don't eat alone

If you want to be in power,
you have to have money;
if you want to be invited,
you have to be somebody;
if you want to be in charge,
you had better be rich;
if you want to be noticed,
you’d better know somebody.
That’s the way of this world:
this tiny planet, tucked away
in a fold of the universe,
not the best or brightest,
nor richest or most important,
despite our machinations.

Still, when our Creator
chose to enter creation
dressed as a creature,
God came here: to earth,
not because we were
important, but because
we weren’t, leaving us
to lifetimes filled with
having to come to terms
with love we cannot earn.

Peace,
Milton

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. (Luke 2:6 KJV)

I first learned the story the same way
Linus told it: in language so old
that some of the words had been lost
or forgotten, others changed.

No one says, “the days were accomplished”
anymore, unless you’re Linus or
the liturgist on Christmas Eve
saying, “she should be delivered”

In the beginning, God spoke and the
universe exploded into existence;
but the Baby is born in passive
voice: how silently the gift is given.

Peace,
Milton

I managed to avoid the mall this season until today. I had to go because that’s where the stuff I needed was being kept (Ginger and Jay were going, too), so, as long as we were going, we decided at least part of the afternoon should be spent at the movies; we saw Invictus.

Put it on your Must See List.

As Jay and I were winding our way, I got a phone call from a religion reporter in Austin who is writing a story about David Gentiles for the newspaper this weekend. As I talked about Davy, I told her he is one of the reasons I trust the veracity of the Incarnation because David incarnated God’s love as well as anyone I know. The movie reminded me that Nelson Mandela falls in that category as well, though I don’t personally know him. As Matt Damon’s character, Francois Pienaar, says of Mandela after visiting the cell at Robben Island where he was imprisoned, “I was thinking how he could spend thirty years in a tiny cell and then come out and forgive the ones who put him there.” Mandela told Francois he had been inspired by poetry (hooray!), particularly “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. I found it when I got home.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The question Mandela kept asking was how to inspire people to be more than they imagined they could be. Listening to NPR as we drove home, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison with the imaginative and transformative leadership of Mandela and the partisan bickering and (I don’t even know what to call it) that plagues most every member of Congress, causing them to treat each other with the incivility and immaturity of a grade school playground (my apologies to grade schoolers). I am not inspired. I also didn’t intend to head towards a rant this evening, so I will change my tack.

At the end of the movie, they showed pictures of the people portrayed in the movie. When I came home, I looked for video of the rugby team and found this video of the team singing “Nkosi Sikelele Africa,” the South African national anthem, before the start of a game with England in 2007. The anthem itself is both song and metaphor for South Africa: it has parts in the four languages primarily spoken in the country. The video is amazing to me because the rugby team is primarily Afrikaners and they are singing their hearts out. They are testament to the power of forgiveness and compassion; you can’t beat unity into people, you must lead them.

My friend Gordon Atkinson preached a sermon Sunday calling us to “be the manger.” His wife, Jeanene, is the one who told me about it (she’s my friend, too).

He said that whether we are ready or not, Christ will come. The reality is that we don’t have to be ready, we don’t have to “have it all together,” we just have to receive the Christ child: it’s our job to be the manger.

I love the image. We are called to be a place, a heart, a being, that can receive and hold Christ. Thirty years in a cell that was hardly big enough for him to lay down, and Nelson Mandela was still a manger, still a receptacle of Love, because he refused to be defined by his calling rather than his circumstance. As we gather with shepherds and wise men again this year that Christ might be born again among us, the choice has not changed: will we fight or forgive?

Peace,
Milton

It’s late, the dinner shift was busy, and I am missing my friend David. I’ve turned to music we shared together, particularly Mark Heard and Pierce Pettis. One of Pierce’s songs, “I’ve Got a Hope,” keeps circling around. I tried to find it on YouTube to no avail, but here is the lyric. It comes from his State of Grace CD, which is worth the investment.

Man is born to trouble
All the days of his life
As the sparks fly upward
From bonfires at night
They fill up the heavens
With pinpoints of light
And I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

Time, it is turning
Like a plow in the field
It roots up the earth
And what’s hidden is revealed
Sewing the future
While the past, it is sealed
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

Half of the battle
Is only with myself
While the other half
Is something I can’t help

Lest I should stumble
I try not to forget
That every hair is numbered
Every footstep, every breath
And this life that I’m living
It will not end in death
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

I’m going to let his words be enough for this night.

Peace,
Milton

Last night our little town of Durham lay in the path of a winter storm working it’s way up the East Coast and we got enough snow to make it feel real. Once the ground was covered, I walked out into the street to take a picture of our house with lights aglow. Because the first attempt let me know the shutter speed was too slow for me to hold the camera steady, I flipped open the flash and took another one, lucking into this wonderful shot of the illuminated house framed by the shining snowflakes caught in the flash of the moment.

