbarium
well after sunrise
to speak of resurrection
with the names of those
who share death in common
as our backdrop
the whistle of trees
our soundtrack and
the promise of pancakes
waiting for us inside
as we retold the story I heard
the passive verb:
the stone was rolled away
as though coming back
to life were as easy as
sliding a door to find
the tomb as empty
as a bag of oreos
only the wrapper left
next to a smiling angel
later thomas would ask to
see Jesus’ pierced palms
but they only show he died
you must turn the hands over
look at the heart whose
knuckles are skinned
tiny cuts of commitment
fingernails filled with hope
coming back to life means
putting your shoulder into it
Peace,
Milton
On one of their early albums, Simon and Garfunkel sang “Silent Night” while a recording of the Seven O’Clock News played at the same time. (You can hear it here.) The song began playing in my head as I sat down to write, I think, because of the way my day went. My Holy Saturday was an active one, with little quiet. And so I wrote the following poem to this soundtrack. Click on this link and read on.
The Women
They didn’t know Sunday was coming
in the way we take for granted
the Cross is not final punctuation.
What I know as expectancy they knew
as uncertainty; what I know for sure
they took on faith, as best they could.
I wonder how late into the night the three
women sat talking about whether or not
to go to the tomb at sunrise.
No matter how dark we make the room,
we weren’t there. We were spared that pain
and can only know their joy secondhand.
Peace,
Milton
“It is finished,” you said.
When we finally get
to ask questions
you will be answer,
mine will be, “What
did you mean?”
I’ve taken my shot
at explanations;
the words matter
too much to let them
just hang there.
Yet even when I look
back from Sunday,
full of resurrection
neither life nor death
will be done.
I dug in the dirt
from noon till three
pulling up the dead
stalks of last summer’s
tomato plants,
among other things:
nothing much ever
feels finished to me.
One day you’ll tell me
what it feels like.
Peace,
Milton
Several years ago, Ginger and I went to Las Vegas because we had never been. We were already in California for a gathering with my side of the family and we tacked on a couple of days and drove from San Diego to Vegas, staying – of course – at the Hard Rock Hotel. On the morning we were packing to leave, I walked down to put the suitcases in the car and ended up following three people, two men and a woman, out of lobby and out into the parking lot. For them, it was still the night before. As they walked, the woman said, “Well, I’ll you two things you always gotta know. You gotta know where you’re going and you gotta know where you’re at.”
“Hell,” said one of the men. “I’ve always known where I’m at, but I ain’t never known where I was going.”
Maundy Thursday is one of the markers in my life that reminds me, to borrow their grammar, where I’m at. Fifteen years ago, as best Ginger and I can remember, we got to go to Israel and Palestine and had a chance to, as the old song says, walk that day where Jesus walked. One of those places was the Garden of Gethsemane, where we were given a good bit of time to sit among the ancient olive trees, which our guide told us had root systems that could have dated back to Jesus’ time. Whether her information was factual didn’t matter; I was captured by the thought that we were in the same garden, the same piece of earth, where Jesus had prayed with his disciples. I sat on one of the benches in silence with one of the other folks on the trip for a while and then we began to sing one of the songs from Godspell, “On the Willows.” (I had recently sung the song in a production of the play at Cambridgeport Baptist Church, so it was fresh in my mind.)
on the willows there
we hung up our lyres
for our captors there
required of us songs
and our tomentors, mirth
saying sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
how can we sing
sing the Lord’s songs
in a foreign land?
The roots became a metaphor of the thread of love and sorrow that reached across the centuries to find us in that garden, that place where Jesus had been in his darkest hour, after he had washed the dust of life from the feet of his friends knowing, as John so beautifully says, “he had come from God and was going to God.” He knew where he was and where he was going. That night, neither one held much comfort.
I came home from the Duke restaurant tonight to find a message from someone I have reconnected with, thanks to Facebook, who asked for the lyrics to a song Billy and I wrote years ago called “Traveling Mercies.”
take bread for the journey and strength for the fight
comfort to sleep through the night
wisdom to choose at the fork in the road
and a heart that knows the way home
go in peace live in grace
trust in the arms that will hold you
go in peace live in grace
trust God’s love
All I had to add was
and for the faithful
and for the weary
and for the hopeful
here is my prayer . . . .
Maybe it’s not so much we have to know where we are as much as who we are. The gospel GPS that let Jesus know he had come from God and was returning to God served to be more identifier than locator: he was Love Incarnate, God made known in a way that had never happened before. Remembering who he was, he washed their feet, he prayed for them in the Garden, and then he went to the Cross because the thread of Love had to go through death to show us Love is the Last Word.
So, on this Maundy Thursday, I know who I am and who I’m with. That’s enough.
(Go in) Peace,
Milton
I trained my replacement tonight.
