don't eat alone

The company that owns the Chicago Tribune (and the Chicago Cubs) declared bankruptcy yesterday. Much like the domino effect on Wall Street not long ago, I expect some other newspapers will fold before long. (Sorry – I couldn’t resist.) Much of the demise of the dailies has been attributed to our quickly changing technology. With all the instant news available, fewer and fewer take time to sit down and turn the page. By the time tomorrow’s headline is printed, it’s old news. A half century ago, Ben Hecht said,

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

The irony is the twenty-four hour news channels and the web outlets as well may be more immediate, but they don’t give any greater a sense of perspective, any idea of context, any sense of memory. We’re still watching the second hand; it just appears to be moving faster – and it’s no longer a the hand of a clock, but a digital counter. We don’t appear to be telling the time anything of great importance.

I’m about two weeks away from this blog’s third birthday and I’m learning that blogging is becoming passé, giving way to Facebook and Twitter, both focusing on the immediate, and the brief, all of it reminiscent of Father Guido Sarducci’s “Five Minute University”:

I read the gospel passage from the lectionary last Sunday: Mark 1:1-8, which begins,

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I never hear that sentence without recalling a sermon Skip Waterbury preached many years ago now at First Congregational Church in Winchester, Massachusetts. He pointed out that the sentence was not talking about the opening scene with John the Baptist, but was better read as the title for the whole gospel. The story of Jesus’ time on earth was the beginning of the Gospel; the story is still being told these twenty centuries later.

Good stories take time to be told.

As we sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, Ginger asked us to go around the table and say what we were thankful for. What came to my mind first was gratitude that we have been in Durham long enough to begin to forge friendships. Acquaintances may be immediate, but friendships are not; they must, like a good story, have time to develop.

When my friend Billy was putting together a Christmas album with some other artists, also some years ago, they called it Christmas in Our Time, drawing from a Meister Eckhart quote that remains an Advent mainstay for me:

What good is it to me if the son of God was born to Mary 1400 years ago if Christ is not born again in my time and in my culture?

Digging around tonight I found a more expansive Eckhart:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to His Son if I do not also give birth to Him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: when the Son of God is begotten in us.

The fullness of time. I love the phrase. It conjures up the image of something ripening, coming to term, growing into wholeness, in much the same way Luke describes Mary getting to Bethlehem in time for the birth:

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

Mary knew nothing of second hands. She marked time with every step the donkey took on the road to Bethlehem and she kept time as she saw come alive in her arms and those memories in her heart to return when she needed to find time to do so. The seconds have done nothing but tick away between her time and mine. What am I telling my time in order that the days might be accomplished for me to give birth to Christ in my time and in my culture?

Peace,
Milton

A number of years ago, Ginger and I had the chance to go to Israel with a group from our church in Winchester. We rode our bus all through Israel and Palestine seeing the places we had only read about, watching much of the Bible come alive in ways we could not have imagined and also visiting the “traditional” sites for many of the happenings in the gospels, which all had churches built over them that were all asking for money. “This is the traditional site for (fill in miracle),” our guide would say, “but this is not where it happened. Centuries of a very lucrative pilgrim/tourist trade had made it necessary to mark the spot, even if the spot was wrong.

On three occasions I remember our guide saying with certainty that where we were was the real deal. One was in the Garden of Gethsemane where she said the root systems of the olive trees go back to Jesus’ time; we were sitting among the same trees where he prayed. The second was across the Kidron valley, entering the Old City. The steps Jesus climbed on the way to Caiaphas’ house were still in use; we walked that day where Jesus walked. The third was inside the church in Nazareth, which was built over a spring she said had always been there; Mary would have come there to draw water in the dusty little village as her children ran and played at her feet.

The centuries of “biblical” art that stand between us and the afternoon the angel showed up to tell Mary what was happening to her leave us with images of a woman draped in fine linens being told she would give birth to a boy that looks, in the paintings, more like Giuseppe than Jesus, gilding over all of the grit and gruesome that made up her life; ours, too.

Nazareth was a no count little village hardly worth putting on the map, if there had been maps. The angel probably had to clear the dust from his throat before he began the proclamation and you have to wonder how long he had to practice before he could look this poor little girl in the eye and say, “Blessed are you among women.” She had no idea what that blessing meant, other than to respond, “Let it be as you said.”

