don't eat alone

In the shadow of the chapel steeple
we’ve simmered and sautéed all evening,
following the familiar patterns we know,
trying a few new things, marking time by
making dinners, passing plates, and,
finally, taking out the trash.

This morning, time was moved along
by turning pages, the clicking of keyboards,
and restroom requests; the tools of the
trade are stored in backpacks and we
made our day without thinking of
how long to braise the lamb.

A twenty-mile asphalt artery took me
from one world to the other, time travel
in a matter of minutes, punctuated by
a uniform change and a cup of coffee.
Neither knows much of the other;
I am a sliver in this Venn diagram.

My flight on the freeway puts me past
eighteen exits, or so, each one an off ramp
to another layer of life, another place
just like the kitchen and the classroom
where someone is telling time and
inhabiting the world they know.

It makes me want to exit early, stop
and ask, “What’s cooking?”

Peace,
Milton

I gave my notice to my chef who hired me for both the Duke and Durham restaurants. Though my exit will be somewhat gradual over the next five or six weeks, I am leaving my job as a professional chef to return to teaching, and specifically teaching English in a small private school made up of students who need a less than traditional environment to survive. Though I have been thinking and praying about getting back into teaching for some time, this opportunity caught me by surprise. A call about a week and a half ago to sub led to a job offer, which led to my choosing to make the move.

“The Lord bless you in your going out and your coming in,” wrote the psalmist. Days like today remind me he is describing one motion that is both things: I am leaving and arriving with the same steps; what is a beginning is also an ending. The last time I had a job as a teacher was in the spring of 2001. I stepped out of the classroom when we moved to Marshfield, thinking I would write for a year or so and go back to teaching. I ran headlong into a deep depression instead, found my way to the kitchen (that phrase actually took about a year and a half) and cooked my way back to daylight. Now it’s time to teach again.

Growing up as a preacher’s kid, I learned what you do and what you are were pretty much the same thing. I can remember the night in the Charlestown Blockbuster Video, where I worked when we first moved to Boston, that I found myself desperately wanting to unlearn that lesson. I walked up to a woman who was looking for a movie and asked if I could be of assistance. She looked a little startled and then said, “Oh – no thanks. I usually don’t talk to the help in places like this.” Her comment created an existential crisis for me: I couldn’t be the guy who rented tapes; it had to be what I did. Period.

As valid as the lesson was for me to learn, I also know, regardless of what I might do for a living, I am both a teacher and a cook, and also a writer (though I must say writing has never paid much). It’s about more than a job. Both are deep inside me, and both have found their vocational expression at different times, and both are more than jobs to me. As I move from kitchen to classroom, I will keep cooking, just as when the motion was reversed some years ago I found ways to teach.

As a writer, I suppose I should have the best words to speak to my situation, yet I’m going to lean into a poem that has found me at several crossroads: Stanley Kunitz’ “The Layers”:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

I find myself feeling grateful and humbled and hopeful and sad, as though all those emotions each ran their respective four way stop sign to come crashing into me.

I will borrow more words for my closing prayer from Dag Hammarskjöld:

For all that has been, thanks; for all that will be, yes.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

A certain man had two sons.

It’s the way Jesus started a lot of the parables, including the one we call the Prodigal Son, which, I might add, is named for the younger sibling. It’s one of those stories I’ve heard so many times I can picture it without even having to think to hard, though I must say in my mind’s movie the story somehow fits better in West Texas than in Palestine. Maybe it’s just imagining the father staring down the dusty road day after day, and that he was able to see the boy walking way down the road, that makes it feel like his ranch was somewhere between Lubbock and Amarillo, or that barbecue was the celebratory food, but that’s how it feels to me.

Either way, the youngest son’s rebellion and repentance is the stuff of movies and novels, the kind of story that tugs at your heartstrings and lets the tears swell up with the violins in the background. It is a wonderful picture of grace. The boy demanded his inheritance, essentially telling his father he wished he were dead and disgracing the family, and headed off to the bright lights of the big city, losing both all the money and himself. When he bottom, he was slopping pigs and thinking their food looked good. Even going home as a total failure would be better than the way he was living. So he walked home, practicing his plea for forgiveness over and over and over. But while he was still way down the road, his father saw him and ran to meet him because the father had been waiting for him to come home. Forgiveness flooded in before any sort of confession took place, love conquered shame and sin, and all that mattered was the boy who had lost himself had been found.

