don't eat alone

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 and Walking Man, which added another layer of memory and meaning to the evening including thoughts of an old friend I miss dearly when I heard:

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.” She is going through a difficult time in her marriage and, she said, the song just popped into her mind today and she couldn’t find the old CD and did I have the words. By the time I read her words, a couple of other friends with whom we share history had “replied to the thread,” as Facebook calls it, leaving the lyric:

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

One of my friends from the Durham restaurant, Leonora, told me about a poetry class she has been taking at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. The class itself doesn’t have much to do with making documentaries, which I suppose means more than anything that the folks at the CDS are mostly looking for new ways to see things, whether or not it ends up on film. In one of the exercises she described, the members of the class were given a copy of a poem in Polish. No one in the room spoke or read Polish and no translation was offered. Their assignment was to decide what the poem meant to them, making whatever associations they could. When they came back the next week, they each presented what they had written and then were given the actual translation to see what connections there might have been.

As I’ve tried to focus my heart and mind on Holy Week today, in the midst of cooking, it strikes me that Leonora’s assignment is not a pretty good metaphor for reading the Bible: we have to take the words and make our own meaning. Yes, I know there are centuries of interpreters who have preceded us and plenty of commentaries and ecclesiastical councils to tell us what we are reading, just as there was an actual translation to her poem. There are also the readings where a “new” phrase appears as something we have never seen before, no matter how many times we have read the story, or we come away with questions we’ve not asked previously because of how we came to the text. Then there are odd little moments in the story, little bits of Polish to unravel, if you will, like this one from Luke 22: 7-12:

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.”

“Where do you want us to prepare for it?” they asked.

He replied, “As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there.”

Jesus’ instructions carry a bit of intrigue because of the little details. When they entered the city, presumably unannounced and unscheduled, they would see a man carrying a jar of water; follow him home and ask for the guest room, which he will show you; go in and get supper ready.

Was Jesus doing some sort of Jedi Mind Trick? In a city with no running water, would there really only be one man with a water jar? And what if they had stopped for a falafel and beer on the way in; would they have missed him? How did he know the man? How did he know about the room?

My translation of the Polish in the passage is I think Jesus had friends the gospels never mentioned. We get a healthy dose of life with the disciples, with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, with Mary Magdalene, as well as the occasional contact with folks like Zacchaeus, but what we are not told is there were more folks who mattered to Jesus. There are stories we don’t know. And in these verses we get a peek at one of those people, the way you get a passing glance at someone famous driving by leaving you to wonder if you really saw who you think you saw.

What makes my translation more than recognition of an oddity is what the understanding means to me. I need to tell another story to explain. The first year I taught Honors British Literature in Winchester, there was a guy who sat silently in the back of the class most everyday. He turned in adequate work, but I could not engage him for the life of me. One day after school, I walked out to the sports fields to watch him and others in the class play lacrosse. I recognized him by his physical appearance, but there were no other connections between the kid in the back of the room and the passionate athlete on the field. After the game I went up to him to congratulate him on the win, and then I said, “I have one question. How do I get the guy who was out there on the field to come to English class?” Who I saw for my forty-five minutes a day of his life was not all of who he was, or even a reasonable facsimile.

Admittedly, I have more information about Jesus than I did about the boy in my English class, yet I think the parallel holds up. We have four fairly brief and often repetitive accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry on earth. We’ve got a pretty good telling of his birth, nothing much about childhood or adolescence, and a whirlwind tour of his three years out on the road. John says, at the end of his gospel, that we couldn’t build a library to hold all of the stories if they were told. But they weren’t. What we have is a representative slice of the life of Jesus, and some of it in theological Polish to boot.

Which means, to me, I need to live expecting Jesus to surprise me. As many times as I have headed into Holy Week filled with intention and focus, I must be ready to caught off guard by the guy with the water pot, whom I always assumed to simply be an extra brought in to fill out the scene. The more I think about him, I begin to imagine the disciples following him home only to be invited in for tea. As they talked about Jesus wanting to use the Upper Room, the man began telling stories of who Jesus was to him: how he had spent the night in that room many times, how he had healed one of his children, how hard he laughed at the dinner table, how much he talked about his disciples.

“I’m glad to finally get to meet you,” he would say. “Jesus has told me so many stories.”

I know about the Triumphal Entry and the Last Supper and the Trial and the Cross, but even in Holy Week there were lower case events, incidental encounters that were more than filler, and that remain unexplained and untranslated: Jesus’ Polish poems.