I managed to get up and out of the house this morning to run some errands and end up at Guglhuph, one of our great local places, for lunch with Ginger and a Massachusetts friend who is moving to the area. I got there early so I would have some time to read, sat down with my coffee, only to find Raymo talking about photography and referring to Janet Malcolm, who says the serious photographer resists “the blandishments of color.”

“It is black-and-white photography,” she says, “that demands of the photographer close attention to the world of color, while color photography permits him to forget it” . . . The black-and-white medium is hard, says Malcolm, color easy. The former requires art, the latter doesn’t. (131)

Here’s the house, then, in black-and-white.

Many years ago, when David Gentiles was youth minister at Hunter’s Glen Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, he invited Billy Crockett and I to come for a weekend. Billy’s concert was the real draw; Dave knew we were working on songs for a new record and he invited me to come along and then he paid for a couple of extra nights in the hotel so we could do some writing. The song that came out of one all-night session was called “Song and Dance,” an unabashedly joyful look at life taking off of the scripture verses that talk about the trees clapping their hands in praise to God, and we wrote:

put away your woes
let ‘em go let ‘em go
they’re gonna be here tomorrow
tune your hearts
to the birds that fly
out on the edge of the deep blue sky
can you hear the music
through the circumstance
listen to the laughter
in the song and dance

I still love that song. It is a full-speed-ahead-arms-wide-open-Snoopy-dancing-in-the-leaves-run-and-jump-and-love-will-catch-you expression of hope and faith that still rings true for me. It’s also akin to my photograph in the snow last night, or driving through the variegated splendor of a New England autumn and taking a picture of the leaves. It’s going to be a great picture because you’re taking a picture of something great. But how do you find the spirit in the song when the color drains from the scene?

Grief is in black-and-white: the winter of the heart, a season of skeleton trees, long dark days, and bone-chilling cold. One note I read in the exchange between friends talking about David quoted C. S. Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief feels like fear.” And fear is the antithesis of love and faith and art. We know that well as a nation because we have allowed fear to be our driving force far too often since September 11, 2001, and that fear has robbed us of too much of our imagination, compassion, and hope. Though it may feel like fear, grief is not the same thing. Grief is loss and pain, and coming to terms with our limits and mortality. As the Sundays sing, “Here’s where the story ends.”

Yes and no. It is also where art and faith and love show their strength and offer some of their best music through the circumstance.

“The art of observing the night sky,” Raymo says, “is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination” (133). He goes on:

Stargazing, like black-and-white photography, demands close attention to color. There are no ravishing sunsets in the midnight sky, no deciduous riots of red and gold in the forest of the night. The snapshooter turns from the telescope in despair, but the artful observer will take the hint and let his imagination enrich the palette. William Henry Smyth fixed his telescope on the stars and saw “crocus,” “damson,” “sardonyx,” and “smalt.” This is the kind of imagination that labels paint chips . . . Of hints and traits we make our way. (135)

Faith and art and love are best expressed as a response, which also means in the context of relationships. The insidious thing about the fear that grips us as a nation is it is generalized: we are scared of big things, broad strokes, which makes us frightened of pretty much everything. Seeing a bogeyman under every bed is not imaginative, it is incapacitating. We respond, therefore, with force and violence, neither of which is artful, faithful, or loving.

The pilgrim who would find his way to the edge of the galaxies and to the beginning of time must forgo daylight’s easy color and launch himself upon the black-and-white sea of the night and in those huge spaces find stars the colors of damson, crocus, grape, and straw. (138)

Jesus, it seems to me, was born in black-and-white, bringing a trace of color into a world full of fear and grief. And the angels sang to the shepherds. As I grieve David’s death, I wait in the dark for a birth, for Christ to be born again this year. I can see the traces of color and the hints of hope in the those of us who knew and loved David – and also know and love each other – have worked to not let grief turn to fear, but are finding ways to share our love, to tighten the bonds, and to imagine we can hear the music, even through this circumstance; we look out into the darkness and we see the colors of “friendship,” “compassion,” and “trust.”

The very first song I wrote with Billy for a youth camp said

here’s another picture of life
all of us together with Christ
its an open heart
it’s a work of art
it’s the basic stuff
that makes another picture of love

It’s still true — even in black and white.

Peace,
Milton

I wrote last night about a friend in ICU. Tonight I write to say my friend, David Gentiles, died earlier this evening with his daughters gathered around him. I’ve been staring at the computer screen for a couple of hours looking for words and have come up empty. My friend is gone: my heart hurts, my mind struggles to comprehend what has happened. David was one of the Good Guys – no, one of the Great Guys, a person who lived with passion and intentionality, grace and integrity, unflappable hope (after all, he was a Cleveland Indians fan) and tenacious love. You can get a good picture of him by watching this.

