I talked to my dad this morning as I was going into work. They had just taken my mother into surgery and we were getting ready for a long day of waiting. I did not expect to hear from him until at least four o’clock. Two and a half hours later, he called to say the surgeons found things much less complicated than they expected and they were finished. Mom was already in recovery. Dad called tonight to say she is in a step down room from the ICU and is expected to go home on Monday or Tuesday.
Sometimes life drifts apart; sometimes it comes together.
Within the last week, several members of my former youth group in Texas found me via Facebook. I still haven’t figured out how to navigate that rather formidable universe, but I am enjoying finding old friends. One of the things we shared in our years together were the songs my friend Billy Crockett and I wrote for youth camp each summer. One chorus didn’t require much work lyrically, on our part, but came together quite well:
God is for us who can be against us God is for us we are not alone God is for us we are for each other hallelujah he is for us
Some years later, Billy was thinking about recording the song (which he did on the CD Red Bird Blue Sky) and decided we needed to write verses. At the time, my father had a serious case of pneumonia and I was really worried about him. And the verses we wrote carried both that concern and the hope that carried us. When we finished, the whole song looked like this:
God is for us who can be against us God is for us we are not alone God is for us we are for each other Hallelujah he is for us
for all the damage done still won’t turn and run hearts have been broken dreams have been stolen but nothing takes these words away
God is for us who can be against us God is for us we are not alone God is for us we are for each other Hallelujah he is for us
the places that we go so many different roads no present danger no distant future will take us where we cannot know
God is for us who can be against us God is for us we are not alone God is for us we are for each other Hallelujah he is for us
Tonight I talked to my mother as I walked to my car after work. She had had a hard day and sounded worn out. Her surgery is at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and is expected to take most of the day. Like so many years ago, I am concerned and feeling the distance between us. Tonight, pieces of my past came back together to remind me of what I know is true underneath the uncertainty.
Peace, Milton
P. S. — I tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out how to imbed an audio file so you could hear the song. If anyone knows how to do that on Blogger, please let me know.
I turned one year old on a ship sailing across the Atlantic Ocean for Africa.
My parents were going to be missionaries in Southern Rhodesia and I was along for the ride. In 1957, the only way to get from Texas to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia was by ship, and then car. We were thirty-two days at sea, leaving New York harbor and stopping only once on the island of St. Helena before docking in Beira, Mozambique. Somewhere in the open water I celebrated my first birthday.
The first task of a missionary in those days was language school. Sindabele was the native tongue (one of the Bantu languages) and my parents were told that the first six weeks of their new life would involve nothing but language classes. They hired a woman named Salina to stay with me while they went about their lessons. One of the favorites stories my father tells is getting one of their first vocabulary lists and finding the word “isikwapa” and it’s translation: armpit. My father was livid and said, “I came halfway around the world to tell people about Jesus and the first word you teach me is armpit!”
Fifty years on, it’s the only Sindabele word any of my family remembers.
Sindabele is one of the “click languages,” meaning there are actual clicking sounds connected to the consonants. You don’t just say the letter, you pop your tongue in one of several ways to make the sound. As a little one, who learned the language faster from Salina than my parents did at school, I couldn’t say the word and the click, I would do one and then the other. No wonder I was fascinated when Miriam Makeba recorded “The Click Song” just a couple of years later.
I tell that story because Miriam Makeba died today at 76. Beyond “The Click Song,” the woman known as “Mama Africa” was one of those voices of freedom that has resonance across generations. She is South African who lived through apartheid and saw her Nelson Mandela become president. She died after singing a concert in Italy in support of another artist taking a stand for what matters. She had a long and full life, far beyond what I knew about it. I didn’t follow her career or know too much more of her music than the song that captured me as a child. And that connection is enough to stop, take notice, and give thanks she sang as she did.
One of the things I love about our church is there is always a certain level of improvisation, particularly when it comes to worship. Our worship is well planned and very intentional and, like good improv, Ginger often uses what we have prepared and the talents she knows we have to offer and calls us to step into the moment, often in that moment. So it was, when I got to church this morning – about ten minutes before the service began – that James, our wonderful music minister, was walking down the hall saying, “Milton, I know you’re here. We need you for the introit.”
