don't eat alone

A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse,” which means the problem is not with the word or phrase in and of itself, but with the fact that it once was so original and true that we used it to death.

The problem for songwriters is there are only so many words and so many rhymes. Once a good one is found, it is almost destined to become a cliché – other than my favorite lines from Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”:

I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
Wanna tell her that I love but the point is probably moot.

The great songwriters of the Forties and Fifties could rhyme like nobody’s business (yep, that’s one): inside rhymes, circular rhymes, exact rhymes. Still, thanks to them, no self-respecting songwriter is going to rhyme moon and June with a straight face. It’s a beautiful rhyme, once full of possibilities, and it has lost its originality by overuse. Even though I like Vanessa Williams, her song, “Save the Best for Last,” is a good example of songwriters going to the same well once too often.

sometimes the snow comes down in June
sometimes the sun goes ’round the moon
I see the passion in your eyes
sometimes it’s all a big surprise


cause there was a time when all I did was wish
you’d tell me this was love
it’s not the way I hoped or how I planned
but somehow it’s enough


and now we’re standing face to face
isn’t this world a crazy place
just when I thought our chance had passed
you go and save the best for last

The melody is romantic, her voice is beautiful, and the song has nothing new to say other than David Foster, who produced the record, knew a hit when he heard one. Of course, there are some songwriters – OK, one: John Prine – who can turn a who handful of clichés into a song by using them on purpose. I give you “Big Old Goofy World.”

Up in the morning
Work like a dog
Is better than sitting
Like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners
Be quiet as a mouse
Some day you’ll own a home
That’s as big as a house


I know a fella
he eats like a horse
knocks his old balls
round the old golf course
you oughta see his wife
she’s a cute little dish
she smokes like a chimney
and drinks like a fish


there’s a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it’s a big old goofy world


now Elvis had a woman
with a head like a rock
I wished I had a woman
that made my knees knock
she’d sing like an angel
and eat like a bird
and if I wrote a song
she’d know ever single word


kiss a little baby
give the world a smile
if you take an inch
give ’em back a mile
cause if you lie like a rug
and you don’t give a damn
you’re never gonna be
as happy as a clam


so I’m sitting in a hotel
trying to write a song
my head is just as empty
as the day is long
why it’s clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I’d be wise as an owl
stead of stubborn as a mule


there’s a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it’s a big old goofy world

Prine’s sense of humor and irony fills the clichés with some new life. There’s more going on than just the words. Long overuse doesn’t automatically turn a word or phrase (or a song) into a cliché. Sing along if you like:

amazing grace how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
was blind but now I see

The rhymes are old, perhaps even obvious, the song used at most every occasion from family reunions to film soundtracks to funerals, and still their familiarity calls up something other than tired; it connects to memory. For most. I’m sure there are those who hear this hymn as clichéd as Vanessa’s song, which leads to my question.

How do we keep the words and phrases that matter to us from becoming clichés?

I should define “we.” I don’t mean it in a giant, cultural, what’s-going-to-go-in-the-dictionary kind of sense. I mean we, as in family, or partners, or spouses, or friends, or congregations. It seems to me that there is a fine line between ritual (meaningful and intentional repetition) and cliché (meaningless from repetition). When we sing, for instance,

praise God from whom all blessings flow
praise God all creatures here below
praise God above ye heavenly host
Creator Christ and Holy Ghost

are we engaging in ritual, or are we repeating a well-worn cliché?

One of the ways the words don’t get tired, I suppose, is to keep asking the question because the answer may not always be the same, even for the same group of people. What do we have to do to infuse the familiarity of our well-worn words and phrases with the tenacity of the truth they hold and the courage and comfort of the faith to which they call us?

I love to tell the story for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest
and when in scenes of glory I sing a new new song
will be the old old story that I have loved so long

When it comes to songwriting lessons, perhaps rhymes do get tired and worn. But then again:

prone to wander Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here’s my heart O take and seal it
Seal it for thy courts above

Perhaps it’s not so much the words as the hearts and minds that grow weary.