My brother was the first person I ever heard talk about “the paradox of blessing” offered to Mary. Yes, she would be the one to bring Jesus into the world, to be the deliverer of the Incarnation, and she would watch him grow in ways she did not understand and suffer and die. Such is the paradox of blessing. However Lennon and McCartney brushed up against it, they understood when they wrote,

when I find myself in times of trouble
mother Mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Yesterday, as Ginger was pouring the cup to serve Communion, she said, “And Jesus took the cup and poured – in a room that was not nearly this quiet.” The downside of our reverence is we sanctify the humanity out of the very events that speak to all that it means to be truly human. Mary had to have had less than the ideal pregnancy ending with giving birth in a barn behind a less-than-five-star inn. However romantic our crèche scenes appear, with the animals gathered round, I can’t imagine it being much help to have the cattle lowing and doing everything else that cows do while she was in labor. For God to choose to enter the world in the person of Jesus was as gritty as it was glorious. The angels may have announced his coming, but Jesus came into the world on the bottom rung, at the place, as Bruce Cockburn says (and my friend Bill reminded me) you have to “kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”

On this day that the church decided to calendar as the one when the angel visited Mary, I offer Patty Griffin’s song, “Mary,” because it helps make Christmas a flesh and blood event for me.

Mary you’re covered in roses
You’re covered in ashes
You’re covered in rain
You’re covered in babies
You’re covered in slashes
You’re covered in wilderness
you’re covered in stains
You cast aside the sheet,
You cast aside the shroud
Of another man, who served the world proud
You greet another son, you lose another one
On some sunny day and always stay
Mary

Jesus says Mother I couldn’t stay another day longer
Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face
While the angels are singin’ his praises in a blaze of glory
Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place

Mary she moves behind me
She leaves her fingerprints everywhere
Everytime the snow drifts,
Everytime the sand shifts
Even when the night lifts,
She’s always there

Jesus said Mother I couldn’t stay another day longer
Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face
While the angels are singin’ his praises in a blaze of glory
Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place

Mary you’re covered in roses,
You’re covered in ruin
You’re covered in secrets
Your’e covered in treetops,
You’re covered in birds
who can sing a million songs without any words
You cast aside the sheets, you cast aside the shroud
of another man, who served the world proud
You greet another son, you lose another one
on some sunny day and always stay
Mary

In my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me . . .

Peace,
Milton

It’s late and I’ve been staring at the page for a long time.

Nothing has appeared. My mind has wandered from John the Baptist to the Magi (they wander in and out of my thoughts all through Advent) to conversations over cooking at work tonight to who knows what, but none of those thoughts has taken the shape of a story and my mind is as tired from wandering as my body is from working. Yet, it did end up somewhere, recalling the chorus to Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem”:

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in

From there I went in search of the lyric and the song, both of which follow. Tonight, this is my lullaby.

Anthem

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government —
signs for all to see.

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There is a new recipe.

Ginger, Ella, and I went downtown for the annual Durham Christmas Parade and Tree Lighting. Here is Ella, up close and personal.

If you needed proof that I live in the South, here it is: a Chik-fil-a float.

We now live in the Bull City, so here are Ginger and Ella next to the Bull statue, which was next to the Christmas tree.

A bit later in the evening, we found someone to take a picture of all three of us.

We had a great time. I already know where I want to stand next year.

Peace,
Milton

I spent the day running errands, mailing a few A Faraway Christmas CDs, and picking up what we needed to do a couple of things on the house before my in-laws come in a little over a week, which means I drove a lot and had incidental conversations with people I don’t know. My favorite was at Lowes, where I was buying paint.

“Do you want our Signature paint or the Premium?” the paint guy asked me.
“What’s the difference?” I replied.
“The Signature is our best paint,” he answered.
“What’s the difference between them? What makes it better?”
“It’s our best paint,” he said.

I left with my Signature paint and a couple of other things and came home. About six forty-five the phone rang and our friends Carla and Lindsey invited us to meet them at the Regulator, our very cool neighborhood independent bookstore, for a reading. I didn’t know any more than that as I grabbed my coat and hat and walked up to meet them. Turns out the bookstore wanted to do something to “get people in the Christmas spirit,” so they asked Allan Gurganus to come and read his story, “A Fool for Christmas,” which he read on NPR a few years back. He was not promoting a new book – or even the story; they just wanted to get people together for Christmas. They had hot cider, mulled wine (using Clarence’s recipe from It’s a Wonderful Life: “heavy on the cinnamon, easy on the cloves”), and several tins of Danish butter cookies and a roomful of folks who all seemed happy to be there.