He found me. We practiced. Ten minutes later I was standing at the front of the church and singing
we plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand he sends the snow in winter the warmth to swell the grain the springtime and the sunshine the cold refreshing rain all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above so thank the Lord, yes thank the Lord for all his love
I went to church this morning with a lot on my heart. My mother is having surgery on Wednesday and, without telling a story that is more hers than mine to tell, it’s a big deal. I went to church this morning, more than anything else, to ask my fellow Pilgrims to pray with me. Even though I live with the pastor, I had no idea what hymns she had chosen, but here is how they went down. After the introit and our call to worship we sang another favorite of mine, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” My heart hung on these words:
summer and winter and springtime and harvest sun moon and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness mercy and love great is thy faithfulness great is thy faithfulness morning by morning new mercies I see all I have needed thy hand hath provided great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me
Our prayer time soon followed. I told my church family what was happening in my family and asked for prayers for my mother. Others lifted up their joys and concerns, which included celebrating a ninetieth birthday with one of our dear ones, and then, as has become our custom, we sat quietly at the end of Ginger’s prayer and listened to the choral response, which begins with a piano instrumental until the voices finish the verse of another favorite hymn:
here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it seal it for thy courts above.
After the children’s time, we sent them off to Sunday School singing
we are walking in the light of God we are walking in the light of God we are walking, we are walking we are walking in the light of God.
When Ella was first learning to walk on a leash, she responded with a combination of distraction and determination to not go quietly down the street. In her one year of life (her birthday was November 4), she has chewed through five – count them, five – lifetime warranty leashes. One day, amidst the frustration of our endeavor, I decided I would see if singing might make a difference, and I began singing the same chorus we sang to send off the children, with one small change:
Ella’s walking Ella’s walking Ella’s walking in the light of God . . .
As soon as she heard the song, she began trotting down the street and continues to do so even now. Something about the light keeps her moving. As I listened and sang this morning, I found the same is true for me.
After church and coffee hour, we had our monthly deacons’ meeting and, since it’s November, the budget was part of the agenda. As I’m sure is true in many churches, the discussion was colored by the present state of the economy, which pulled us too quickly to being distracted by all we think we can’t do rather than who we believe God is calling us to be in the year ahead. Though we didn’t sing to get ourselves back in the light, we did talk our way there. We will need to keep talking and remembering if we are to live into the words that were our closing hymn today:
not alone we conquer, not alone we fall in each loss or triumph, lose or triumph all bound by God’s far purpose in one living whole move we on together to the shining goal forward through the ages in unbroken line move the faithful spirits at the call divine.
One of the reasons I love the last hymn is it takes the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” so we can sing about something other than war, which is not a metaphor for faith that does much for me. I’m not looking for a fight. I am looking to be reminded of what I know is true: whatever circumstances life presents, Love is the Last Word. When I remember who I am and Whose I am, as the old saying goes, I can also remember the best response to that kind of Love is gratitude.
Thank the Lord, yes thank the Lord for all the love.
When I got to the front yard, my neighbor had just finished raking the leaves. Our property line was well delineated: no leaves on his lawn, leaves on mine. He has chosen to participate in fall’s festival of futility in ways I have not. I’m waiting for a good stiff breeze to blow them all down the block to belong to someone else.
The leaves are more singular in their task than I; all they have to do at this point is let go and fall. I have to — well, I won’t bore you with my to dos — let’s just say I already have enough futile flailings to attend that I don’t need to add raking to my list. And so my yard is full of leaves — let me be clear — not because I didn’t have time to rake, or I didn’t buy a rake, or I had planned to rake and was kept from my task by some circumstantial emergency.
I’ve chosen to let my lawn be a sanctuary for the fallen, a place for leaves to land and stay for as long as they like. If I do gather them at all, it will be to make a big pile for the purpose of doing my best Snoopy impression, shuffling through the stack, my head kicked back in glee, until all the leaves are scattered once more across the yard. Then I will wave to my neighbor as he rakes, and go inside, grateful.
On our trip to Texas, we stopped for coffee somewhere south of Waco and, along with our beverages, we picked up James Taylor’s new CD, Covers, to give us a break from the radio. As I said earlier this week, my life is a movie in search of a soundtrack. A couple of cuts in, I could feel something change inside me as he began to sing, “I am a lineman for the county.” I have loved “Wichita Lineman” since I first heard Glen Campbell sing it on a record my parents had, to when I learned Jimmy Webb wrote it, to when I heard Jimmy Webb sing it, and on down until JT’s soft, well-weathered voice carried the words and music as we drove up that Texas highway last week.