Peace,
Milton

Yesterday, March 2, was my parents’ fifty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was also Texas Independence Day, and the birthday of both of my friends, Todd Lake and Lance Laird. All of those hold significance in my life, but I have to say today, March 3, matters more. It is not a holiday (that I know of) and Facebook has no birthday reminders (though today is Ira Glass’ birthday, if you are a fan of This American Life). It matters because, at our house, today is the Day of Gifts for No Reason.

Ginger and I started dating in January of 1989. On March 3 that year I gave her flowers, a CD, and a theology book because I had never dated anyone who could appreciate all three things. I wasn’t out to start a tradition; I was just falling in love with an amazing woman. But it became something worth continuing. I realized how much it meant to both of us the one year (about four or five in, I think) when I forgot it. That only happened once. March 3 has held significance for us now for twenty-one years.

I don’t remember the first CD I gave Ginger, but tonight I came back to a song that came out in 1989 from an album that was part of the soundtrack of life for us in those days. The singer was Mary Black and the record was No Frontiers. The title track was written by Jimmy McCarthy, and here are his lyrics:

If life is a river and your heart is a boat
And just like a water baby, born to float,
And if life is a wild wind that blows way on high,
And your heart is Amelia dying to fly,
Heaven knows no frontiers and I’ve seen heaven in your eyes


And if life is a bar room in which we must wait,
’round the man with his fingers on the ivory gates,
Where we sing until dawn of our fears and our fates,
And we stack all the dead men in self-addressed crates,
In your eyes faint as the singing of a lark,
That somehow this black night,
Feels warmer for the spark,
Warmer for the spark,
To hold us ’til the day,
When fear will lose its grip,
And heaven has its way,
Heaven knows no frontiers,
And I’ve seen heaven in your eyes


If your life is a rough bed of brambles and nails,
And your spirit’s a slave to man’s whips and man’s jails,
Where you thirst and you hunger for justice and right,
And your heart is a pure flame of man’s constant night,
In your eyes faint as the singing of a lark,
That somehow this black night,
Feels warmer for the spark,
Warmer for the spark,
To hold us ’til the day when fear will lose its grip,
And heaven has its way,
And heaven has its way,
When all will harmonize,
And know what’s in our hearts,
The dream will realize


Heaven knows no frontiers,
And I’ve seen heaven in your eyes,
Heaven knows no frontiers,
And I’ve seen heaven in your eyes

My mother likes to recall the conversation I had with her when I called to say I had met Ginger. Mom says she asked what I liked about her and my first response was, “She has the most amazing eyes.” For over two decades now that has remained true. Whether in the depths of my depression or on the cusp of new adventures, it is the look in her eyes that has brought comfort and confidence. She is Scout and Amelia rolled into one, with a little Wonder Woman for good measure.

Why wouldn’t I come home with presents?

Peace,
Milton

Today I worked on a project that was off the menu, if you will, along with the other prep I had to do to get ready for dinner. One of the organizations in Durham that works hard to figure out how to feed and house folks who, for whatever reason, are hungry and homeless is Urban Ministries. One of their big fundraising events is called Empty Bowls. (The concept is a national one you can learn about here.) The way it works is potters here in town make clay soup bowls, restaurants make and donate soup, and people come and pay for a bowl and soup ($30) or just soup ($15) to help support UMD.

The Durham restaurant is one of the restaurants involved and I am the one who gets to make the soup. This will be my second year doing that; the new part for me is I get to go to the event and serve the soup this year. And yes, there is a friendly competition among the soup providers. (Durham folks: come eat and vote.) Here’s their promotional video.

