In our first summer
I started feeding birds –
you’ll have to feed
all year round,
our neighbor said,
or they’ll die in winter
I thought
I was doing them
a favor.
Now they congregate
in the crisp autumn air
and wait like worshippers
for me to fill the feeder
while the wild geese
fly overhead
I wonder
if both instincts
are true.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — You can check out other poems at Writer’s Island.
Growing up Southern Baptist meant growing up with an image of a Very Male God.
Whatever images of God were given to me, one thing was always clear: God was He. Of course, Southern Baptists by no means had a monopoly on the pronoun, but the universe of faith I grew up in had no room for God to take on a new orbit. Somewhere along the way (college, I think), I came across a little book by J. B. Phillips called Your God is Too Small, which pushed me to think in some new ways, even though his images were exclusively male. One of my regular college exercises was rereading The Chronicles of Narnia. Two scenes, in particular, have stuck with me (though I can’t find the references just now). One is the warning in Dawn Treader that Aslan is “not a tame lion.” The other is Lucy meeting Aslan on the children’s return to Narnia and stepping back when she hugs him, startled that the lion is bigger than she remembers. “When you grow, I get bigger,” he tells her.
When Ginger started reading the passage from Luke 15 yesterday before her sermon, I was reminded of pivotal those parables have been in allowing my God to grow. I don’t remember when it happened, but I do remember the wonderful feeling of surprise and hope I felt when I realized Jesus was telling a story in which God was a woman: God, the tenacious housewife. (I know the parable doesn’t say anything about her being married, but that’s the way I understood the story at the time.)
The woman in the story was not one who had, as we say, disposable income. She had ten coins – the equivalent of ten day’s wages – and she lost one of them. Living on nine-tenths was not an option. She searched the house with a tenacity that grew out of desperation: she had to find the money. She moved furniture, tossed couch cushions, opened and reopened drawers. Nothing. Though the parable is short, I imagine the search was not. Who knows where she finally found the money. It was, I’m sure, as my mother always says, “in the last place she looked.” (Isn’t that always where you find something?) In that moment, her torment turned to joy and relief such that she spent the rest of the week’s grocery money throwing a party to celebrate finding the coin.
The parable is sandwiched between the story of a shepherd, also a social outcast and an odoriferous one at that, and a father. I realized in the sermons I had heard growing up that preachers said God is our shepherd and God is our father, but God was like a woman searching for a coin. But that’s not the way Jesus tells the story: God is a poor, desperate woman who is as relentless in celebrating what she found as she is searching for what she lost.
As I was rereading the passage this morning, I was struck by the verse that introduces the parables:
By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.” Their grumbling triggered this story. (Luke 15:1-3, The Message)
If our God is too small then our image of humanity is diminutive as well. If God represents only power and might (by that I mean if our image of God is white and male), then only the powerful and mighty will matter. If we take the Incarnation seriously, then God is not only a shepherd, a poor woman, and a longing father, but God is also an undocumented immigrant, an AIDS patient, an insurgent, a gay man, a lesbian, a Darfurian refugee, a Katrina victim, a family farmer, a troubled teenager, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the description of a straight white male.
For the past six years I’ve been an hourly worker in restaurant kitchens. I’ve averaged bringing home around $20000 annually. Yet, when I walk into a store or a restaurant or pretty much anywhere, no one questions my right to be there. When I’m in downtown Boston, where public restrooms are hard to find, I can walk into the swankiest hotels and ask where the bathroom is and they tell me without assuming for a moment that I am not a guest. I don’t get followed around in stores to see if I’m going to try and steal something. I’m not held suspect because of my skin color or my accent. I have the run of the place because I’m The Man.
What I love most about these parables is Jesus’ message is clear: God is not The Man.
I used to get complaints from my English students because I wouldn’t let them use a male pronoun to stand for everyone. From time to time, they would argue from tradition. “It’s like the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal.”
“You’ve made my point,” I would answer. “When they wrote those words, they meant all men, not all people. In fact, they meant all white men who own property.”