And now he is not here. And I am.

Just before I got the news, I finished reading A Circle of Quiet and found this in the closing paragraphs:

Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses’ vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light.

The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way. (246)

The clouds of grief and sorrow now descended, I pray for eyes to see what lies beyond and after both light and loss. Our world is a little dimmer tonight.

Peace,
Milton

I have spent the last couple of days waiting for news about an old friend who was severely injured and is in ICU; beyond that, the details are not mine to share. Our friendship goes back about twenty-five years, I think; it seems tonight that we have always known each other. My sadness has let memories seep in, taking me back to youth camp days together. In those days, Billy Crockett used to sing a blues song called “The Bottom of Life,” which began with

I’ve got a question, Mr. Jesus, tell me what’s at the bottom of life?

As the song played in my mind today, I found myself rewriting the lyric to ask, what’s in the middle of life? We talk of bottoms and tops, looking to the edges of existence, to the boundaries, and yet most of life gets lived in the middles. We are on the way, a work in progress; other than the days that mark our birth and death, life gets lived in the middles. Growing up, I learned A. A. Milne’s poem, “Halfway Down the Stairs.” (The Muppets — or someone — turned it into a song, but I learned it as spoken verse.

Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn’t any
other stair
quite like
it.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
so this is the stair
where
I always
stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!

Life, I suppose, is more escalator than stairs, when it comes to metaphor: even the stairs are moving. We are not sitting still. The ground on which we stand is spinning on its axis, revolving around the sun, and swirling in the galaxy. Nothing stays in place for long. As I was talking about last night, the middle makes it hard to find a sense of perspective. You can gain your bearings at sea once you sight the shore, but out in the middle is another story.

The middle is not the center. Life doesn’t explain itself with that kind of geography. We’re in the middle, as in middle of the night, or middle of a thought, or “I’m in the middle of something.” We live in the tension of the now and the not yet, between here and gone, between (as Madeleine L’Engle says) “the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable or as not needing forgiveness” (233). A few pages earlier, she talked about what and how we learn from life, how the middles add up to a life:

Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver’s body works kinesthetically; steering wheel, brake, accelerator – if you have to think about using each one of these you won’t dare drvie on a major highway. A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought.

I’m convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we’ve made all our lives; who we have used as our mentors; as our points of reference. (222)

For most of maritime history, sailors out in the middle of the ocean used the stars to find their way; they chose to see themselves in the middle of the constants – the stars in the sky — rather than lost in the vastness of the unpredictable sea. However endless the water appeared, they knew how to find their way home. Even in the midst of stormy seas, the stars held true. When I learned of my friend’s accident, my response was to do what I have done over and over: to call the circle of friends we share, that we might find each other in the dark and find our way together in the middle of these days.

I know, Mr. Jesus, what’s in the middle of life.

Peace,
Milton

If someone were driving by our church tonight, they might have mistaken us for Baptists: the parking lot was full on a Wednesday night. The choir was rehearsing, with orchestra, for their Vivaldi offering on Sunday, the bilingual English class was having their Christmas party in the Fellowship Hall, and a group of us were gathered in the Dowdy Room (not a descriptive adjective, but the name of someone) for our annual Blue Christmas service, designed to allow those who are grieving or struggling to have permission to feel something other than full of holiday cheer. It’s one of my favorite services of the year and, in every church where we have had the service, it’s always a small crowd.

I know there are more than ten people in our church who are struggling through the season. I also realize there are any number of reasons they might not have been there; I’m not making a judgment here. I just wish for more because of what the service means to those who do participate. There is wonder-working power in shared grief and pain. We hold each other up and we learn from each other. I see my pain differently when I am sharing the load with those around me.

Chet Raymo sends my looking skyward, once more:

If we want to understand the Milky Way, it is usually best to look to other galaxies. The Milky Way is the one galaxy we cannot see in its entirety because we are inside it. (114)

We certainly feel our pain up close, yet when it comes to making meaning out of our existence we must look out, look toward one another in order to gain some perspective. I learned about my depression by reading what others lived through and by talking to almost anyone willing to share their experience. Had I been left solely to stare out into my own darkness, I couldn’t have found my way through deepest midnight of those days. Still, it seems we have to train ourselves to need one another, even when we know we don’t want to be alone. Living intentionally means choosing to live in community until it becomes second nature.

One of my favorite parts of the service tonight was the closing reading, which accompanied the lighting of four candles. I offer it as a view into our little constellation of compassion.