Now, I’m not just making soup; I’m making twenty-five gallons of soup, which means I have no recipe that large. Let me back up. I don’t actually have a recipe, period, other than this is a soup I have made before and love: Sweet Potato, Apple, and Poblano Bisque. The largest batch I’ve made to this point was about three gallons. In many ways, soup is a forgiving thing to make because it is not an exact science in the way baking is, for instance, but in both cases, expanding the recipe means working to figure out the ratios: the ingredients have to be seen in relationship to one another. A salad dressing, for example, hangs on the ratio between the vinegar or acid and the oil. For my soup, the relationship between the sweet potatoes, apples, and poblanos has to be in ratios that let you taste the ingredients in that order and in that priority: you need to know it is a sweet potato soup, with a touch of apple in the middle, and a nice peppery finish at the end. The garlic and ginger are there to fill in the background, if you will. My recipe ended up something like this:

60 quarts of peeled and sliced sweet potatoes and the water they are soaking in
16 quarts of onions
16 quarts of Granny Smith apples
8 quarts of poblano peppers
4 cups of garlic
4 cups of fresh ginger
enough vegetable stock to get the soup to the consistency needed
salt and pepper

We don’t have pots big enough to do all of that in one, so I divided it into fours (because I had two big pots) and made half of it today and will do the other half tomorrow. Then I’m going to mix the batches in the containers (five 5 gallon containers) so the soup will be consistent from batch to batch because I want the soup to taste the same to the first people who come to eat on Friday night as it does to the last people. And it will.

My brother called me this afternoon in the middle of my souping and I tried to explain what I was doing, much as I have tried to do here. He is the pastor of a church with several thousand members; our church has about a hundred and fifty active folks. I listen to what he has to do and feel about his job the same way he felt about how I was spending my day. I love being in a small church where I know the three year olds and the eighty three year olds, where worship has both focus and informality, and where there is a certain hand made quality to the whole experience. I have no idea how to think about going to church with eight or ten thousand other people. I imagine understanding the commonalties means learning to understand the ratios and how you expand the recipe for what it means to be a community of faith. I’m sure making more soup is easier to do.

The word ratio has relate in its roots, which is to say figuring out ratios has to do with figuring out relationships and priorities. In the same way I want the taste of the sweet potato to come first, and then the apple, and then the pepper, so I have to keep tweaking the recipe of my life so that my relationship with Ginger is the strongest note and let the other aspects of my life begin to find their place in relation to what matters most to me. As one who is capable of becoming quite task-focused in any given situation, I have to keep reminding myself that the ratio between people and stuff that needs to get done, people should always be on the heavy end of the equation. The analogy works on an individual level, as I struggle trying to figure out how to exercise and lose some weight in a personal world that has all but written both out of the equation.

On a couple of the recipe sites I have found, they have a function that allows you to change the number of servings and they will recalculate the amount of the ingredients. When the new recipe comes up, so does a disclaimer saying expanding a recipe is not as easy as proportionally increasing the ingredients. Sometimes you have to add more of something, or less of something else, to get it to taste and feel and look the way you know it’s supposed to look. Life may be about ratios, but it’s more than just doing the math. If I were someone who understood the nuances of mathematics, I would probably say life is more complex than just following the recipe.

I do wish, sometimes, life was as easy as soup.

Peace,
Milton

The restaurant where I work at Duke serves dinner Monday through Thursday, which means we do our best to run out of everything on Thursday night and we have to recreate most everything on Monday. I go in on Monday mornings (I get there about eleven) and start working my way down the list. Abel, my partner on the line, comes in around one and Arnaldo, our dishwasher and helper in most any way we can teach him, gets there about three-thirty. Billy and Chris are the lunch cooks who, along with Jorge, the daytime dishwasher, take care of the lunch buffet and help me out with dinner prep when they can. They know Mondays are crazy, so they usually get a couple of things started, but today when I walked in they only had news that a major accident on I-40 had kept the produce truck from making its appointed rounds and we didn’t have what we needed to work down our list. Instead of getting started at eleven, it was closer to one-thirty or two before we got into full swing. Monday, Monday: can’t trust that day.