If we want our words to include everyone, we have to choose them carefully, which is not easy work. We have to expand our vocabulary intentionally. We have to teach ourselves to think and feel new things in order to effectively articulate the reality in which we live. So it is with our image of God.
By the end of Luke 15, everyone from the single sheep to the big brother has been invited to the party. Our untamed, unabashed, unfathomable God has invited everyone. including the people who make us squirm. “When you grow, I get bigger,” Aslan told Lucy. Perhaps God is saying to us, “I’m bigger; now you grow.”
Peace,
Milton
One of my favorite images from scripture is that of God coming to walk through the garden each evening with Adam and Eve. There’s something about time being kept only by the rhythm of our steps that makes walking a sacred activity. Ginger and I walked our usual loop around the neighborhood yesterday afternoon, ending up on the beach since the tide was out. As we walked, we could see various sized footprints and paw prints in the sand, evidence of how others had marked their days. The tide has since come and gone, erasing those marks and preparing the beach for a new day, for new walks, for a new time.
Last night, we went to our friend Robin’s house to share in her Rosh Hashanah dinner. Ginger met Robin several years ago at the Interfaith Seder at Robin’s congregation and they became fast friends. Robin has been kind to include us in several of the Jewish holiday feasts along the way. We sat around a big table and Robin lighted the candles and those who knew the prayers said them together in Hebrew; Robin then repeated them in English. As we began to eat, each dish had significance both in taste and in shape. The round Challah, rather than braided, to represent wholeness and community. The bread was sweet and full of raisins. Sweet was the operative word for the meal: we ate apples dipped in honey, chicken soup with matzoth balls, chicken with a cranberry balsamic glaze, noodle kugel (that tasted of cinnamon), and tzimmes (slow-cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, and prunes). The meal finished with a multitude of wonderful desserts. As one web site noted:
The Holiday’s food reflects this pensive, contemplative and hopeful mood not only by using symbolic ingredients throughout the meal but also by avoiding others. Sweetness – which symbolizes hope for good things to come, is presented throughout Rosh Hashanah’s food. The main meal, which is eaten on R/H eve, always starts with either apple or a piece of challah dipped in honey. Any bitter or sour flavors are avoided.
Food is important in celebrations, I think, because it is both temporal and archetypal at the same time. We were eating dishes steeped in history and tradition and we were eating a meal prepared that day for that moment; the eternal and the fleeting share the same table. We sat around that table for almost four hours telling stories and sharing ourselves witih one another. It was truly a sweet evening. I sat next to a woman who was also a Gentile. Robin said she had invited herself to dinner when she heard it was Rosh Hashanah by saying, “I need a new year.”
Starting a new year in the fall fits the rhythm of life better than January. The harvest is in, the leaves are turning, and we are moving into a time of rest and anticipation. In New England, it will soon be time to plant the bulbs we want to see bloom in the spring, an important exercise in delayed gratification and, as E. B. White said, “calmly plotting the resurrection.” As we talked, laughed, and listened, I could feel the roots of our conversation reaching deep into a tradition and history that has known almost four thousand more new years than mine, a faith that has fed my own, and a way of marking time that starts with, “In the beginning, God . . .”
When we got home, I had one more walk to take. The pups were quick to remind me they had not made their daily trek to the water, so I grabbed the leashes and we trailed off into the moonless night. The tide was out and the beach was empty, so I let them off their leashes and they scattered off down the sand and quickly turned into shadows. I stood under the starlight sky, naming what stars I could, drinking in the Milky Way, and listening to the waves marking time as the encroaching tide prepared, once again, to erase our footprints and bring another new day, another new year. After a few minutes, I called their names and Lola and Gracie emerged from the darkness ready to go back home. As we walked, I heard Tom Waits singing in my ear:
and its time, time, time
and its time, time, time
and its time, time, time that you love
and its time, time, time
Peace,
Milton
The food we use at the restaurant comes from several different sources, most of which are local. Our oysters and mussels come right out of Cape Cod Bay. Our pasta provider makes it all just a few miles from us. Our produce company, though local, picks up the fruit and vegetables from the market in Boston, so, unfortunately, some of it is well traveled by the time it ends up in our walk in refrigerator. This past week, our tomatoes were Canadian and our spinach Californian. Most of our dry goods and some other hard to find things are brought by a huge national food distributor whose trucks, I’m sure, crowd the streets where you live as well. They bring everything from pizza boxes to tomato paste to anything else we ask for. For a price, of course.
