don't eat alone

I love live music. I love being in the room for those one of a kind moments that can’t be replicated. I saw Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Buddy Miller a few summers ago on their “Sweet Harmony Musical Revue” tour. The evening was full of amazing things, but the hallmark was David Rawlings, who is known for his old school acoustic guitar, strapping on a Fender and tearing up the night with Buddy Miller. There aren’t any recordings, any YouTube videos (I checked); either you were there or you weren’t.

I was in Tarrrant County Convention Center when B. B. King opened for U2 and then came back out for the encore and they sang “When Love Comes to Town.” Some of that did end up on film, but not Bono turning to Edge as King left the stage and saying, “For a minute there I felt like a musician.”

Ginger and I sat in a small jazz club in Cambridge and heard Jimmy Webb sing “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman” and I understood those songs differently when he was finished.

For all the moments I’ve gotten to share, I’ve missed even more. For all the times I’ve seen Springsteen, including the last concert in the Boston Garden, I didn’t get to see him play Fenway Park and open the show with “Dirty Water.” I simply wasn’t there.

I’ve spent the day thinking about those being there moments because we got news this morning that Vera, one of the dear souls in Marshfield, died over the weekend. She was well into her nineties and full of great things. When I shaved my head during coffee hour as a youth mission trip fundraiser (talk about your being there moments), Vera kept a lock of my hair. I was not there when she died; I won’t be there for the funeral. It is the third significant funeral I’ve missed since we moved south. We shared seven years of unrepeatable life together with the folks at North Community. As I grieve those who have gone on, I also grieve not being there. I must also say the grief is matched with gratitude. Of all the days and all the places on earth, I got to spend seven years there, years filled with moments from mission trips to memorial services, coffee hours to confirmations, dinners and dances, smiles and tears.

When I used to walk the beach in Green Harbor looking for sea glass, I was often struck by the fact that I had to choose a path when I walked; I couldn’t cover the whole thing. Unless the shiny little piece of refuse happened to be in the path I chose, I didn’t find it. Conversely, had I chosen a different path, I would not have found the glass I brought home after each trip.

I’m in Durham now, so I don’t get to be in Marshfield for Vera’s funeral. My path leads me to different things, such as what I saw in church yesterday. We stood up to sing a hymn and Bella, a wonderful little girl stood up between her parents and put her arms around them as they sang. They returned the embrace and I couldn’t help but take a picture with my phone. It’s the kind of scene Vera would have liked.

In my youth ministry days, I worked hard to get every kid I could to go to youth camp or whatever retreat we had planned. Once the bus loaded, I chose to be content with those who attended and would tell them, “We will never again be this collection of people in this place at this time. Let’s make the most of it.” Over the years I’ve realized those retreats were no different than everyday life , which is a string of unrepeatable moments and gatherings, only a fraction of which I can attend. Billions of people have come and gone without my knowing them. Millions of concerts have played that I have not heard. And – in this giant universe – I got to be the one whom Vera asked to give her a lock of hair.

That’s the way love comes to town.

Peace,
Milton

We wrapped up Pentecost by watching the Red Sox game with friends. At one point, the commentators took time to talk about how quickly a batter has to decide whether or not to swing at a pitch. They showed the action in super slow motion, with a digital clock in one corner of the screen. On average, the batter has one quarter of a second to decide to swing or not to swing.

Our friend Terry said, “We don’t see and hear with our eyes and ears; we see and hear with our brains.”

Before the eyes have really had time to focus, the brain has already sized up the pitch and sent the message to the legs to dig in and the arms to start swinging to send the ball searching for the fences, all in less than half a second. All the hours spent practicing in the batting cages pay off because the body knows to trust itself and do what it has been prepared to do, which is an amazing and beautiful thing to behold for a baseball lover.

My earliest understanding of Pentecost was that the disciples spoke in different languages, thanks to the hair-singing descent of the Spirit (did anyone else think of Michael Jackson’s Pepsi commercial?), astounding those in the crowd. Years later, I figured out it was not that they spoke different languages but that the folks in the crowd heard their own language as the disciples spoke. They weren’t seeing and hearing with their eyes and ears, or even their brains, but with their hearts. Some heard nothing but a rushing wind and a bunch of gibberish, leaving them to accuse the speakers of being drunk on “sweet wine.”