“How do you eat an elephant?” the old joke asks. “One bite at a time.”

And so it is with prep work. I must have been standing and staring into nowhere when Abel said, “So, Milty (I wish I knew how to write that with a Guatemalan accent), what you gonna do next?” He timed his repetition of the question perfectly throughout the afternoon and, by the time service started at five, we were putting the finishing touches on our final projects. No one who came to dinner knew of the accident in Raleigh or the purposefulness of our preparation. They sat down, they ordered, and we cooked for them, as if it were any other night, which, of course, we our intention.

We had a good afternoon and evening because we worked hard and stayed focused and because we let some things not get made. I had time to make the chocolate chip pan cookies, the brownies, the apple crisp, and the blueberry bread pudding, but I had to let the sweet potato pound cake wait until tomorrow, along with a couple of other entrée things I wanted to do. Perhaps I could have gotten it all done, but Abel and I decided we were going to work hard, make sure we were well prepared, and enjoy our day at work. Letting the pound cake go was part of completing the third objective. The folks in the dining room could live without pound cake easier than I could live without my sanity.

I didn’t get it all done is not the same as I failed to get it all done.

Yesterday afternoon, I watched the USA-Canada Olympic Hockey Final, with most of North America, I understand. After the game, Ryan Miller, who was both the losing goaltender and the MVP of the entire tournament, was rather ruthlessly interviewed by someone from NBC who kept asking him what the game meant. Miller kept saying something along the lines of, “It was just another hockey game,” which flew all over one of my colleagues at work who is a huge hockey fan.

“It wasn’t just another game. It was the Olympics. But he had to say something like that because the real problem is you win to get the gold and the bronze medals, but you lose to get the silver.”

I’d never thought of it that way. When you have to win a tournament to get a medal, first and third places are won; you get second by losing. However well the entire tournament went, second place comes out of a final defeat. Maybe Miller’s words were a way of choosing to get up off the ice and see the medal around his neck as an accomplishment rather than a defeat. Maybe not. As someone who is an amazing average athlete and who has never been in contention for a gold medal of any sort on any level, I don’t know what it feels like to turn in the kind of effort worthy of being named MVP only to miss first place by a fraction of an inch or a second.

I do, however, know what it’s like to be one of two people up for a job that I really wanted and end up being the one not hired. There was no silver medal involved, nor was I given any credit for how I participated. They just sent me an email note to let me know I didn’t get the job. As I look back on it, I responded a little like the goalie, acting as though it was one job among many and I would have other opportunities, which I knew to be true but didn’t feel very much in that moment.

We read Job’s words Saturday, as he came to terms with all the bad news from his various servants. “The Lord gives,” he said, “and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Though, theologically, I’m not one to ascribe every aspect of our existence as being caused by God, I love the sentiment in the statement. Job was a rich and prosperous and comfortable and powerful man and yet he saw something deeper than his net worth, or even his grief at losing it all.

As we were cleaning up the line after dinner tonight, Abel said, “This was a good day, Milty.” He said it at the end of a day that began at 4 a. m. for him, taking one of his brothers to the airport to return to Guatemala for good. Arnaldo kept his spirit and his sense of humor even though his son is in ICU at Duke Medical Center. Getting worked up over pound cake didn’t make much sense.

It never does.

