We stood in a circle
in the sunshine on the
patio where we had waved
palm fronds barely an hour
before; now we were sharing
bread and wine, basking
in the brilliant spring shine,
our solemn ritual exposed,
on purpose, made public,
taken outdoors, alive;
our ministers in stoles
and sunglasses.
The future’s so sacred,
we gotta wear shades.
Peace,
Milton
Time like an ever-rolling stream
bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.
(Isaac Watts)
Let’s go Red Sox!
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — and of course, Opening Day has been postponed due to inclement weather; after all, it is April in Boston.
I have great news: my friend, Nathan Brown, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry with his latest book, Two Tables Over. I know. The sentence begs a couple of questions:
The answer to both questions is yes. Poetry does come out of Oklahoma, and it’s good. Nathan is a determined and gifted person who works hard at his craft and has a great deal to say. I quoted one of his poems a couple of days ago. Here’s another of my favorites from his new book.
Taking it Back
They stand there flash shocked
in a black and white photograph
right beneath the caption:
55 Years Perfect Attendance.Turns out to be for Sunday School.
His hand barely touches the back
of her arm. They’re both
uncomfortable with the contact.Tiny, frightened eyes panic
behind big bifocal lenses.
They’re thinkin’ about the drive home
in front of a dirt road dust cloud
that will eventually settle somewhere
far to the east on the grassy plain.And, you know?
I was going to wind this down
to a great, sarcastic finish . . .
something to do with religion.But, honestly, I’m touched by such
commitment. People like this actually
still exist. And there’s something
I know I should be grateful for
in the way they balance out
a world gone mostly mad.
Treat yourself to a volume of Nathan’s poetry (he has five). You will find something to feed your heart and you will help him pay some bills. Turns out, though the Oklahoma Book Award is a great honor, it doesn’t come with much of a cash prize.
Peace,
Milton
I dug a grave today.
It was a first for me. The call came early this morning from church friends Tracy and Robin saying their beloved beagle, Violet, was going to be put to sleep. Ginger was up and out of the house in minutes. About a half hour later she called and asked me to meet her at their house to bury their pet. I put my shovel in the back of my Cherokee and drove over to share in what was a very sacred time. They brought Violet down from the house, beautifully swaddled in a sheet, and laid her in the place we had dug at the bottom of the yard, next to the fence that backs up on the wooded land behind them. Nellie, their beagle puppy, ran around us as I dug and they grieved, a visible sign of hope beyond the loss. As we were putting the grass back on top of the grave, Robin threw a piece of a root over the fence into the woods and said, “It’s good to be on the edge of the wilderness.”
Yes, and meaningful.
The physical act of digging the grave and placing the body of the dear little dog down in the dirt had a visceral effect on me. There was a time when people were more accustomed to living with death, and dealing with it. The old row houses in Boston have “coffin corners” – small indentions in the wall of the stairway so the coffin could make the turns when the body was brought into the house for the wake. People dug graves together, waked the body together, buried their loved ones and threw dirt on the coffin together. They got to say goodbye with body, mind, and heart in a way we do not these days. Our funeral rituals are quiet and solemn and do their best to keep us from seeing anything but flowers. I felt honored today to get to share so practically and poignantly in the grief of our friends. It is good to be on the edge of the wilderness – together.
My afternoon was an exhumation of sorts, and unintentional at that.
We finally got to some boxes of books that have been in the shed since we moved into the house. We’ve been staining bookshelves and are ready to fill them, so today we started bringing in the books and helping them find their places on our shelves. (We also set some aside to find new lives on other people’s shelves.) I opened one box to find binders of poetry and lyrics going back seventeen or eighteen years, words I had allowed to get buried under the passing of time. Some of them would do well to stay underground, but some deserve to be resurrected, if you will, to find a new life in these new days. I have no idea what I will do with them, but I know I’ve got to dig back in and see what is there, find what I had to offer.
On October 26, 1992 I wrote:
sacred rituals
she can’t fall asleep till her daddy sings songs
the porch light stays on until everyone’s home
there’s a note in his lunch box to find everyday
and she plants every year as the snow melts awayhe doesn’t get up till he’s hit the snooze twice
if it’s Tuesday night then it’s chicken and rice
each time they meet they exchange and embrace
before she eats dinner she bows to say gracethe meaning of lifeagain and again
as oft as you eat
as oft as you drink
remember me
remember me and you
Our church is continuing our Lenten practice of celebrating Communion a different way each Sunday even as we participate in the long tradition of Palm Sunday. I love walking in with the palm branches and singing together because it brings the same kind of physicality to worship I found in working the shovel to make a place for Violet. When it comes time for Communion, we are all going to process out of the sanctuary, rather than up to the altar, and celebrate the meal outside on the front patio as a way of physically reminding ourselves we are carrying Christ with us as we go into our daily routines.