Once or twice a year, the distributor has a food show where the merchants they represent set up tasting tables and work hard to show how they can make our lives easier. For the most part, the displays are piled with pre-made things designed to cut labor time and make us “look good” to the customer. With the right kind of budget, you could open a restaurant and only have to have a microwave, a warming oven, and a Fry-o-lator to get the food out. The clam strips are already breaded, the turtle cheesecakes are pre-sliced, the soups need only to be reheated, shrink-wrapped salmon filets, each one identical to the other, are ready to hit the pan and then topped with a pre-mixed sauce.
The experience was the foodservice equivalent of a shopping mall: once I stepped inside there was no identifying context. Regardless of where you live, once you walk into the mall and stroll between the Gap, Abercrombie, and Linens-N-Things, you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The shirts on the shelves in Seattle are the same as those in St. Louis. Send it to your cousin in Albuquerque and, if he doesn’t like it he can exchange it at the same store in the mall in his town.
The restaurant business these days, at most any level, is fascinated with “mini” or “baby” anything. Today I saw (and tasted) mini-éclairs, mini-quesadillas (rolled up in little cones), mini-hamburgers (one inch across), baby ravioli, and chicken cordon bleu bites. The buzz on the bite-sized products was they made good bar food. I suppose the vendors were right on some level: some of the stuff tasted pretty good and the convenience is not for nothing. But it wouldn’t be any fun to make or interesting to serve. What would I say: “Here, I warmed this up for you?”
Food has to have a soul. It is flavored by relationships and stories, not by convenience or ubiquity. Not that I haven’t eaten my fair share of drive-through (excuse me – drive thru). The people I met in the room were nice and appeared to care about what they were selling, and somehow it didn’t feel like food to me.
A number of years ago, a friend was taking a class on Shakespeare. The professor entered the room and wrote in large letters across the board, “Who benefits?” He went on to say the question was at the heart of every action and every character in the Bard’s plays. If you wanted to see where things were headed, ask the question of what is happening at the time. The question came to mind as I was approached with pre-packaged everything. When the discussion about the viability of a menu item centers on speed, price, and fashion, who benefits?
Speed, as a promise of progress, is deceptive. Faster, when it comes to food, is rarely an improvement. Instant anything pales in comparison to the real deal. Price finds its way into most any discussion. Perhaps cost is a better word. Prepared foods may be more cost-effective from a money standpoint, but what is the price of including phenodexelwhamalamadingdongzephedrine in my diet for no apparent reason other than convenience? Fashion, in any arena, usually has all the staying power of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. It’s one thing for a chef (or a person who likes to cook) to discover a dish or an ingredient and learn how to use it; it’s another thing for most every restaurant to add chipotle-something to their menu because we were all at the same food show.
When we were in Greece and Turkey last year we ate some amazing food. I bought cookbooks and learned how to make Pastitsio (Ginger’s favorite) and Imam Bayildi (my fave). I’m not sure how authentic my versions of these dishes have become, but they are full of memory and meaning for us and I’m really glad I can find it in the frozen food section at our supermarket. For most of the years we have lived in the Boston area, we have lamented the lack of good Mexican food. The reason for its absence was simple: there were very few Mexicans in the area. Over time that changed and we have a wonderful place that opened not far from where we live. The owner, Ezekiel, works hard to make good food and his staff – also Mexican, for the most part – greet everyone with a big “Hola, amigos” and a smile. I didn’t see him at the food show shopping for the “Santa Fe Quesadilla Bites.” I’m not sure he would have recognized them.
Then again, if he’d had a table of his homemade Pork Carnitas, he could have brought the whole show to a standstill.
Peace,
Milton
If you want to sell your house, they say,
make it look like you don’t live there.
People can’t imagine themselves living
in the space if you are still present.
I don’t know how to disappear, I say.
I can’t erase myself as I leave every day.