“Seriously?” asked Peter. “It’s nine in the morning.”

Ginger spent a good part of her sermon asking what we need to do to talk about our faith and our church in a way that others can hear it in their own language, so they will know they are loved and welcome in Jesus’ name. Her sermon and the Sox come together for me because I think each day holds any number of opportunities where I have a split second to decide whether or not to swing, if you will – to try to speak the language of Love in a way that can be heard by everyone from Ginger to the guy at the convenience store to the people I work with in the kitchen. Occasionally, like a batter with a 3-0 count who knows a fastball is coming down the pike, I have some time to think about what I want to say, but most of the time the chances come quickly and I have to hope I have prepared my heart well enough to see and hear – and act – before I am conscious of the opportunity.

If today is the birthday of the church, as we say, then we do well to notice it began with people speaking and acting in a way that allowed those who were listening to hear of God’s love in a way they could understand – in a way that let them know they belonged with the beloved. That is our foundation, our heritage, our fundamental calling. And so I wonder tonight: who am I practicing to become? how am I training myself to respond to those around me? how does my life speak and what does it say?

Peace,
Milton

It was a perfect night.

The four of us sat around the iron table on the patio of La Hacienda and shared an evening filled with wonderful Mexican food, frozen margaritas, friendship, laughter, and stories – all a part of our celebration of Ginger’s birthday. It was not the only food of the day. During our time in New England, one of the rituals for Ginger’s birthday was a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to wander and wonder among the paintings and then to share the cheese plate in the museum café. We didn’t make it to an art museum yesterday, but we did end up at Six Plates, a wine bar owned by a new friend here in Durham, that has a great cheese plate to keep up our birthday tradition. My girl likes her some cheese.

As Ginger told of our travels from cheese plate to queso and chips, our friend Lindsey said, “You all are such creatures of ritual.”

Yes, we are.

Ritual is best defined as “meaningful repetition” – repeating those things that help you remember, as the old saying goes, who you are and whose you are. So we end up in a Hard Rock Café on our wedding and engagement anniversaries, we chase down a good cheese plate on Ginger’s birthday, and we keep repeating any number of little sayings and actions that remind us of the promises we are committed to keeping, transforming daily doings into something sacred.

The repetition is a stacking of time, each experience laid one on top of the other, so that when we return to repeat it again we do so from a new perspective. All the years of cheese plates give us a different view of what it means to be together, to be alive in this world. One of my favorite stories is Joshua’s telling the people of Israel to stack up the stones after they had crossed the Jordan so that when the children asked what the stones mean they could tell the story of their deliverance, over and over again.

If ritual is meaningful repetition, habit is the opposite – repetition that grows out of convenience, compliance, or just because: unexamined repetition. Where habits grow like kudzu, rituals have to be cultivated and nourished. We have to keep stacking up stones and slicing cheese if life is going to mean something.

When Jesus first passed the bread and wine, he said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” As a chef, one of the ways I like to interpret his words is to think he was not so much envisioning a Communion service at church as much as he was talking about meal time in a more general sense: every time you break bread together, remember. Let our meals be rituals and not habits.

Soon after Ginger and I started dating, I cooked dinner for her. I sautéed some chicken with pasta and alfredo sauce. She loved it and it became one of our ritual meals, which we call Saturday Night Chicken, since it was a Saturday night when we first had it together. Now it’s a meal I prepare, particularly when we have gone through a busy or stressful time and I want to reconnect. All the meals over the almost twenty years since I first served it to her stack up to give a great view of who we are and where we have come from together because we eat and remember.

Rituals are the raw material from which we can build of our lives a mountain of memories, offering us the chance to see that we have come from God and we are going to God, that we are inextricably connected to one another by the grace of God, and, even in the scope of so grand a universe, it matters that we celebrate with cheese plates, over and over again.

Peace,
Milton

They gave these to us as we left the polling station — ain’t that America . . .