Peace,
Milton

there’s a liturgy to our life
that begins with breakfast
cereal, coffee, cinnamon toast

some days the invocation
is offered by public radio
and others we speak ourselves

we exchange the reading
of our calendars, listing our
obligations and appointments

and talk of when we will
come home to one another
answering the altar call

to return and to remember
our hope is built on something
as simple as promises kept

we are blessed in our goings
out and our comings in
that pretty much covers it

amen

Peace,
Milton

I woke up this morning to news of the earthquake in Chile as I was getting ready to lead a study of the Book of Job at church. And this morning followed last evening, when Ginger and I watched the new Coen Brothers’ movie, A Serious Man, which is their take on Job, set in 1967 (in the same way O Brother, Where Art Thou was their take on The Odyssey). The main character is Larry Gopnik, whose life begins to unravel about as quickly as the movie can get going, starting with his wife asking for a ritual divorce (a gett) so she can marry a neighbor. Larry goes to see the Marshak, the oldest rabbi, for advice, but ends up seeing Rabbi Scott, the youngest one, which troubles Larry because he’s not sure Scott has the experience to help him.

“I am the junior rabbi. And it’s true, the point-of-view of somebody who’s older and perhaps had similar problems might be more valid. And you should see the senior rabbi as well, by all means . . . But maybe – can I share something with you? Because I too have had the feeling of losing track of Hashem (God), which is the problem here. I too have forgotten how to see Him in the world. And when that happens you think, well, if I can’t see Him, He isn’t there any more, He’s gone. But that’s not the case. You just need to remember how to see Him. Am I right? I mean, the parking lot here. Not much to see. It is a different angle on the same parking lot we saw from the Hebrew school window. But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn’t familiar with these autos and such — somebody still with a capacity for wonder, someone with a fresh perspective. That’s what it is, Larry. Because with the right perspective you can see Hashem, you know, reaching into the world. He is in the world, not just in shul. It sounds to me like you’re looking at the world, looking at your wife, through tired eyes. It sounds like she’s become a sort of… thing… a problem… a thing…”

“Well, she’s, she’s seeing Sy Ableman. She’s, they’re planning, that’s why they want the Gett.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It was his idea.

“Well, they do need a Gett to remarry in the faith. But this is life. For you too. You can’t cut yourself off from the mystical or you’ll be-you’ll remain-completely lost. You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will. You don’t have to like it, of course.”

“The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.”

“Ha-ha-ha! That’s right, things aren’t so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry. Just look at that parking lot.”

I thought about my first pastorate (I wasn’t even out of college) and my first visit to see a church member who came sporadically. I got a call that her husband had died. They had had a hard life, but they had had it together; she was devastated. He, literally, was all she had. I got to her house and she was sitting on the porch. I sat down in the chair next to hers and she began to cry and tell me how she had found him and how bad it hurt. I had no idea what to say, but I felt like I had to say something.

“I know just how you feel,” is what came out, my feeble attempt at compassion. She stopped sobbing in a snap and looked up from her hands.

“Do you really?”

“No,” I answered. “I just didn’t know what else to say.”

She began to cry again, and I sat there in silence with my hand on her shoulder. About ten minutes later, another church member, who had been a widow for forty years, drove up. When she stepped on to the porch, she said the very same sentence I had uttered, only it was informed by her life and their friendship. I was her pastor, but not her minister that afternoon.

When Marshak finally speaks in the film, he says, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies . . . then what?”

You may not recognize the lyric printed as a quote, but if I played the drums and guitar, you could sing the whole verse and answer the question:

when the truth is found to be lies
and all the hope within you dies
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you’d better find somebody to love

Cathleen Falsani (who has a book, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, that I want to read) writes in an article about the questions raised in the film,

Perhaps an answer, insomuch as there can be one, lies in something Rilke said in his Letters to a Young Poet:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves … Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way to the answer.

Or at least spend the morning sitting around a table with people you trust enough to ask the questions out loud and remember we are in this together. As Ginger quoted Pierce Pettis, from a song born of his own deep personal pain:

we’re all in this together
we’re all in this alone

My day wandered from the Bible study to errands to work and then back home, where I came in to find how the tsunamis set in motion by the earthquake had traveled as far as Hawaii while I had roamed the neighborhood. I took the trash out under a full moon on a cloudless night. What truth I know has not failed me and the hope within is thriving, thank you. Still, tonight, I am grateful that I have somebody to love.