The story was told in first person by Vernon Ricketts, the manager of a mall pet store, who notices a runaway girl hanging around the mall and offers her part-time work walking a cocker spaniel puppy, Butterbean, around the shopping center to entice people to come buy a pet for Christmas. The girl is pregnant and the story culminates in a strange nativity scene with him delivering her baby in the pet store surrounded by puppies and kittens and an African parrot.

I loved it.

In his introductory remarks before he began the story, Gurganus commented about the current economic state of things in a refreshing manner. “We are going to have to make some sacrifices,” he said, “and I’m ready,” going on to talk about how we have a chance to dig in and make something great come out of this time of hardship. Two things crossed my mind in quick succession: I resonated with what he was saying and I felt fortunate to be one of the ones for whom sacrifice is a choice.

I’m the only one in my kitchen at Duke who doesn’t work at least six days a week; I’m one of two who only has one job. And, day in and day out, the guys not only show up for work but come with a sense of humor and good spirit. They don’t get to choose to sit down, sip wine, and listen to stories very often. And they are not alone.

I’m a sucker for Christmas movies, Elf and Scrooged being two of my favorites, along with the aforementioned It’s a Wonderful Life. They all build to a call for us to be better, kinder, more compassionate people who understand the power of personal relationships, and to be people who realize the world is not primarily about themselves. They are all about redemption, even if they are sentimental Hollywood movies (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

A real part of the Advent/Christmas season is about looking for the connectedness reflected in those movies. We want to belong. We want to matter. We want to be together. What becomes difficult are the consequences of that connectedness. In the last section of “The Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot writes:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Once the wise men got back home, they realized they had seen too much; redemption came with a price: they had to live and act differently long after the Christmas season had passed. Maybe that ‘s one of the reasons we celebrate it year after year: we need help remembering what it means to be redeemed, to be called to sacrifice.

Peace,
Milton

Look at the photograph
and you will see a little
boy standing in the front
yard; he is small and
did not dress himself in
the baggy shorts, the tiny
striped t-shirt or the small
sailor hat, but he’s dressed
and he looks a bit puzzled.
The colors of the stripes
are long ago forgotten;
the image is black and
white. Who knows why
he is standing there, or
why the picture was taken.
Freeze any frame of life
and so much is left un-
explained. Then again,
you could have a snap
shot of every second
between then and now
and still not understand
how I got from there to here.

Peace,
Milton

Many summers ago, Ginger and I were leading a youth camp for a group of churches we did not know well. One of the morning classes offered to the young people was massage (not a class I would have chosen to offer to teenagers, but that’s another post). I happened to be walking through the room when I heard the leader say, “Now, grab your partner’s elbow skin.”

I stopped in the middle of the young massagers and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to mark this moment. Never in my life did I ever expect to hear the sentence, ‘Now, grab your partner’s elbow skin.’” And I kept going.

Last night my phone rang while I was in the middle of the dinner rush and it was my brother. I called him back on my way home and he uttered another sentence I never expected to hear: “I have a tumor on my spinal cord.” It’s not quite as easy to just keep going after that one.

In the process of preparing for knee surgery that’s been on the books for some time, his wonderfully attentive doctors found the tumor. The knee will have to wait; the tumor will be removed on the same day he had set aside for the knee repair. And now we all must wait to learn more. The tests have not told us much more than it is a tumor a couple of inches long and about an inch and a half in diameter. The surgery will let us know if it is benign or malignant; the surgery also means a substantial risk, since they will have to open the spinal column to remove the tumor. My brother has both an internist and a surgeon he trusts and is ready to do what needs to be done to not have a tumor on his spine. We are hopeful and prayerful and, well, frightened. (OK – I’m those things.)

The person in the story of Jesus’ birth that most pulls at me is Joseph, partly because he had to deal with an unexpected sentence of his own. He dreamt an angel came to him and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” The situation was no less problematic when he awoke, but he had a different way of seeing: they would call the child Immanuel: God with us.

Our extended family has a full plate right now. My brother and sister-in-law lost one of their sister-in-laws to cancer last year and just found out another one has weeks to live. My father is living with bladder cancer and my mother is recuperating from extensive surgery. In a little over a week, Ginger will go to Birmingham and drive her parents back to spend the holidays with us because her dad’s Alzheimer’s is progressing and we don’t’ know how many more Christmases he will be able to remember. Each of these situations had a phone call or a conversation that contained one of those heretofore unspoken sentences that create a marker that delineates life before that sentence and life after it. Nobody gets to go back; nobody knows what happens next.

What we can trust is God is with us.