But Jesus didn’t know when to quit. Even though there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, he kept going. There were two sons, remember? The eldest brother was coming in from a hard day at work, as he had done most all of his life, and was surprised to find a party going on in the middle of a workday. That never happened. When his father told him they were celebrating his younger brother’s return, the eldest son was not up for joining in. All he could see was he had been dutiful and compliant and dutiful and it hadn’t gotten him either the inheritance or a party. As Hoyt Axton used to sing,

work your fingers to the bone
and what do you get?
bony fingers bony fingers.

When the father tried to explain his extravagance, the oldest brother was incredulous: I did everything you told me to do and you’ve never even given me a goat to cook with my friends; doesn’t being dutiful deserve to be rewarded? In the economy of God’s grace, it seems, the answer to that question is, “No.” Love and forgiveness are not earnable. They are gifts – painfully free gifts. If we are being dutiful and diligent because we think it’s going to pay off, we’ve missed the point.

And the point is made well in a story from a book I picked up years ago called The Song of the Bird by Anthony de Mello. It is a collection of stories and parables from different faith perspectives. The story Is simply called, “Good News.”

Jesus began to teach in parables. He said:

The kingdom of God is like two brothers who were called by God to give up all they had and serve humanity. The older responded to the call though he had to tear himself away from his fiancée and his family and go oft to a distant land to spend himself in the service of the poor. Years later he was imprisoned for his work tortured and put to death.

And the Lord said, “Well done my good and faithful servant! You gave me a thousand measures of service. I shall now give you a thousand million measures of beatitude. Enter into the joy of your Lord.”

The younger boy ignored the call. He married the girl he loved and prospered in his business. He was kind to his wife and children and gave occasional alms to the poor.

And when he came to die, the Lord said, “Well done my good and faithful servant! You gave me twenty measures of service. I shall now give you a thousand million measures of beatitude. Enter into the joy of your Lord.”

When the older boy was told that his brother was to get the same reward as he, he was surprised. And he rejoiced. “Lord,” he said, “had I known this at the time you called me I know I would have done exactly what I did for love of you.

We don’t have to go to the far country or lose everything or be baptized in shame to understand the extravagant love of God, but we do have to understand extravagance. We do have to come to terms with a love that cannot be earned. Both the brothers thought they knew how to make life pay off. Both of them were wrong. One came home asking forgiveness, and the other . . .

Well, Jesus quit telling the story before the older brother responded to his father’s explanation. I wonder if the point of the ending was for those of us who hear the story to realize we are more like the eldest brother than the youngest when it comes to understanding that God loves everyone: the people who make more money than we do, the people who get the jobs we want and are less qualified, the people who appear to be president of the Dumb Luck Club, the people who do damage to others without apparent punishment, the people who disagree with us, the people who take advantage of us, the people who have no idea what real love is.

Yes, them. All of them. And us, too.

How do we respond to love like that?

Peace,
Milton

I continued my reading of Nora Gallagher’s Practicing Resurrection and only got about five pages in when I a quote that brought the rest of the day rushing back to me.

A spiritual director told me once that God is found on the edge of things, in the margins. About a drunk who sleeps on Trinity’s porch he said, “You can ask him not to drink on the porch but you can’t ask him to leave. He lives in the part that makes the church uncomfortable and that’s where Jesus lives.”

We had a workshop on stewardship this morning at church. Eighteen of us gathered around the tables in the Fellowship Hall to listen to Jena Roy, a friend from Massachusetts, as she challenged us to look at how we see ourselves, who we wish we could become, what we worry about when it comes to our church, and what we would change. The group was engaged and engaging, working hard to listen to one another and to share honestly, and the morning was full of good things that left us with even more questions. And that’s a good thing.

We are a relatively small church (about a hundred and fifty active members), and we are a theologically liberal church that works hard to put hands and feet to our faith: we would be one of those “social justice” churches that frightens Glen Beck. As we listed the things that we saw as strengths of our congregation and then moved on to “stumbling blocks” and “opportunities,” we didn’t come up with three distinct lists. What were strengths to some were the stuff stumbling blocks were made of, and most everything provided the opportunity to make ourselves uncomfortable, which is where Gallagher’s words took me even though she was talking about something completely different.