Peace,
Milton

God has made a habit of gathering
undesirables, the less than perfect,
or at least those as broken as they
are brazen – I could name names
but it serves just as well to look in
a mirror, or around most any room
filled with the fallen and faithful;
what privilege I enjoy I have not
earned; any hardship or suffering
I have endured was not inflicted;
what sense of belonging I have
known, what love I have found –
or has found me – came wrapped
in the dusty envelope of humanity,
fraught with fingerprints that point
to both a checkered past and a promise
that love binds us together because
it is not earned, but given and received.

Peace,
Milton

Over the years of writing this blog, I’ve made some connections with other blog writers. I wish I knew a better way to say it, but our vocabulary hasn’t caught up with our lives just yet. These folks are more than acquaintances because we have shared things about ourselves with each other, but they aren’t friends because we have a strictly virtual relationship, if you will. If I could find a way to become friends, I think I would choose to make a trip to Canada first to find Bill Kinnon. Something in the way he writes and thinks, and the role music plays in his life, makes me think we would hit it off swimmingly, that we would find we could trust the resonance we feel in cyber-space. That very resonance is what I’m leaning into tonight from his post about Job and Thomas.

It caught my eye because I’m beginning a four-week Saturday morning study on Job at church, using story as starting place. By that I mean, I want to start with the art of the tale, rather than see how fast we can bring our theological presuppositions to bear. What if we let ourselves begin with, “Once upon a time, there was a man named Job,” and see where that might take us. Bill has given me a great way to think about the story by sharing a quote from a sermon by Fleming Rutledge:

Now if God had answered Job in the way that we would expect, with soothing explanations and comforting reassurances, then the answer to the question, “Is there a God beyond what we can imagine?” would have to be, No. Anyone can imagine a God who does what we expect. The reason that so many people have complained that God’s answer to Job is no answer at all is that they want a God who fits their preconceptions. Job, however, is manifestly satisfied. The God who is really God has come to him and has revealed himself as the one who was already present, already at work before there was anyone to imagine him. God is the author of creation; the creation is not the author of God. This was revealed to Job by the living voice and presence of God’s own self. That was enough.

Yeah, I know I’m already jumping to the final scene before I even had my first Saturday session, but I love the idea that what “satisfied” Job, after everything that had happened and all that he had had to put up with from his alleged friends, was a God who didn’t give him the answers he expected. One of the ways Daniel Levitin talks about the songs that matter most to us – the ones that get under our skin and into our hearts – is they set the stage by offering a recognizable melody pattern and then, when we think we know where its going, take an unexpected turn in pitch or rhythm or timbre that makes us take notice: we remember the songs that catch us by surprise and expand the pattern in new directions. So it is with the melody of theology, with the songs God sings.

Bill goes on to use a quote that wasn’t far from where my mind went:

I am reminded of the children in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe who are afraid of Aslan when they first hear of him. When Lucy asks if he’s “safe,” Mr. Beaver replies, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

The Narnia scene I thought of comes from the children’s second visit through the wardrobe, all of them a bit more grown up. Lucy, the youngest, is the one who sees Aslan and runs to meet him.

“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan. At last.”
…She gazed up into the large wise face. “Welcome child,” he said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

However far I go, or however much I grow, there is more God than there is me. When comfort is my primary need, I love the image of falling into the grace of a God whose compassion exceeds my imagination. When I’m working to make meaning of my life, the reality of a God who is more than the answers to my questions, whose sense of humor baffles my wit, whose capacity for irony and nuance makes my story telling read like a phone book, whose tenacious love outshines anything I know experientially is disquieting. Once I get past what I know to be true and still struggle to accept: there is a God and it’s not me, the disquietude offers room to breathe and belong.