The Body of Christ – to go.
My notebooks full of words and ideas got lost because they never got attached to anyone. If they find life now, it will be because I find a way to flesh them out into a poem or a song to share, to make them something more than an idea dreamed up in the comfort of my own home. The rituals that matter – whether in shovel or song or sacrament – are the ones that bind us together, here on the edge of the wilderness.
Peace,
Milton
Ginger and I have spent the day around the house getting it ready for our new housemate and dear friend, Cherry, who has packed up the plans in her car and is leaving Boston to come and live with us here in the Bull City. In the process of our cleaning, I came across Congregational Chow, a cookbook I helped put together with the youth group at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas when I was youth minister there – in 1986.
My favorite section of the book came about at the suggestion of someone else in the church, and that was to ask the children in our preschool Sunday School classes to give us their favorite recipes and then to add them to the cookbook verbatim, which we did. Here are a couple of them:
BAKED POTATO
Take one Irish potato and put it in the microwave. Cook for 50 minutes. It’s done because the bell rings. Put butter and cheese on it. Eat it. (Alison, age 5)CORN
Green corn with butter. add pepper and salt, stir. Put it in the oven at 68 degrees. Cook for 20 minutes, then put lettuce on it. It’s ready to eat. (Wesley, age 4)TURKEY AND DRESSING
Put turkey sauce on the turkey and put salt on top. Cook it on top of the stove for 25 mintues or so. It’s done when it gets real dark. Mix up some popcorn and a drink to go with it. (Margie, age 5)OATMEAL COOKIES
Take oatmeal and put it in a big bowl. Then put it in another bowl. Add pepper and milk. Stir and stir. Bake it in a hot oven at one degree for just forty weeks. (Ethel Mae, age 3)PUMPKIN PIE
Take out a pan, scrub it out if it’s dirty. Now that you have a clean pan, take some dough and roll it out and then cook it. After you cook it, you put different color dots on it. Put about four glasses of cooked pumpkin in it. Then you put orange icing and black for the eyes and mouth. Then it’s done. (Margie, age 5)
What I love about the recipes is the perspective. The kids were telling how they saw those things being made, remembering details that made the most impression, or perhaps repeating things they heard in the kitchen (“Now that you have a clean pan . . .). An pastor friend of mine asked his four year old son what he thought his dad did for a job and the boy thought for a minute and said, “You talk on the phone a lot.” That’s what it looked like from where he stood. Though our perspective may widen as we age, we still make up our own recipes.
The events of the past few days (sorry, can’t go into more detail) have reminded me that, though we are all trying to make a life, we can come up with very different recipes for what that life looks like. In a series of interactions this week I saw how one person’s primary ingredient was power. It’s how she evaluates relationships and responds to them. She wants the power and doesn’t want to share it. For the most part, that ingredient doesn’t much show up in my recipe, so I had to work hard to figure out what was happening between us because what I was saying was not what was being heard.
When we start to talk about faith we have the same issues. Growing up Southern Baptist, I was brought up with a lot of battle imagery. Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war. We talked about fighting Satan and being prayer warriors. The overarching images of Christianity were ones of conflict and conquest, and we were in it to win it. The difficulty with that recipe, for me, is wars require enemies. Once one is defeated, another must take its place or the recipe falls apart. The circle gets smaller and smaller until we are left shooting at each other.
The recipe of faith I have been working on for most of my adult life is less about conflict than it is about community. It’s less about measuring up than making room, less about who is right than who is here, less about wars than welcomes. I’m pointing out the differences to point to the difficulty of understanding just how the other recipe works. Some who see themselves fighting for truth might look at my recipe and think it ranks right up there with Margie’s pumpkin pie – well-intentioned, but lacking a complete understanding. When I have written about responding to violence with violence being neither a successful nor Christian response, I’ve gotten comments trying to help me out of my naiveté. I’m not naïve, I just don’t think violence is a solution. I think it’s safe to say most of history will bear me out.