The limits of our language come into play when we talk about our relationship to church because we use the same word for the physical building and geographical location that we use for the spiritual community we call the Body of Christ. We don’t have another way to describe what we do on Sunday morning other than to say, “I’m going to church,” but the separation in that sentence makes it problematic, at some level, when we want to say (0r sing), “We are the church.” When we talk about going to church, we think of it as a place of comfort and warmth, which is right and good, but when we talk about being the church we have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

As the conversation moved around the table, one person commented that we didn’t do our members a favor by suggesting they give two percent of their income to the church. “We’re letting ourselves off easy,” she said. Another, who is currently looking for work, said she has realized in the midst of her job search that, for the first time, she is taking into account the effect the job will have on the time on her life in church. “I’ve never thought of things this way before,” she said. The two comments came together for me in that being the church means we are willing to change the way we live to be a part: the way we spend money, the way we use our time, and even what we do for a job.

Part of the life of any institution is a push for self-perpetuation. The church is not exempt from falling into the pattern of using most of our energy to “keeping the doors open.” The call of the gospel is not to self-perpetuation, however, but to spend ourselves in the present, to not hold back. (Consider the lilies.) Our assembling ourselves together is, almost by definition, at cross-purposes with itself, pun intended. (Lose your life to find it.) And we haven’t even gotten to the relational energy it takes to be with one another. Most all of the epistles that make up the last half of the New Testament were written to deal with problems in the early church, with the questions and quagmires that grew out of trying to live together in Jesus’ name. The issues we raised around the table this morning were ours, but they were by no means original. This is the part of the church where drunks sleep and Jesus lives, where getting together matters more that getting my way, listening is a crucial incarnation of love, giving our offering is an act of discipleship and not a charitable donation, and committing ourselves to one another is more important that getting our way. After all, we are not a civic organization or a book club; we are the church.

Tomorrow night marks the last night of this particular menu at the Durham restaurant. Those who come to dinner on Tuesday will get a whole new menu of offerings. For those of us in the kitchen, it means coming into the same room to prep and cook, but to do so with new ingredients and new recipes, to set up the line differently, and to learn new patterns of cooperation with each other. The change is good, important, and uncomfortable work, and it’s the way the restaurant stays fresh. The church, like the restaurant, has its seasons, whether we’re talking about the liturgical calendar or the ebb and flow of life, and might do well to appropriate the metaphor. We might not have to ditch the whole menu, but we need a steady diet of change and choices that challenge us to see with fresh eyes and learn new patterns of faithfulness and compassion.

Our workshop this weekend was a new item on our church menu. I’m grateful for the work that went into making it happen, for those who gave their time to be together, and for the freedom we gave each other to made uncomfortable that we might see with fresh eyes where Jesus lives among us.

Peace,
Milton

Abel spent the afternoon
prepping the vegetable plate:
slicing shiitakes and scallions,
reducing the risotto, and
spreading the mixture on
sheet pans to let it cool.
Then he enlisted me to make
the rice balls and roll them
in Japanese breadcrumbs.
He cut sweet potatoes,
blanched greens, and
roasted garlic to make
the cream sauce.

The thirty-seven people
who ordered the dish were
offered both a visual and
culinary treat: the sauté
of spinach and sweets
on one side of the plate;
the small swatch of sauce
creating a bed for the three
golden crusted arancini;
the last ladle of cream
draped across the top,
with a sprinkle of scallions.

But only those relegated to
the kitchen were fortunate
enough to see how tenderly
Abel stacked the sauté;
how he nestled the small orbs
on their side of the plate as
though they were as fragile
as they were flavorful;
and the affection with which
he baptized them with the
puree of garlic and goat cheese;
the smile that sent the dish
to the diners. Thirty-seven times.

Peace,
Milton

The whole scene arrived in the middle of a week when the story of the Prodigal Son is the lectionary passage, about as gift wrapped as a sermon illustration could be. Nomar Garciaparra, longtime and well-loved shortstop for the Boston Red Sox who was traded away, came home day before last, to retire. Though the terms under which he left in the summer of 1974 were not good at all, and it was the October that followed – and perhaps, in part, because of the trade – that the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years.