I’m not one who sees illness as metaphor for evil; I don’t think our family has been besieged by Satan. I’ve been praying since my phone rang last night that the tumor is benign and removable and everything will go well. I know I have only begun to work through the layers of life to get to how I really feel about what is happening to my brother. I talked to my oldest nephew today and he said, “I’m just hanging on anything positive the doctor says.” I’m right there with him.

My brother, at one point in our conversation tonight, tried to put it in a larger perspective, saying what he’s facing pales by comparison to suffering around the world or even what his in-laws are going through. He’s right, I suppose, yet part of what matters most about the Incarnation, about Jesus being born in a small stable behind a small inn in an insignificant little village is the larger perspective only makes sense when we let ourselves truly feel the pain and grief and loss that makes up our little lives just like Joseph, for then we can hear the angel say, “Don’t be afraid.”

The words I turned to tonight were written by the same nephew I talked to this afternoon in a song he wrote in response to his aunt’s death last spring.

I think about these things
I don’t know what they mean
is there joy in suffering
I think about these things

it’s gonna be alright
it’s gonna be alright
though the darkness holds tight
we’re locked into the light

Immanuel: God with us.

Peace,
Milton

I was a little over halfway through my first semester of seminary when a college friend called to say he was passing through town and wanted to take me to lunch. About halfway through the meal, I found out he was selling insurance and was hoping I would become a customer. I wasn’t really in the market, so we finished our food let it go at that. Eight or nine months later, I got another call from him and another invitation to eat. This time, I found out he had changed companies and had another sales pitch to make. I still wasn’t swinging. Another year passed before I heard from him again, with an invitation to play out the scene yet once more. Instead of going to lunch, I said, “If you want to get together for lunch because you want to get together, I’m glad to do it; if you want to sell me something, I’m going to pass. I want to be your friend, not your customer.”

I never heard from him again.

I thought about him today, though, as I read Mary Ward Brown’s story, “A New Life,” in God: stories on my coffee break. She tells the story of Elizabeth, a woman just a year beyond her husband’s death, and her encounter with an old friend and his wife that leads to them befriending her to try and get her to come to their church. Their concern feels honest, but they show their hand when Elizabeth finally tells them she’s not going to be a part of their church and they leave. For good.

My brief summation doesn’t do the story justice at all, but it’s enough to get me to the thought that hung in my mind for much of the afternoon: friendship suffers when there’s an agenda. So does faith. And art. If any of them becomes a means to an end, they become, as Paul said, “a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” What I mean by agenda is the artist intends you to do something specific or respond in a particular way to what he or she has created. All of a sudden, both The and Truth are capitalized. It’s one of the reasons I’ve struggled to connect with much of what is marketed as Christian music. I don’t want someone telling me The Truth, even if the melody is catchy.

In my songwriting days, when the songs I wrote with my friend Billy circulated in that same Christian market, I learned again and again how hard it is to write and sing about what matters without using a sledgehammer for the percussion. I also had occasion to know a good story when we wrote one and let it speak for itself. One of those was a song called “Someday Face to Face” on Billy’s record, Watermarks. We were talking about Paul’s words, “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.” The words we put to Billy’s melody were story, not explanation.

he woke alone in bed
the lights were on downstairs
she was sitting by the window
in her grandma’s rocking chair
he stood and watched her from the doorway
and never made a sound
and the rain was coming down

little move so she would hear him
she glanced across the room
he said baby what you doing
she stared back at the moon
when he tried to say I love you
he hardly made a sound
the rain kept coming down

someday we all shall see and
someday we shall be known
but now it’s trough a mirror
a cloudy pane of glass
someday we all shall see and
someday we shall be known
when love and understanding
bring us to each other face to face

he climbed back into bed
she followed him up the stairs
she would not let the silence
speak for all her fears
and they held each other all that night
and listened to the sound
as the rain kept coming down

someday we all shall see and
someday we shall be known
but now it’s trough a mirror
a cloudy pane of glass
someday we all shall see and
someday we shall be known
when love and understanding
bring us to each other face to face

In any conversation I’ve ever had about the songs I was a part of, I’ve never had anyone say, “’Someday Face to Face’ is my favorite song.” I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to anyone about it other than in a conversation I started. Yet it came back to me today after I read about Elizabeth and thought about my college friend and wondered aloud to myself how much good faith and good art seem alike to me because they are both invitations rather than impositions. It came back to me, not because I’m staking my claim to great art or faith, but because it’s one of those moments where I brushed up against the art and faith I want to live out.