At the risk of stretching my metaphor farther than it is prepared to go, and going back to my experiences this week, the challenge for me is how do I learn to share the table with those whose recipes for living are so different than mine. The situations this week were more than passing glances. I have to deal with this person on pretty much a daily basis, both of us trying to make something of the situation, and both coming at it from very different perspectives and seeking very different outcomes. The best way for me is to start with an ingredient Ginger added to my recipe years ago with a quote she passed along: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” I can follow that by remembering I’m responsible for the life I’m making – for my recipe – and not for the other person’s. I need to stick to what I trust is true regardless of how she chooses to respond.
This is advanced cooking – and hard to do.
Then again, I knew it couldn’t be as easy as Margie made it sound.
Peace,
Milton
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon today, I found what I thought would be the opening lines to a poem for my post:
when they ask how you’re doing
say something other than tired
The line came to me because of how tired I felt and I wished for the wherewithal to say something beyond the obvious when someone asked how I was doing. Answering, “I’m tired” is akin to saying, “I’m busy.” Both may be true, but they lie at the base of the hierarchy of meaning, when it comes to feelings. (Oh, are you reading this? That last paragraph was mostly talking to myself.)
Tonight, after a long day of work – long for reasons other than being tired, I met Ginger and some friends at Six Plates Wine Bar to listen to my friend, Terry, who is an amazing harmonica player and who plays once a month with a wonderful jazz trio who do an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”
There are nights when you gather with friends, and then there are nights when friends gather around you. Tonight, for me, was the latter. I had the opening lines early in the day; I needed my friends to show me where the poem wanted to go.
when they ask how you’re doing
say something other than tired
say something other than busy
look for something to saybeyond the shadow of circumstance,
past the pugilism of pettiness,
through the façade of failureand say that thing; say it again
say it the way you sing that song
that bored deep into your heart
long ago, before you were tiredbefore you knew about busy,
when you could remember the truth
without having to be remindedwhen they ask how you’re doing
answer a different question
tell them you know what it’s liketo be gathered around by friends
and harmonica music
you never get tired of that
Peace,
Milton
On nights like tonight
when I come home tired
and try to write, only
to have my little dog
begin bouncing her ball
on my feet, begging me
to choose her over words,
I think about monks
and those who cloister
themselves to meditate,
yes, and to write, to get
closer to God, seeing
isolation as the way to
make meaning of life.
I write in traffic, feeling
like the street performer
who juggled three things
chosen by the crowd –
a bowling ball, an apple,
and a working chain saw –
and kept them all in the air.
That’s contemplation —
and it’s a public act. (Now
I sound like I’m polarizing.)
Those cloistered clerics may
have had about as much
choice in the pace of life
as I, a juggler, myself,
who wishes for a couple
more hours of sleep,
and wonders how one
who unfamiliar with the
unabashed ambush of
canine affection finds
anything to say at all
on nights like tonight.
Peace,
Milton
By the time most of you read this (actually, by the time I finish writing), it will be April, whose first week holds a sort of harmonic convergence for me. The First of April marks the beginning of National Poetry Month (National GeekFest, as Ginger lovingly calls it); this weekend brings the NCAA Basketball Tournaments to a glorious close; and, Monday marks Opening Day for my beloved Red Sox. I suppose I should also mention Palm Sunday falls in there as well.
Basketball has dominated the airwaves for some time now and I know there will always be Sox stories to tell. Tonight I will tell you a story about poets, two of them, and let their words be the invitation to the month to come.
Several years ago – OK, a whole bunch of years ago, just after Ginger and I moved to Boston, I drove to Rochester, New York to meet my brother, who was living in Akron, Ohio at the time. We picked Rochester because it was about halfway. Meeting halfway was a good metaphor, even though we didn’t see it at the time, because we were at a place in our relationship where we were having a hard time finding each other. We gave it a valiant try, but were not very successful. (Later, we were.) I drove back to Boston, trying to make meaning out of what had happened and chose to drive home down Route 20 rather than the Interstate. Somewhere in the Berkshires, I met Jimmy Santiago Baca as he talked with an interviewer on NPR. Somewhere in my library is a paperback book of NPR interviews with the transcript of what I heard, but I’m not digging for quotes here; I’m remembering a moment. Whatever he said marked my heart as the sun fell behind me and I drove toward the ocean, toward home, toward whatever was next.