Peace,
Milton

It’s late and I’m restless. After the two deaths last week at our church here in Durham, word came that one of the dearest souls in the Marshfield church died unexpectedly. Grief, like my depression, sends me searching for songs in the middle of the night, mostly looking for old friends to comfort me. I found a few at church this morning in the hymns we sang. The postlude was “Shall We Gather At the River.”

ere we reach the shining river
lay we every burden down

I rode the river of new technology tonight that is YouTube, finding all sorts of old friends camped out along the way. Somewhere in my sojourn, I landed on a song I had not thought of in years, perhaps: Gary Chapman’s “Sweet Jesus,” a haunting melody that captures the paradox of faithful grieving and the kind of hopeful suffering Ginger preached about this morning, following 1 Peter’s lead:

Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good. (4:19)

Here are the lyrics:

Sweet Jesus

There is a river running through this town
It carries the water
There isn’t any way to slow it down
Or make it stop
I was a baby when the big bridge fell
So I don’t remember
But I have listened to the stories well
And so I know
They were falling
To the surface
They were calling
To their God
And their cry was

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying

Fishing for luck beneath the bridge that day
A man in his eighties
He saw it happen and began to pray
As he dove in
He found a mother and a baby boy
They both wouldn’t make it
The mama handed him her only joy
He took the child
Then he was swimming
Like he was twenty
He made shoreline
Then he died
And his thoughts were

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
He was crying

I miss my mother and the brave old man
Though I never knew them
They are the soul inside the man I am
I bear their dreams
And I am walking
In their footsteps
I am talking
To their God
And my cry is

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
We’re all crying

There is a river running through this town
It carries the water
There isn’t any way to slow it down
Or make it stop

Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river, gather with the saints at the river that flows by the throne of God.

Peace,
Milton

In the quiver of lies called depression,
the name of the sharpest arrow is
You Have Nothing To Say. Forget
what the flowers told you, or the gift
from the little one in front of you at
the drive through when she smiled.

How can you give voice to the joy of
a snuggling Schnauzer, or speak to
the grief that rises with the sun day
after day? Anything you say will only
reinforce your insignificance. No one is
waiting to hear from you. Stay silent.

Truth is not silent. You must speak
through the pain, of the pain. Silence
can’t hold healing. Name the lie. Write
into the night, fill any page with names
you can remember, stories you believe,
songs you know by heart. It matters.

Peace,
Milton

I went to work at five this morning so I could leave early to get to a funeral. A dear soul in our church, Bryant, who was, as his son said, both a gentle man and a gentleman died last Friday. Ginger said the family had asked for someone to sing “In the Garden,” which I was happy to do. Growing up Baptist meant growing up with that song and, for most of my early life, I thought it was kind of schmaltzy until William Reynolds, the guy who knows more about hymns than anyone I know, explained who is really singing the words: Mary Magdelene (john 20:15). This is an Easter hymn imagining what it must have been like for Mary meeting Jesus in the garden where she had gone to anoint his dead body only to find he was alive.

I come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses
and the voice I hear falling on my ear
the Son of God discloses

and he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own
and the joy we share as we tarry there
none other has ever known

he speaks and the sound of his voice
is so sweet the birds hush their singing
and the melody that he gave to me
within my heart is ringing

and he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own
and the joy we share as we tarry there
none other has ever known

I’ll stay in the garden with him
though the night around me is falling
but he bids me go with a voice of woe
his voice to me is calling

and he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own
and the joy we share as we tarry there
none other has ever known

C. Austin Miles, who wrote the hymn, spoke of his inspiration this way:

I read the story of the greatest morn in history. The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, while it was yet very dark, unto the sepulcher. Instantly, completely, there unfolded in my mind the scenes of the garden, where out of the mists comes a form, halting, hesitating, tearful, seeking, turning from side to side in bewildering amazement. Falteringly, bearing grief in every accent, with tear-dimmed eyes, she whispers, ‘If Thou has borne Him hence.’ He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing. He said to her, “Mary!” “Just one word and forgotten are the heartaches, the long dreary hours, all the past blotted out in His presence.