How can I leave this house to someone
without imagination enough to see it?
Just three years shy of one hundred,
our house stands on stones and stories;
it can’t be a blank slate anymore than
we can act like we don’t live here.
Our laughter and longing have colored
the walls and settled into the carpet.
Our feet have worn down the stairs;
our hands have fixed what we have broken.
Real estate is measured in square feet;
the imaginary estate belongs to those
who can see themselves sharing space
with all who helped build their home.
Peace,
Milton
Sometimes, our lives are like a joke, or at least the opening of one.
Yesterday, Ginger and I performed a wedding together that included a Buddhist, a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, and a lapsed Presbyterian. She looked at the gathered crowd of friends and family and said, “It sounds like we should all go into a bar.”
The setting was amazing. We were standing on a hillside on the grounds of the Beach Plum Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, the late summer sun shining down like a spotlight. The ceremony began with the groom, a Pakistani, and all of his extended family parading down the hill with him under a colorful canopy, banging drums and cheering. Not long before, many of them had cheered as Ginger and I got to the Inn. At 10:45 that morning, we had walked out of our worship service early (with appropriate explanation) and driven the fifty-three miles to Wood’s Hole to catch the Vineyard Ferry, which left at 12:15. We got there with seven minutes to spare. We docked in Vineyard Haven where they had a guide for us to follow to the Inn, where we arrived at 1:45 – in time to put on our robes, drink a glass of water, and start the ceremony at 2:00.
We had lots of reasons to cheer. Almost two years ago to the day, the groom was beginning chemotherapy; we weren’t sure if he was going to live. Almost six years ago, after the fall of the Twin Towers, he answered a knock on his apartment door one evening and was greeted by two FBI agents who interrogated him for several hours without allowing him to make a phone call or even get up and go to the bathroom simply because he was from Pakistan and his name was “suspicious.” As of yesterday, this week in September will now be remembered as a week of celebration because their wedding far outshines those former fears.
The couple, and most of their gathered congregation, defines their spirituality different from mine. We are not without commonalties, but (how do I say this?) they would be tentative in places where I might be more emphatic when in comes to Christianity and Jesus in particular. And they called and said they really wanted Ginger and I to perform the ceremony. When the four of us met together, we had great discussions not only about the details of the wedding but also the spiritual significance we found there. Though Ginger and I were challenged, at times, to find the vocabulary to give voice to our diversity, what happened as we stood in the Vineyard sun was filled with the winds of the Spirit.
One of the things the couple wanted to do was to have everyone touch the rings before they put them on, as a symbol of the connectedness with and the support they felt from everyone there. Ginger and I had been trying to figure out how to make that work all week. As we sat on the ferry going to the Island, Ginger said, “I’ve got it.” We worked out the details together.
At the appropriate time, Ginger took the rings and walked out into the middle of the congregation. She explained what the couple wanted and then explained how we were going to adjust their idea to make the same point. She invited those closest to her to put their hands on her shoulders and then the next layer of people to touch the shoulder of the person nearest them until we were all connected. The contagion of contact rippled all the way up to where I was standing with the bride and groom. The visual image was startling and sumptuous. “Now,” I said, “when you look at your rings in the days and years to come, you will be reminded of the promises you made here and you will always know that you’ve got people.”
Sara Miles talks about marriage in her book as well. (Yeah, I thought I was through quoting her as well.) She and her partner were among those who were married in San Francisco when the mayor made provision for equal marriage, and before the state voided them all. She describes a scene where the priest at her church calls on those gathered to bless the marriages in much the same fashion as Ginger called us to bless the rings. Miles says,
The marriage of a couple, I understood then, was more than personal: it was a rite binding people into community and, beyond that, pointing to the union of all humanity with God. A marriage such as ours prophesied the politically inconvenient but spiritually resonant truth that the unlikely and outcast were part of God’s creation, in all ways. It was like communion: when some people were shut out of the rite, the picture couldn’t be complete. (234)
As the afternoon wound down, one of the co-best men and the Pakistani equivalent of Napoleon Dynamite, sang a karaoke version of Journey’s “Open Arms” that only his closest friends could truly appreciate. With consuming passion and complete disregard for pitch or melody, he blared,
so, now, I come to you
with open arms
nothing to hide
believe what I say
so here I am
with open arms
hoping you’ll see
what your love
means to me
open arms
We couldn’t have asked for a better punch line.