He has traveled to California and Chicago and back to California, trying to find his place. I must also say, for the record, that the Sox haven’t had a steady shortstop since. Every time Nomar came back to Boston, regardless of the colors he was wearing, the Fenway Faithful gave him a long standing ovation. We loved Nomar, even from afar. Besides, he was the only player we ever had whose name rhymed with homer, as in, “Come in Nomar, hit a homer.” (It has to be done in a heavy Boston accent – “Come on, Nomah, hit a homah” – and it rhymes the same way country singers think rain rhymes with string.)

Nomar knew it was time to retire and he also wished he could retire in his Red Sox uniform. Spring training is in full swing, and he is not playing for anyone. So the Sox offered him a contract: a one day, minor league contract that allowed him to become a part of the organization once again, and then he retired, at home. He’s happy and all those folks (like Ginger) who still have their Garciaparra t-shirts can wear them again. Nomar belongs to us. Period.

“The dream to play baseball in the big leagues started here,” he said at his news conference held at City of Palms Park before the Red Sox played a spring training game. “I really wanted to have that be the last uniform I ever put on.”

As I was walking home tonight from the restaurant, I found myself humming a soundtrack to my thoughts about Nomar’s last homestand:

and I see your true colors shining through
I see your true colors and that’s why I love you
so don’t be afraid to let them show
you true colors true colors
are beautiful like the rainbow

In the King James version of the story in Luke, it says the prodigal son “came to himself” as he was feeding the pigs and realized it was time to go home for good. He realized he was prodigal, as in wastefully extravagant, and he had used himself all up, along with his possessions. The dictionary offers a second definition for prodigal: “giving in abundance; lavish or profuse.” We might also use the same adjective for the father, who welcomed his son home with extravagant forgiveness and a barbeque to boot. They shared a propensity for extravagance; the father, however, knew how to spend himself in love. Such were his true colors.

Yes, I’m a Sox fan and I know I might be stretching the story a bit here, still I’m willing to stretch because one of ours that got lost has come home. He was humble enough to ask and the Red Sox ownership were generous enough to find a way to make it work. What it means for Red Sox Nation is, when we tell our stories (and we do tell stories), we can say he is one of us. Whatever happened between 2004 and now is what happened, but the real story is he came home. And my guess is it was no different at the Prodigal Household in the parable. As they bit into the brisket, they told stories, too, of how the boy had run away, and how the father had pined at the front door day after day. “And then you came home,” someone said. And they laughed and cried and told the story again, talking, I’m sure, with their mouths full.

We are at our best with our arms wide open. It’s true for both Bible and baseball.

Peace,
Milton

I can’t say I have ever heard God speak out loud, but I think I’ve come close.

Whatever God’s voice actually sounds like, I think I come close to hearing it when our children lead worship. Last Sunday, they led our call to worship by lining up in front of the Communion table and singing with holy gusto:

I am the church you are the church
we are the church together
all who follow Jesus all around the world
we are the church together

the church is not a building
the church is not a steeple,
the church is not a resting place
the church is a people

we’re many kinds of people
with many kinds of faces
all colors and all ages
from all times and places

and when the people gather
there’s singing and there’s praying
there’s laughing and there’s crying
sometimes, all of it saying

I am the church you are the church
we are the church together
all who follow Jesus all around the world
we are the church together

Their singing was evidence of the Incarnation, shown in the abandon with which they inhabited the words they sang and the tenacity of their hand gestures; they weren’t fooling around. As they began our Communion service, they called us to incarnate our faith not only as we passed the Bread and the Cup, but also as we passed the Peace during the service and as we passed the snacks at Coffee Hour. I could hear them singing again as I read the words of Augustine at lunch today, quoted by Nora Gallagher:

You are the body of Christ and its members. . . . It is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table. And it is to what you are that you reply. Amen. (23)

“The Word became flesh,” John says at the beginning of his gospel. Paul’s use of the body of Christ as the metaphor for the church suggests the Word stayed flesh. As Mary Oliver says, “The Spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest.” We are the Church, the Body, the Word still made flesh: Love with skin on. Together, that is.