I know you can do all things
and nothing you wish is impossible…
I have spoken of the unspeakable,
and tried to grasp the infinite…
I had heard of you with my ears,
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.
(Job 42:1-6)

“I’ve really got to use my imagination,” Gladys Knight used to sing, “to think of good reasons to keep on keeping on.” The first we were breathed into existence by a God who is crazy enough to imagine us, in the first place, and tenacious enough to not give up on us. As Pierce Pettis sings,

when you rise up just to fall again
God believes in you
deserted by your closest friend
God believes in you
when you’re betrayed with a kiss
you turn your cheek to another fist
it doesn’t have to end like this
God believes in you

Now that’s a story worth telling.

Peace,
Milton

Over the past several days, I’ve only been able to see bits and pieces of the Winter Olympics, partly because of my work schedule and partly because I’ve chosen other things. I’ve let my knowledge of what’s going on be fed, mostly, by the highlight reels and news blurbs. I’ve heard enough of Joannie Rochette’s story to be moved by what I read about her performance, even though I didn’t see it: she skated two days after her mother’s death in Vancouver. Tonight, the over-riding theme appeared to be near misses, or perhaps I would do better to simply say living with mistakes. Sven Kramer, a Dutch skater who set an Olympic record with his speed skating performance, was disqualified because his coach told him to change lanes at the wrong time. The South Korean women’s short track team, who had won four straight gold medals, was disqualified because one of them grazed a Chinese skater – after they had won the race. Lindsey Vonn, an American expected to medal, fell in the Giant Slalom while her teammate, Julia Mancuso, was on the course. They stopped Mancuso in the middle of a great run and made her re-ski; she ended up eighteenth. For every medalist, there are any number of stories of those who fell short of what they hoped to accomplish at the Olympics.

I was back into Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music this morning, reading the chapter, “What Makes a Musician?” The short answer is practice. Though he was willing to admit some of us have more affinity than others when it comes to playing and singing, the way one becomes an expert musician (or anything else, for that matter) is by practice.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – anything. In study after study, of composers, players, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years . . . It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. (197)

No doubt, everyone of the athletes I mentioned above, as well as everyone else out there with them, have put in their ten thousand hours and all the practice and expertise in the world doesn’t guarantee a gold medal, or even a mistake-free performance in the moment when it appears to matter most. As sit and watch their performances, framed by the announcers in a gold-or-nothing value system, its hard not to think of those who didn’t make it as failures. And we mean it as a bad thing. Levitin, again.

We also know that, on average, successful people have had many more failures than unsuccessful people. This seems counterintuitive. How could successful people have failed more than everyone else? Failure is unavoidable and sometimes happens randomly. It’s what you do after the failure that is important. (207)

Though he goes on to make a case for sticking to it, whatever it is, the reality of life is a string of courageous failures does not necessarily end in a triumphant medal ceremony at some point. In one of my favorite movies, Miss Firecracker, Holly Hunter plays Carnelle Scott, a woman in the last year of her eligibility for the Miss Firecracker Contest in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her sister had won it years before and Carnelle is sure she can do the same, even though the odds seem insurmountable. When her name is called, she places fifth. In the midst of her disappointment, she gets up to march in the parade. Her sister condescendingly tells her she doesn’t have to go and Carnelle answers, “When you come in fifth place, you have to march behind the float.” Later, Mac Sam, the come-and-go love of her life says to her, “I’ll always remember you as the one who could take it on the chin.”

Not long after, she says, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.”

“Not much,” he answers with a laughing cough.

“But something,” she persists.

“Eternal grace,” comes the reply.