Peace,
Milton
I’m not one of those people who remember dreams, for the most part. Something about the way I wake up in the morning makes my mind work like an Etch-a-Sketch, erasing whatever was created during the night as I shake myself into consciousness. But I think I had a dream last night that refused to go away, one that has taken all day to break the surface, one with a haunting quality that I don’t think plans to fade away anytime soon. It’s pretty straightforward. There aren’t any symbols to unpack or metaphors to mine. I’m sharing it in search of resonance. Somewhere in the world, someone is already doing what I dreamt; I don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or the stove) to see my dream incarnated. Someone out there knows whom I need to know. Therefore, trusting in the connections of grace that bind us together, I share my dream.
I dreamt I had a restaurant – a diner, actually – that was open for lunch Monday to Friday. The inside of the place was filled with round tables that sat six or eight people. There were no tables for twos and fours. In the kitchen was a team of good cooks, people who were serious about making good food to draw people together. Each day we prepared a plate lunch: salad, entrée, sides, and dessert. The menu changed depending on what we could get our hands on to cook. Regardless of the ingredients, we made comfort food, community building food, food made to be eaten together.
The doors opened at ten-thirty or eleven, and people found a seat wherever they could as they came in. The point was to break bread with people you knew and some you didn’t: to break barriers and open hearts. When folks sat down, we brought their drinks and then started bringing their food. When the meal was over, those who could paid for lunch and those who couldn’t, well, didn’t. Some learned to give out of their abundance and paid for more than one meal without making a big deal about it. Some paid by joining the staff of the restaurant and doing what they could to help feed folks. When the food ran out, we closed the doors for the day and started working on what we were going to make the next day.
What we learned, over time, was there was a way to feed people’s hunger for food and community and make a living doing it. (Here’s where I need to know who has figured out how to actually do this.) There has to be a way to create excellent food and make it available to anyone who is hungry, not just those privileged enough to afford it. I dreamt of a place Isaiah described:
Hey there! All who are thirsty, come to the water!
Are you penniless? Come anyway—buy and eat!
Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk.
Buy without money—everything’s free!
Why do you spend your money on junk food,
your hard-earned cash on cotton candy?
Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best,
fill yourself with only the finest.
Pay attention, come close now,
listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words.
(Isaiah 55:1-5, The Message)
What I dreamt is real. Someone out there is living my dream. Please tell me who they are. I need to learn from them; I need them to feed me.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — There’s a new recipe.
Ginger and I have spent the last two days finishing all the things we’ve lived with unfinished for the last six years so our house could go on the market today. As we were leaving our realtor at the house, a couple was coming in to try and imagine themselves in the space we have called our own. I found myself humming this song as I drove away.
if I travel all my life
and I never get to stop and settle down
long as I have you by my side
there’s a roof above and good walls all around
you’re my castle you’re my cabin
and my instant pleasure dome
I need you in my house
’cause you’re my home
Peace,
Milton
This poem is a response to two prompts: one from Christine with this accompanying image and the other being the final prompt at Poetry Thursday, which was “open window.” They reminded me of jazz artist Chet Baker, whose story I first learned of through David Wilcox’s song, “Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song.”
open window
The smell of the sea wafts in
through our open windows,
curtains billowing like full
sails of a tall ship riding
waves of adventure.
From upstairs, I can see
the small whitecaps landing
on the sand with gentle
introductions; it’s hard not
to feel free on such a day.
They found Chet underneath
his upstairs window early
one Amsterdam morning.
Despite all the melodies,
he thought he needed
a needle to be free.
When I hear his horn
I wonder why he couldn’t
find wings in the music
that carries my heart
out beyond my burdens.
Perhaps it felt different
on the other side of the horn.
Some places breezes can’t blow
no matter how open the window.
Peace,
Milton
Friday night was busy at the restaurant.