I am a lineman for the county. and I drive the main road searching in the sun for another overload
I hear you singing in the wire I can hear you thru the whine and the Wichita lineman is still on the line
I know I need a small vacation but it don’t look like rain and if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain
and I need you more than want you and I want you for all time and the Wichita lineman is still on the line
From my earliest memories, the song is tied to “Gentle on my Mind,” which was on the same record. Both of them are unusual love songs, I suppose, and I sang along heartily even though I had no idea what he was singing about, other than I liked the word pictures of
moving down the back roads by the rivers of my memory and for hours your just gentle on my mind
As I have heard “Wichita Lineman” over the years, I’ve come to see it as a tenacious love song. Here’s a guy who is dutifully doing what he thinks needs to be done and, even in the midst of his hard work, love comes singing to find him. The lines that kill me are
and I need you more than want you and I want you for all time and the Wichita Lineman is still on the line
Ginger and I talked again today about how our work schedules – OK, mostly mine, since I work five nights a week, and this week, six – keep us from eating dinner together or being able to get out and do much. Maybe the song hits because I feel like the Bull City Line Cook who is still on a line of his own. Most any afternoon, one of us calls the other and says something like, “I just missed you and wanted to say, ‘Hi’.” Even though the phones have nothing to do with lines anymore, I can still hear her heart sing. However the equation of need and want plays out, what I understand almost twenty years on is the tenacity of love is not about hanging on, or hanging in there, but about diligently boring into one another’s beings and determinedly tightening the bonds between us, regardless of schedules and duties and whatever else life may hold. Whether all has been said and done, or there is still much to do and say, we are together.
The opening scene of the movie, Big, (as I remember it, twenty years later) was of Josh and his friend, Billy, walking together down a tree-lined street singing,
The space goes down, down baby, down, down the roller coaster. Sweet, sweet baby, sweet, sweet, don’t let me go. Shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy, rock. Shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy, rock. I met a girlfriend – a triscuit. She said, a triscuit – a biscuit. Ice cream, soda pop, vanilla on the top. Ooh, Shelly’s out, walking down the street, ten times a week. I read it. I said it. I stole my momma’s credit. I’m cool. I’m hot. Sock me in the stomach three more times.
OK, I didn’t remember their song; I found it here. But I do remember the street, lined with giant trees in their full autumn regalia, looking about as American as it gets. For a long time I wondered where those streets were, then I moved to Boston and found those streets, but I never got to live on one of them.
Until now.
Here is what our street looked like this morning when I turned to the left
and to the right.
Yup. I’m cool. I’m hot. I’m fortunate. Sock me in the stomach three more times.
I woke up thinking about the Kenyan election that was held some time back. Was thought to be one Africa’s most stable democracies was ripped apart when the results did not go the way the party in power hoped they would. I woke up thinking about it because I had spent the evening watching power change hands and seeing both candidates graciously take their places in the transition.
Yes, the final weeks of the campaign looked, as one commentator described it, like “a knife fight in a phone booth,” but no one was killed, no one was violently intimidated, and we elected a new president. There are a number of things I wish were different about the way we behave and operate politically as Americans, but today I woke up thankful for what we accomplished last night.
I suppose there are any number of ways I could describe my life, but one that fits as well as any is a movie in search of a soundtrack. Whatever is going on, I’m always listening for the right song to rise up from the jukebox in my mind and take it’s place on the turntable. (Yes, I realize the metaphor needs to be updated.)
Though North Carolina is a state with an early voting option, Ginger and I waited until this morning to vote just because we like voting on Election Day. I made a quick trip to Dunkin Donuts to get our stand-in-line coffees and then we walked the block and a half to the polling place in our neighborhood, which is the local elementary school. Since we live in a very politically and culturally active area, the lines weren’t long because most of our neighbors voted early, so we were home just a little after seven. Up until today, I’ve voted only in Texas and Massachusetts during presidential elections, which means the fate of the state was already determined before I even cast my ballot. This year, North Carolina is one of the “swing states” (I like that better than “battleground”) and my vote carries some weight beyond my exercising my opportunity to be a part of the process.
This election marks the ninth time I have voted for president. I turned eighteen in 1974, just two years after my family had moved back to the States from Africa, and I was still figuring out what it meant to be an American in many ways. (Wait – I’m still trying to figure that one out.) For all that confounded and overwhelmed me, I was taken in most by the music. When we lived overseas, music was one of the main ways I felt connected to the US. I can remember getting James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, or Crosby, Stills, and Nash, or Carole King’s Tapestry (just to name a few). One of the albums that marked me most was Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. We moved to Houston in January of 1973 and somewhere in that year Paul Simon went solo and released There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, which had the radio hit, “Kodachrome.” For a kid in eleventh grade what’s not to connect with a song that begins
when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.
And it’s not the best song on the record. “St. Judy’s Comet” is a wonderful take on a lullaby, “Loves Me Like a Rock” is good gospel fun, “Something So Right” is worth hearing just about any time, and then there’s the song I woke up humming in my head this morning, “An Ameican Tune.”
Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken And many times confused Yes, and often felt forsaken And certainly misused But I’m all right, I’m all right I’m just weary to my bones Still, you don’t expect to be Bright and bon vivant So far away from home, so far away from home
And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered I don’t have a friend who feels at ease I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees But it’s all right, it’s all right We’ve lived so well so long Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on I wonder what went wrong I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong
And I dreamed I was dying And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly And looking back down at me Smiled reassuringly And I dreamed I was flying And high above my eyes could clearly see The Statue of Liberty Sailing away to sea And I dreamed I was flying
We come on the ship they call the Mayflower We come on the ship that sailed the moon We come in the age’s most uncertain hour and sing an American tune But it’s all right, it’s all right You can’t be forever blessed Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day And I’m trying to get some rest That’s all I’m trying to get some rest
Two things about this song pull at me. The first is the lyric, which is a mixture of hope and struggle. Regardless of who wins the presidency today, we face the daunting task as a nation of figuring out how to be together. Reconciliation needs to become our national pastime. We are all wounded and battered. I wonder why it’s so hard to find the connectedness in our pain. We seem so quick to choose to strike out, as if seeing others hurt like we do makes things better. Would that in what feels like our age’s most uncertain hour, our American tune would be orchestrated with something other than the cannon of the 1812 Overture.
Speaking of tunes, the second thing that pulls me to this song is the melody, which is an adaptation of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, or (as I know it) “O, Sacred Head Now Wounded.” Melody leads to melody and then to lyric, and I am pulled to the final verse of the hymn, which are some of my favorite words in any song:
what language shall I borrow to thank thee, Dearest Friend for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end? o, make me thine forever, and should I fainting be Lord, let me never, ever outlive my love for thee
I know nothing of how Simon came to put his words to Bach’s melody, but that those notes can carry both the uncertain feelings about my country and the heart of my faith calls me to think about how I can carry the reconciling love of God into the uncivil conflict that is our political arena. As a nation, we can’t be forever blessed, but as children of God we never run out of love. How can it be that it seems so much easier to choose sides than it is to choose solidarity?
When Ginger and I fly, she always takes the window seat and I always opt for the aisle, which means, from time to time, someone unrelated to us sits in the middle. Last night on the flight home from Texas, a rather chatty woman sat between us and covered a wide variety of subjects from her husband’s impending trip to Iraq to do software work for the Department of Defense to her church in Austin. At one point, she was talking about something that had happened at the church and she said, “I went to the pastor and said, ‘If you don’t want people to dwell on the past you’ve got to show us what’s next.’”
While she continued talking, my mind wandered off on a journey of its own. We were flying back from Texas because we had flown down on Friday for three events that were all something other than “what’s next”: my brother’s fiftieth birthday (or, at least when we could celebrate it), my dad’s eightieth birthday (same scenario), and my thirtieth college reunion – all three markers that gave me pause to look back more than forward.
Those words, however, are not enough. When it comes to time, we lack for sufficient vocabulary. When we convince ourselves time is linear, we’re working with a deeply flawed metaphor. This is a line:
________________________________________
It lies flat on the page and runs in two directions. If you want to be generous, you can say it has two dimensions, but only if you draw a really fat line. Time is so much more. Think about the verbs we use. We save time, lose time, make time, waste time, have time, take time, and – on weekends like the one I just lived – we move through time as though it were an environment.
I’ve not been on the Baylor campus in a number of years and have not been to Homecoming in a decade. When we parked the car at the stadium on Saturday and walked across the grass to the tents for the reunion picnics, I wondered what I was in for. Ginger and I got our plates of barbeque and moved toward the tent and the first two people I saw were Al and Keith, pledge brothers, who called my name and hugged me and the years disappeared with their welcome. It was not about how long it had been as it was about being, together. We had missed much of each other’s lives (they had children, now out of college, I had never seen) and we found the gossamer strands of friendship still tethered us. For the next couple of hours, I talked with folks whom I had not seen in years, picking up conversations we had laid down and continuing on.
Webster says a reunion is “an assembling of persons who have been separated.” And so it is. We walked through time, across time, even out of time to find one another on the field we had walked together long ago, and, as we stood, we grew back together. Rumi wrote,
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Time is a field, where we can meet and re-member ourselves, reunite ourselves, not looking only for what is next, but for all that ties us together. The day was filled with good things, yet I would have made one change. I would move Homecoming to March, so that we could have stood together in the field, surrounded by bluebonnets.