If we could all sit down together and share, each of us would have some sort of “what if” or near miss moment that felt as cataclysmic as life looked to those failing Olympians we saw today. Looking back, perhaps, some of those moments proved to be life-altering and some didn’t. Tonight, though, I’m thinking more about the little failures and defeats that wear away at us the way feet have worn down the stone steps of the Boston Public Library over the years: the daily wear and tear that makes life feel as though that’s what life is. Mary Oliver says it this way in her poem, “The Wild Geese”:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Yes, it does, and it calls us not to be defined by the little collections of failures anymore than we want to be remembered by our big mistakes. Everyone of the failers tonight in Vancouver had someone they went to, someone who held them, or cried with them, someone who reminded them they were not alone. My lead in to the Olympics was Patty Griffin’s song, “Little Fire,” from her new album, Downtown Church. At the end of a day that held a failure or two of my own, I’ll end it with her words and music.

my friend come and stand beside me
lately I’m feeling so along
a flood came and washed the stones of the path away
and a hot sun turned the mud to dust


calling the sheep in for the evening
there’s a voice that calls above the howling wind
it says come rest beside my little fire
we’ll ride out the storm that’s coming in


my friend you know me and my family
you’ve seen us wandering through these times
you’ve seen us in weakness and in power
you’ve seen us forgetful and unkind


all that I want is one who knows me
a kind hand on my face when I weep
and I’d give back these things I know are meaningless
for a little fire to warm me when I sleep

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Sunday night I was working at the Durham restaurant when one of the servers came to tell me that Chuck, one of our vets, was in the dining room. (It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a clinic to raise Schnauzers.) He and his wife were well into the entrees of her birthday dinner when I finally got out to their table to say hello. Our conversation bounced a round a bit, but after a while I asked her what she did for a job and she said, “I practice sports medicine and urgent care.” Who knows why, but I woke up thinking about her statement, particularly her choice of verb: practice.
“We wage war,” I thought to myself, “and we practice healing.”

Maybe its all the reading about music, or watching and listening to Bill Mallonee Saturday night as he deftly played and sang his way through wonderful songs and stories, or the pull to pick up my guitar because I have a gig with my friend, Terry, in about six weeks and, well, I need to practice.

Practice: the word came into English a half a millennium ago carrying much the same definition it does now: to perform repeatedly to acquire skill. A hundred years later, people began using it in relation to professions: “she practices law.” Yet, it was hardly a hundred years ago that people began using it in relation to faith: “he is a practicing Christian.”

I got home late from work last night and sat down with Ginger and the pups with no other intention other than to sit down with Ginger and the pups. Amidst the conversation and puppy rubbing, we began watching the ice dancing and came in just as the Canadian couple who won the gold medal began their routine. Sunday night, as I was sitting at the bar at the restaurant finishing the produce order, I got to see the last few minutes of the USA-Canada hockey game. I had the same thought in both situations, as I watched people moving across the frozen floor on burnished blades with ease and expertise: how did they learn to do that?

Practice.

A number of years ago, Billy Crockett and I wrote a song called “Walking on the Earth,” which was inspired by the call to “Carpe Diem” in Dead Poet’s Society. The song began

walking on the earth for a little while
how do how do we make it count
kicking up the dust for another mile
how do how do we make it count

As the sentiment unfolded, we said

walking on the earth it’s your only trip
how do how do we make it count
there is no practice life, this is it
how do how do we make it count

I still love both the song and the movie, and, tonight I would like to make one small change to the lyric

there is a practice life: this is it.

Practice healing. Practice kindness. Practice compassion. Practice guitar and piano, harmonica and mandolin. Practice breaking eggs and painting flowers. Practice friendship and kindness and sitting still. Practice eating well and walking dogs and taking to neighbors. Practice having friends over for dinner and meeting for coffee. Practice affirming one another. Practice having fun for no particular reason. Practice singing with the radio while the car windows are down. At a stop light. With the windows down. Practice following your heart. Practice listening and praying and singing hymns. Practice talking to little kids. Practice laughing out loud. Practice asking questions that don’t have answers. Practice resurrection.

I know the last phrase because of my friend, Tim, who practices life whole-heartedly. The phrase is the title of his blog, and is taken from this poem by Wendell Berry who practices farming and poetry.

Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front


Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.


So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.


Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.


Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?


Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Practice Lent. Practice Love. Practice Life.

Peace,
Milton