One: The first candle we light to remember those whom we have loved and lost. We pause to remember their names, their faces, their voices, the memory that binds them to us in this season. (Light first candle.)
All: May God’s eternal love surround us as we hold them near.

One: This second candle we light is to redeem the path of loss: the loss of relationships, the loss of jobs, the loss of health, the loss of dreams. (Light second candle.) We pause to gather up the pain of the past and offer it to God, asking that from God’s hands we receive the gift of peace.
All: Refresh, restore, renew us, O God, and lead us into your future.

One: This third candle we light is to remember ourselves this Christmas time. We pause and remember the disbelief, the anger, the down times, the poignancy of reminiscing, the hugs and handshakes of family and friends, and all those who stood with us. (Light third candle.)
All: Let us remember that dawn defeats darkness.

One: This fourth candle is to remember our faith and the gift of hope which the Christmas story offers to us. (Light fourth candle.) We remember that God who shares our live promises us a place and a time of no more pain and suffering.
All: Let us remember the One who shows the way, who brings the truth, and bears the light.

And then we sang:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by;
Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting Light!
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

As we sat silently, the Spanish folks snacked down the hall and, in the sanctuary, the singers and strings practiced for their concert; then we all went out into the night, as the galaxies gazed and glistened.

Peace,
Milton

After a week with my in-laws, a week where I didn’t have to work and had time to cook dinner in the evenings, I’ve had two days of double shifts split between lunch at the Duke restaurants (making soups, mostly) and evening catering jobs, one on a grand scale (520 people) and the other, a family’s holiday party (eighty people and a big house, but small by comparison). Though the two events were for the same reason, I found tonight’s much easier, and more fun, because I was in someone’s house – in their kitchen – cooking for friends. As I put platters together to go to the table, I stood in the eye of the storm of affection and connection that swirled though the house, fueled by laughter, conversation, and a good amount of wine. The same dynamic may have been a part of the larger event, but I never saw any of the people I was feeding; that was the difference.

Proximity matters.

My most recent Raymo readings (before my double shifts) found him talking about the dark matter that makes up most of the universe, continuing to puzzle astronomers and most anyone else who thinks about it:

“Ninety-seven percent of the stuff in the universe,” I said,” is stuff about which we know absolutely nothing.” “It is probably the best stuff, too,” my friend replied. The turth is that astronomers do not as yet have any idea what this “stuff” is that holds the stars in their galactic orbits. (104)

He goes on to say the thinking about what may fill it has more to do with small than large.

Other forms of “dark stuff” have been suggested by the physicists who investigate the realm of the subatomic: hoards of neutrinos, each endowed with an imperceptible whiff of mass; or a gas of yet-to-be-discovered “gravitinos” or “photinos” or “axions,” particles a trillion times lighter than electrons, hypothetical entities that no one could have thought of them did not wander like a pilgrim among the modern kingdoms of Prester John, the worlds of infinitely large and infinitely small. (105)

The more I read Raymo (and watch things like TED talks), the more I begin to understand today’s scientists are people of imagination, mystery, and even faith. These folks are looking into the night sky and imagining – even describing and naming – magnificently minuscule particles that might fill up the darkness. L’Engle agrees, getting to the same place by another way:

Science, literature, art, theology: it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language. (209)

I drove to Chapel Hill this evening listening to stories about the climate change conference in Copenhagen, troops being deployed to Afghanistan from right here in North Carolina, among other things. Whatever the technological medium, I can be bounced around the world in a minute, challenged to take in more information than I know what to do with. The term “global village” may work as a metaphor as far as how information can be disseminated, but it breaks down when it comes to describing what holds us together. We are left feeling like the astronomers, wondering what is in the dark matter between us. Even in the smaller party this evening, I noticed those who talked to me as though I were a person and those who only saw the uniform and allowed me to become as invisible as a gravitino.

I came home tonight to news that a friend far away is in critical condition. I found messages from other mutual friends, all of us trying to find each other in the dark, counting on our connectedness to get us through the questions we have tonight and the explanations that will come tomorrow. I stood alone in a room filled with people tonight and came home to an empty house to feel close to my friends all because of our shared pain: we needed to find each other.

Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general. (L’Engle 193)

Proximity matters. Like love, we feel pain when it has a face, a name. Our names, the subatomic stuff of the universe, connect us and bind us together in the dark.

Peace,
Milton

I’m not sure how much preparing
food for five hundred is like
preparing the way of the Lord,
but I’ve had morning, afternoon,
and evening to think about it.

The best division of labor was
to choose and do one thing:
I grilled vegetables – squash,
actually – for an hour or two.
It was not the featured food,

but it was my part in getting
ready, my contribution as a
member of the company of
cooks assigned to prepare the
meal on this (almost) wintry night.

Peace,
Milton