I love the line in the song that says, “The church is not a resting place.” I remember my father telling a story years ago of a person leaving church one Sunday morning and telling him they would not be back. “I don’t come to church to be made uncomfortable,” they said. If we are the church, then we are not only Love with skin on, but also Pain and Grief and Hope and Joy and Despair incarnate. We are people deciding to be together, which means to be both comforted and uncomforted. It means we ought to be looking at one another and at our world with the same holy gusto with which our children sang.

Though Gallagher had changed subjects somewhat as I moved on to the next chapter, I found a connection between Augustine’s admonition and her thoughts on prayer:

I have always been wary of the “surrender to God” school of prayer, which seems to make one more passive than is necessary in a relationship that doesn’t seem to encourage passivity. (39)

Listening is not a passive act. If I’m paying attention – attending to my life – I am engaged and alive. “Be still and know that I am God” is not a call to being a blessed blob, but a direction for discernment and intentionality.

Be still and know.
Come and see.
Take and eat.

Together, we inhabit the Mystery, we incarnate the Love: we are the Church. Together.

Peace,
Milton

In order to survey, Kit said, you always have to have two points. In a photo, he leans over his tripod looking through the scope, high above Otowi Bridge in northern New Mexico, sighting a distant point on the other side of the river . . . I thought of him as making sense of geography. (Nora Gallagher, Practicing Resurrection 27)

survey

I learned Kit’s lesson from my friend,
Doug, who was a surveyor until
he looked through the scope
and saw he was a painter.

On more than one occasion,
we held the pole for one another,
usually over Indian food,
mapping our hearts’ desires,

scoping to make some sense of
the geography of middle age,
a landscape littered with enough
forks in the road to supply silverware

for anyone hungry to know where
they were, or what lay across the
ridge of reason, beyond the forest of
failure, and under the sheltering sky.

Peace,
Milton

I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had been gone a good thirty years, had sold their land to the Wilsons, who in turn had passed it on to the Smiths; but it still the old Turner place, named for someone even the old timers had a hard time remembering.

Ginger and I spent the afternoon with a friend who had come for his daughter to look at Duke. She is a junior in college and beginning to think about where she wants to study. After they had seen the campus, they came to our house so we could go to dinner. Ginger had a meeting first, so I played tour guide to share what I knew about Durham. Thanks to the Neighborhood History Walk our neighborhood association does, tours friends gave us when we moved here, and a little reconnoitering of my own, I can put together a pretty good little tour of our fair city, though, after I talked about the old Erwin Mills buildings on Ninth Street and the old tobacco buildings at Brightleaf and American Tobacco, I wondered if I didn’t sound like I was giving directions to the old Turner place. I was telling history that I didn’t experience as though I knew what it meant.

Pick any church building with stained glass windows over a hundred years old and there will be names most folks in the congregations would be hard pressed to recognize. Within the last year, the last survivor of the German concentration camps died, meaning those chilling stories that compel us never to forget can no longer be told in the first person. As a collective, the human race has forgotten more than it has remembered; there are only so many things we can carry. As a youth minister in the mid-eighties, I remember my shock when one of my seventh graders, who would have been born in the early seventies, picked up a Beatles record of mine and said, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Alas, the trivial example best makes the point.

emotional archaeology

the bones of a building don’t have
the guts to tell you the whole story
the faded cigarette sign painted on
the wall isn’t the whole picture

I’m digging in the used bin at Offbeat
Records in Brightleaf a tobacco building
turned into a tune shop whose days
are numbered thanks to itunes

the vacant lot at the end of our block
once held the house where John Loudermilk
wrote Tobacco Road and I find myself
hard pressed to sing more than the title

the day is coming I know when someone
will ask about a new place and I’ll say
it’s where the old record shop used to be
mourning both music and memory

Peace,
Milton

we pass the silver plate
of broken bread with
less confidence than
we pass the peace

easier perhaps to hug
than to admit our hunger
we take and eat without
a word and wait for

the wine’s weaker friend
shot glasses of salvation
we place the empties
in the pew racks causing

the clicking sound of
solidarity to rattle
our hearts and shake
awake the resonance

that runs through all
the saints and suppers
that we might remember
that we might be one

Peace,
Milton