How did you translate them?

Peace,
Milton

We started on the courtyard
all waving our palm fronds
and naming them since we never
say frond except on Palm Sunday.

Before the hour was over
we moved from parade to
Passion, from courtyard
to Cross, in a couple of verses.

Tonight I watched basketball
and saw how quickly things
change, how triumph crosses
that thin line into loss.

For years, I’ve thought we
missed the point waving our
fronds in celebration, but
I think I am mistaken:

those who celebrated were
those who saw him crucified;
they were also, thank God,
those who came to the Tomb.

Peace,
Milton

I was a sixth grader at Hubbard Heights Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas in 1967. My family was on furlough from the mission field and we were members at University Baptist Church. America was a foreign country to my brother and me. I learned that year that there were people who lived in one house their whole lives, what penny loafers were, and how to play organized basketball.

I should interject here that I am, and have always been, an amazingly average athlete. Since I was a part of Royal Ambassadors (think Southern Baptist Boy Scouts) with my friends at church and they all played basketball, I joined the team. They were good. I was not. After watching me at practice, coach kept me on the bench. But in one game where we were way ahead, he sent me in with two minutes left. I fouled out. My prowess on the basketball court has remained steady all of these years, as has my allegiance to the Boston Red Sox. 1967 was the year they played the St. Louis Cardinals to seven games, eventually losing, as they had done for many years and would do for many more.

As I got ready to go to school one morning, my dad asked me if I wanted to come home and watch the game with him. It was a time before television decided when the games started, so there were still afternoon games. He said, “Your team is in the World Series and we’re only in the States once every four years; I’ll write you a note to come home.” It remains one of the coolest things my dad ever did. I walked home and watched games and had my heart broken, like any good Red Sox fan. I grew up and went to Baylor, whose teams, traditionally, were accustomed to the near miss, which is to say they were used to coming close but not winning.

Then came November 9, 1974. Earl Campbell and the Texas Longhorns came to Baylor Stadium intending to beat us as they had done every year I had been alive and more. At half time, Texas led 24-0. Stories have been told about what Grant Teaff said to the team and legends have grown, but what we saw was a complete reversal: when the game was over, Baylor had won 34-24 and went on to win the Southwest Conference that year for the first time in fifty years. They left the scoreboard lights on all night long.

In those days, Baylor played basketball at the Heart of Texas Coliseum (that’s the HOT Coliseum to you and me), which was a rodeo arena. No one even thought about the NCAA tournament. We were not good. So to spend this weekend watching both the men and the women who play basketball at Baylor earn their way into their respective Elite Eights is as incredible as beating Earl Campbell and Friends that cool November evening. I must say, here, that the women have a winning tradition, bringing home an NCAA championship just a couple of years ago, but up until last week the men had not won a tournament game in fifty years.

My heart has been pledged to teams who have been occasional winners, if at all. This could be a year when we get a taste of new wine; it could also be another year when we come up short of that final victory. I am not used to expecting the former.

A big part of the reason my father wanted my brother and me to be active athletically was sports was the best metaphor for life for him. It was where you learned a lot of life’s lessons with less pain, he told us. Maybe he’s right. As one who was never fastest or first pick, I learned how to sit on a bench, how to share in the success that comes from what others can do. I also learned how to lose, which was an important lesson. I learned that sometimes you get to win, as well. And then I learned life isn’t life sports after all.

Even if it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game, life is not a game and our existence cannot be reduced to a competition. Well, it can, but then you end up with the ridiculous discourse spewing out of our pundits and politicians in the wake of who won and lost in the health care debate, for instance. When life is measured by victories, it becomes consumed with conquest and we end up believing what Vince Lombardi said about football, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

NO!

To be a success in sports means you have to win. After all of the great games and touching stories, after all the buzzer beaters and overtime thrillers, all that will matter is who wins the championship. Sixty-four out of sixty-five teams will have fallen short, or (as my eighth graders are consumed with saying) will have failed. The point was to win. They didn’t. There is only one winner. That’s the seminal lesson of sports.

Life is not a winner-take-all competition. I do, however, think of it as a team sport. Yes, there are those who keep score, who consider who is winning, and who foul without getting called for it. But here’s the way the writer of Hebrews talks about it:

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls.

Don’t win; just run. Together.

Peace,
Milton