I was at the fish station and Chef was on the grill, which are the two main sauté stations. We share eighteen burners, three ovens, and more sauté pans than I can count and, once dinner service gets into full swing, we keep the burners blazing and the pans flying. For the first hour and a half of service, everyone that came in ordered meat. I had only two small tickets. That changed around seven-thirty: I got slammed. All of a sudden I had five salmon, two swordfish, two or three cods, and a couple of pasta dishes that are assigned to my station. Chef had a line of tickets of his own and called for the Sous Chef, who was the floater for the night, to come and help us get the food out. I had thought through the orders and had a plan for getting the food out expeditiously and well timed with the food from the other stations. She stepped on to the line with her own plan and in a matter of minutes I felt superfluous.
Chef and Sous have worked together for seven years along with two of the other line cooks in our kitchen. They have all been very welcoming to me and willing to help me learn the ropes. I get along with everyone in the kitchen. And as the two of them fell into their familiar rhythm, I knew I was an outsider. I also knew they had no idea they were pushing me out of the circle. Sous was stepping up to a station that was hers before I was hired; she had no need to ask what I was working on or how I planned to deal with the tickets. She had her way. She was going to do her thing and she did.
As I drove home reflecting on the evening, I thought, “This is how church feels to some people.” People join a church because they feel welcomed and they are encouraged to get involved. Somewhere along the way they have an experience (or seven) much like my night on the line when one of the Ones Who Know steps in to help and simply takes over, leaving the new person on the sidelines not knowing how to get in the game as something other than a sub or a replacement player. The action by the long term member is not malicious, but it is alienating. It would have felt different to me if Sous had simply asked, “What can I do to help?”
Saturday night, Sous was on both pizza and garde manger. My station was closest to her, so Chef asked me to keep an eye to whether or not she needed help. Again, my station started slow and her tickets were stacking up. Every time I saw three or four salads come up closely followed by a pizza or three, I asked her if she needed help.
“I got it,” she said.
She didn’t have it. She was in the weeds, but I was not the one who could help her. Not long after she waved me off, I looked up to see one of the cooks she has known for years at garde manger making salads. I don’t know if she asked for help or if he just went in there and started throwing lettuce in the bowls, but the situation reminded me again I am not an insider. I am welcome but I don’t belong.
One of the ways we describe ourselves in the UCC is as people of “extravagant welcome.” I love the phrase and the sentiment, and church has to be more than a welcoming place if we don’t want people to end up feeling like I did this weekend. We need to be a community of extravagant belonging.
When Ginger pastored in Winchester, one of the enduring phrases within the youth group was, “There are no lunch tables at church,” meaning we all belong as much as anyone else. Jesus calls us to crash through cliques and disregard labels. We had kids from every layer of high school society in the group and they learned, both at church and at school, how to break the boundaries between the lunch tables and belong to and with one another.
Somewhere along the way I heard or read of someone saying, “If you’re on a church committee or board and you are not actively training your replacement, you’re doing it wrong.” I think at some level it’s hard for us to remember that when we say “our church” the pronoun is descriptive, not possessive.
I don’t know an easy way to do it. I’ve been the one in Sous’ position – both at work and at church — and barreled over whomever was trying to be a part of things with much less tact than she pushed past me the other night, I’m sure. Here’s what I wished had happened: when she came on to the line she would have said something to the effect of, “It looks like you have an idea of how you want to handle these tickets. How can I help?”
What I wanted was for her to treat me as a member of the team and not the new guy.
In every church of which I have been a part, I’ve seen people stand on the sidelines trying to figure out how to get in the game. I think a lot of folks get tired of being welcomed but fade away because they aren’t given clear indication of how they can belong. The shared histories of those already there is often intimidating. The mostly unintentional code of conduct and procedure that exists in most churches is unintelligible to the uninitiated. The biggest difference between being welcomed and belonging is in the vulnerability it takes to trust one another.
Tonight, she was doing pizza and garde manger again and, at one point, she said, “Milton, can you help me by making two baby spinach salads and one Caesar to go with these pizzas?” I jumped at the chance. She had no idea how good it felt to me for the two of us to be standing there in “our” restaurant.
Peace,
Milton