Because I saw myself in the well-meaning friends in the story as much as I did in Elizabeth. As much as I want to see myself as progressive and inclusive, I’m quite comfortable being right. My opinions are as strong as my voice is powerful. Each time I opt to be the Strong One, I learn again that power and force can’t carry love the way a story can. The mirror will not be unclouded by force or will, correct theology or righteous indignation, but by love.

As I try to figure out how to end this post, I’m working hard to do something other than write a do-you-get-the-point-there-Chuckie final paragraph. I’m going to lean into an old literary friend for help. In her poem, “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver writes:

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

And we are another day closer to the Manger.

Peace,
Milton

Mondays are busy at the restaurant anyway, but today had its own pace. Because of the holiday and the fact that the Duke students were gone, we had been closed since Tuesday night; everything had to be made new today. Still, when I left the house this morning, I put my two Advent books in my bag. I was determined to find even a few minutes to read. A little after three o’clock I made my way across the Plaza to Joe Van Gogh: The Art of Coffee for my afternoon coffee and I took Oates with me. The chapter was short: “First Loves: From “Jabberwocky” to “After Apple Picking.” She began:

There are two primary influences in a writer’s life: those influences that come so early in childhood, they seem to soak into the very marrow of our bones and to condition our interpretation of the universe thereafter; and those that come a little later, when we are old enough to exercise some control of our environment and our response to it, and have begun to be aware not only of the emotional power but the strategies of art.

I was in second grade when I memorized my first poem: “Missing” by A. A. Milne. I can still recite it.

Has anybody seen my mouse?

I opened his box for half a minute,
Just to make sure he was really in it,
And while I was looking, he jumped outside!
I tried to catch him, I tried, I tried….
I think he’s somewhere about the house.
Has anyone seen my mouse?

Uncle John, have you seen my mouse?

Just a small sort of mouse, a dear little brown one,
He came from the country, he wasn’t a town one,
So he’ll feel all lonely in a London street;
Why, what could he possibly find to eat?
He must be somewhere. I’ll ask Aunt Rose:
Have you seen a mouse with a woffelly nose?
He’s just got out…

Hasn’t anybody seen my mouse?

I learned the poem because my mother told me my father had memorized it when he was in second grade and I wanted to surprise him for his birthday. Perhaps Oates is right about those early influences soaking into our marrow; my father and Winnie the Pooh are still with me.

The first time I remember a painter capturing my attention was my sophomore year in high school, when Don McLean sang “Vincent.” That’s right. I found art through AM pop radio. My freshman year in college, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stopped me in my tracks. I was a teenager, struggling to come to terms with myself (whom I didn’t like much), my rootless life as an MK, and my faith. To hear that one could feel no hope left inside on a starry, starry night, or that the serenity of a snowy night might lead to reminders of promises to keep and miles to go taught me that faith, like art, has its strategies.

Strategy. It seems an odd word to connect with art and faith. for me because I hear it first as a military word and then a business word, neither of which do much for me as metaphors for either faith or art. (Spend some time here and you’ll see what I mean.) And – not but; and – if we choose to make meaning of our world, our lives we begin to format a perspective, a response, a way of being. Art and faith, at their best, call us to a strategy of openness, of vulnerability, of compassion, which means we are not necessarily in it to win it as much as we are in it, period, and not alone.

Oates has her own Frost connection. She points to “After Apple Picking,” finding resonance in the lines:

For I have had too much
Of apple picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

“The poem’s powerful subtext,” she says, “is the inevitability of loss. . . In its understated way the poem is a tragic work of art. Yet there remains a defiant human resilience beneath, as in us all.” The short story of the day, which I read when I got home from work, was Richard Bausch’s “Design,” which was his own expression of the inevitability Oates recognized, as he tells of two ministers coming to terms with their own mortality.

I’m three days away from my one year anniversary at the restaurant, eleven days from my fifty-second birthday, and another fortnight beyond that from getting to the Manger. Each of those markers is filled with hope, loss and resilience.

Ginger came to eat at the restaurant tonight with our friends Jay and Eloise, who have been with us for Thanksgiving, as they are most every year. About an hour after they left, my phone rang and Ginger said, “Have you seen the sky?” with an air of expectancy in her voice. She went on to describe what it looked like to look up and see the moon, Jupiter, and Venus aligned more closely than they will be for another forty years.

“It’s a Bethlehem Star kind of night,” she said.