The guy who will take over at the Duke restaurant next semester worked alongside Abel and me to get a sense of how things work and, I’m sure, how he might do things differently once I have shuffled off to high school. He’s a really nice guy, a strong cook, and pleasant company for an evening in the kitchen. He got along well with everyone, asked good questions, and helped us through the dinner rush. Here in a couple of weeks he will be the chef and I will be, well, gone.
I am replacing someone else at school.
If all the world’s a stage and we are only players, most of our roles are replacement parts. We pick up where someone else left off, or just left, and inhabit the role until it comes time for us to make our exit and hand the part on to the next person in line. Sometimes we are the ones originating the role on opening night; occasionally, we are the ones who stand on the stage when the curtain falls on the final performance; but most of the time we are acting in the middle of life, playing our scene, and moving on. It true in things both big and small. On the way to work today, I stopped to fill up my car with gas. When I went inside to pay, I took the place of the person in front of me at the cash register; when I turned to leave, there were four people behind me all waiting for their moment in the contagion of life at the Family Fare. I walk into a nearly hundred year old house that has been the stage for more than one family in its life, painting their stories into the walls and breathing the fertile air of memory as it seeps through the cracks and into my soul. One day, we will walk away and let someone else play the scene.
The temptation is to try and leave some sort of mark, something indelible. When my brother was in high school, he had the lead in the musical for a couple of years. One year, the show was Half a Sixpence and one of the scenes took place on the beach. One of Miller’s good friends, Mark, played the part of a weightlifter on the beach (it was typecasting, trust me) and his task was simply to stand in the background, but he couldn’t help himself. He began to flex and pose, and he began to get noticed. He kept going and it got funny. It also took away from the play because we were no longer watching the main story unfolding because we were watching him.
That’s not how we get remembered.
“Remember me,” was what Jesus said as he passed the bread and cup to his disciples on the night he was betrayed. “As often as you do this, remember me.”
The motion of passing the bread and cup one to another down the pew during Communion seems good metaphor for the motion we must learn in life to keep learning and living. We reach with one hand to replace the one who received before us and we then turn to offer the tray to the one who will replace us, even as we all sit one beside another, connected. Being replaced is not being forgotten.
Though, I suppose, sometimes it is.
When we sing hymns, and even name hymns, we stop or breathe at odd places, breaking up thoughts and phrases without even realizing what we are doing. One of the hymns of my youth that has stuck with me we call “Take My Life and Let It Be,” ending the title in the middle of a thought, and unwittingly making a very interesting theological point, or even a prayer: God, take my life and let it be. Amen.
A prayer like that is speaking words of wisdom: let it be.
Yes, I trained my replacement tonight. When my two and a half years are done in a couple of weeks, the nights I am not there will stack up the same as those I inhabited until I have been gone longer than I stayed. I’ll be tethered by some friendships I made during these days that are larger than a dinner shift and are not defined by a kitchen and we all will keep moving through the mix of presence and absence that makes up our lives. I don’t know what to do with the mix of feelings, even though they are quite familiar, but it felt important to notice and remember.
Peace,
Milton
As I drove to the Duke restaurant this afternoon, Talk of the Nation was my soundtrack, as is often the case. I happened to join the program just as Tavis Smiley began talking about his program MLK: A Call Beyond Conscience, which looks at Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” that he delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day of his assassination. Though Neal Conan timed the interview to coincide with the broadcast, that it falls in the middle of Holy Week seems worth noting as well, even though it was unintentional.
One of the most moving aspects of Jesus’ journey to the Cross is that he never responded to violence with violence, though he had opportunity over and over again. One of the things I find in the Empty Tomb is the promise that peace outlasts violence. Any time we choose violence as a solution — out of frustration or pride or power or convenience – whether we’re talking Vietnam or Iraq or Guantanamo, we choose to trust a fallacy that will only lead to deeper conflict. We choose to be cynics. We choose to sell ourselves short.
King’s decision to speak out cost him deeply, but he knew the cost before he spoke. Listen to what he said:
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
In the middle of all of the discussions and arguments that are going on about our growing national deficit and our need to cut back spending, the conversation stays stuck on cutting social programs, when slashing our defense budget hardly enters the discourse. We spend a ridiculous amount to prepare ourselves to be the biggest, baddest SOBs in the valley of the shadow; we have convinced ourselves that being the most violent will somehow make us safer. It hasn’t worked. We may think of ourselves as the most powerful, yet we live motivated primarily by fear. We have more weapons than anyone else in the world and we continue, year after year, to spend more on defense than anyone else in the world and we are not safer or saner or even more secure. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, we have proven ourselves insane, driven crazy by our fear while abandoning our faith.
At the risk of quoting King too much, I go back to the speech:
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Imagine the explosion had their been twenty-four hour news channels in 1967.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”
Imagine what could happen if we took these words to heart in 2010, even as we follow Jesus to the Cross.
Peace,
Milton