A couple of years later, I found Baca again as a part of Bill Moyers’ series, The Language of Life (which also introduced me to the Dodge Poetry Festival). I was teaching high school English in the Boston Public Schools and Baca made me believe poetry had a pivotal role to play in the lives of my students. I put one of his quotes above the board at the front of the room:
words can save your life.
Nathan Brown and I came to know each other through a mutual friend and have found a bond of our own that began with two important things: poetry and depression. He came to visit Ginger and me in Boston and, in the aisles of Wordsworth Books in Harvard Square, I handed him one of Baca’s books and said, “You need this.” A couple of weeks later he called me from a coffee shop somewhere in Oklahoma City doing his own version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp, almost unable to verbalize what Baca’s poetry was doing to him.
More years passed and I was driving one day when my phone rang and it was Nathan, again, on the other end of the phone. “Hang on,” he said, “I have someone who wants to say hello to you.” The next voice said,
“Milton, this is Jimmy Santiago Baca.”
For the next few minutes, he told me how Nathan had invited him to come to the University of Oklahoma, where Nathan teaches. And a few words coming out of the radio on a winding road found a way to connect the three of us across years and circumstance. I wish the years had afforded me the chance to know both men better; I’m grateful for the connection that exists and, in that gratitude offer a poem from each one as companions for your winding road.
I Am Offering This Poem
Jimmy Santiago BacaI am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat,
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,I love you,
I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in the winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over your hair, to tie up around your face,I love you,
Keep it, treasure it as you would
if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,
tucked away like a cabin or a hogan
in dense trees, come knocking,
and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe,I love you,
It’s all I have to give,
and it’s all anyone needs to live,
and to go on living inside,
when the world outside
no longer cares if you live or die;
remember,I love you.
_______________________
Loose Words
Nathan BrownI’ve intended to tape it back in
for months – page 455 of my
fraying paperback dictionary.I have to slide it into place, fix it,
every time I look up a word.
Page 455 hangs by a thread.And like I said, I’ve intended
to tape it back in for months,
but . . . I don’t know . . .there’s just something about words
in constant danger of being lost
that keeps me from doing it.
Happy Poetry Month. Happy Final Four. Go Sox. Hosanna.
Peace,
Milton
I would like to say
at the end of the day
that I still had some play
but that would be (somewhat) lying
I would like to reveal
all the things that I feel
you know – keeping it real
but that would be (mostly) sighing
So I’m going to bed
with much left unsaid
and though that rhymes with dead
I intend to be quite death-defying
For a good night of sleep
and all that will reap
will for sure help me keep
my promise to keep lentifying
Peace,
Milton
My friend Gordon has been telling the story of his church in San Antonio at his blog at at the High Calling website. Part of the story is about the pastor who preceded him — a friend of many of us – who was amazingly gifted at offering grace to others that he was not able to accept himself. Ultimately, it destroyed him.
Of course, that’s the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of a much more complex and complicated story. I thought about him today during Communion because Communion was one of the places he most creatively invited those around him to open their hearts to God.
We continued our Lenten practice, as a congregation, of celebrating Communion in different ways each Sunday. Today we came forward to the Table where the bread and cup were laid out and we served ourselves. The metaphor in our movement that spoke to me was the Meal was only as sustaining as my willingness to take and eat. I had to get up and come to supper. As I walked down the aisle, the tune playing in my head was a song our nephew, Scott, wrote for his older brother, Ben. I don’t know the story behind the song, other than it was a birthday gift. I know it speaks to me.
Ben’s Song (You Are Loved)
you’re hanging by a thread
it’s thinner everyday
but hold on –
there’s someone there to catch youyour plate had been wiped clean
there’s nothing left to eat
but hang in there —
you’ve been invited to a feastyou are loved
you are forgiven
you are safe inside
the center of redemptionyour crippled body’s weak
you’re crawling on the ground
stand up –
there’s someone here to heal youyour eyes are old and blind
you’re groping in the dark
look around –
there’s a light that shines in darknessyou are loved
you are forgiven
you’re safe inside
the center of redemptionyou’re wandering in a field
got lost along the way
but sit tight –
there’s a shepherd who will find youyou are loved
you are forgiven
you’re safe inside
the center of redemption
I spent some time tonight with iMovie, since I can’t for the life of me figure out how to upload music to Blogger, and made a (very rough) music video so you could hear the song, as well as read the lyric.
We are loved.
We are forgiven.
We are safe within the center of redemption.
Amen.
Peace,
Milton