My windowless kitchen doesn’t afford me a celestial view, so the three heavenly bodies passed by each other while I cooked. I walked out under the night sky a few minutes ago to see what I could see and there was Orion, my favorite constellation, hunting without the benefit of the bright lights, keeping his promises. As I tried to imagine what the spectacle might have looked like, I thought of Yeats talking about his “mind’s eye” as he described the Magi:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

From magi to shepherds, from starry nights to simmering sauces, from celestial spectacles to familiar formations, everything is being pulled to the magnet of the Manger, to the uncontrollable mystery of a God whose name – whose very being – is Love.

Perhaps I’ll listen now.

Peace,
Milton

(I love the synchronicity of the image being created with the help of www.starrynight.com.)

It’s been a long time since I felt ready.

Perhaps it’s because this past year has been one of settling in, rather than moving on. Maybe it’s because I’m an hour and a half away from December and I don’t feel depressed (which is new for this time of year – at least in recent memory). Then again, it could be because I’ve spent the better part of the year working hard at my job and not reading as much as I’m accustomed to do, or writing as much as I wanted, and I’m ready for a centering season to remind me who I am and who I want to become. Perhaps all of the above are true. What I know is I am stepping into the season with energy and expectation, rather than the desperation of Advents past, which is enough to release a river of gratitude.

I feel awake. I feel alive. I feel thankful. And I’m determined to read.

My practice in Advent has been to pick a couple of books as traveling companions, and I usually chose ones of a theological nature. This year, I invited one and one invited me to take a bit of a different road to Bethlehem. My friends Lori and Terry gave me God: stories, which is a collection of short stories that have spiritual themes edited by C. Michael Curtis. From my bookshelf, I chose The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates, a book I don’t remember acquiring. I want to grow as a person, a Christian, a writer, and a reader during these days, and I’m hopeful my traveling companions will help me find my way.

I was the prophet today during worship, as I am each Sunday of Advent, walking down the aisle singing, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” and then delivering the prophetic passage for the day, which was Isaiah 64:1-9. Isaiah’s prayer/sermon was first spoken during the Babylonian exile during a time when the people of God had chosen to be held captive by their fear rather than being compelled by their calling. It’s not one of the passages that rings with resonance because of a phrase made famous; it’s not even that easy to understand in some places.

The opening story in Curtis’ book is “Exodus” by James Baldwin. It centers around Florence, the daughter of a freed slave who, after hearing her mother’s story of walking off the plantation one day, dreams of the day of her exit, and finally chooses it, even though she must leave her mother on her death bed.

Oates’ tells first of “District School #7, Niagara County, New York,” the one room schoolhouse where she began her education and learned to read. Though her recollections gave me pause to reflect on my first school days, she described a world I have never known.

I was not moved, particularly, by any of the stories I read today. I didn’t come away with a quote or anecdote to share or remember. All three feel like people who get on the bus at your stop and ride with you awhile, rather than ture traveling companions. And so I’ve taken time to notice them a bit, in the same way I used to study people riding on the bus in hopes of remembering them for characters in my stories at a later time. I see a story of a prophet calling out to people who feel trapped and have allowed themselves to resign to it; a woman who feels trapped and chooses to break out at great cost; and a woman who looks back on a trap she escaped without knowing she was ever in it. When I look at the stories that way, I’m familiar with all three, for I have stories to tell of living in all three conditions.

As a high school student I learned about the arc of a story, which had not changed by the time I became a high school English teacher: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument – all of it driven by conflict (person vs. person, person vs. nature or technology, person vs. his or herself). Tonight I start my Advent story with much conflict to speak of. Since I’ve been using a bus metaphor, so I’ll stick with it, for now. My story opens on a season of open road, riding on a bus with two books I don’t know well on a journey that leads to an ending I already know.

This ought to be riveting, don’t you think?

I used to play golf. My last summer of college was the best of my golfing career. The reason was we played everyday. A group of us took early classes and then headed for the links every afternoon. Since it was summer in Waco, we had no trouble getting a tee time; it was one hundred and fifty degrees. Playing the same course everyday gave me a chance to grow as a golfer because I learned from both my mistakes and my successes. That summer – and only that summer – I was an under 90 golfer.

After fifty-two Christmases, there are still things for me to learn from walking the same road to Bethlehem, singing the same songs, hearing the same words, and welcoming Jesus into our hearts and our world, again. Well, that’s not exactly right. I will do well to remember the destination may be the same, but the journey will not. I am starting from a different place, both physically and personally, and I have some different companions. And I feel ready, which, as I said, is a new starting place for me.

We’ll see where the story goes.

Peace.
Milton