I also found this video of Dwight Yoakum singing the hymn at the funeral of his friend and mentor, Buck Owens.

I guess I had never really thought about it as a funeral hymn, other than singing it because it was a favorite of the person we were memorializing. But tonight I find comfort in it’s poetry and melody, thinking of Mary finding Jesus in her grief and hoping for the same kind of encounter for friends I know who are grieving tonight.

Peace,
Milton

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to Mark Heard as I’ve gone about my business here in Durham. For those of you who don’t know of him, Mark was a wonderful songwriter, thinker, and singer who died way too young and left an enduring legacy of music (much of which is available at emusic). For those of you who are familiar with him, then you know it does a heart good to tune in to his songs from time to time.

The record I’ve given the most play is Eye of the Storm, which I can remember buying while I was doing my CPE training and dealing with grief and death on an almost daily basis. The title track opens with a wonderfully infectious acoustic guitar lick and Mark begins to sing:

when it’s dark outside you’ve got to carry the light
or you’ll stumble and fall like stumbling dice
it takes a steady step, it takes God-given sight
just to tell what is the truth, what is wrong, what is right

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

when the night sky glows with the red fires of war
and the threat of annihilation pounds at your door
you don’t have to pretend you’ve got nerves of steel
to believe the love of the Lord is actual and real

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

when the daybreak comes with a trumpet blast
and the true fruit of faith is tasted at long last
when the darkness dies and death is undone
and teardrops are dried in the noonday sun

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

The irony that the person singing those words dropped dead at 41 is not lost on me. In fact, as much as the song pulls me, it causes me to question. As the friends of God, do we really suffer no permanent harm? Is the thought that our suffering is ultimately temporary truly comforting when the passing pain we live with carries such a wallop? How do I learn to look beyond today’s pain to grasp life’s larger promise?

Ginger and I went exploring in Carrboro, North Carolina this afternoon – “the Paris of the Piedmont” it’s called, we were told. We found a couple of great coffee shops and several restaurants to come back to. We also found one of those card shops/art galleries that had all kinds of magnets with cute sayings that included:

My life has a wonderful cast, I just can’t figure out the plot.

Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

The quote made me smile – and hope – and then wonder if the end would be OK. We’ve had two deaths in our parish this week. Since North Carolina is next in the primary line, we are being inundated with all the things that don’t matter and being told that they do, leaving me to think that even at the end I will still live in a very broken nation that squandered its gifts and resources. I got home and spent some time reading my copies of The Nation that were delayed in their arrival due to our address change. I read about the tragedy and pain of the food shortages around the world and the painful reality that one in three of our military personnel returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home with brain injuries and/or psychological trauma. And then I found this quote in one of the book reviews in which Martin Luther King Jr. called us to live in “divine dissatisfaction”:

Let us not be satisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

He spoke those words in August, 1967. It appears we have yet to hear them and take them to heart. I moved from paper to screen to get caught up on my blog reading. Bobbie at Emerging Sideways led me to this post by Clarrisa Pinkola Estes, which contained the following poem:

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.

You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting
your heart toward heaven — only you.

It is in the midst of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says
nothing good came of this,
is not yet listening.

Her words were still ringing in my heart and head when I began reading The Official Thomas Bickle Blog where Sarah, Thomas’ mother has faithfully shared all that is painful and not OK as her little boy lives with a brain tumor. The end is approaching and it doesn’t feel OK, yet Sarah knows something about the eye of the storm because she writes about more than her world turning to shit. She is someone who has refused to stay down and continues to lift her heart – and mine – heavenward. You see, I first met Sarah leading a youth camp when she was in high school. Neither of us knew we would find each other again so many years down the road, me with my depression and her coming to terms with watching her little boy live his short life in unspeakable pain.

I’ve spent my share of Southern Baptist Sunday nights singing about the roll being called up yonder and just passing through this world that is not my home and I never really took to the idea that our days on this planet were the equivalent of sitting in a cosmic Greyhound station waiting on the Big Bus. If these days don’t count, then the pain and suffering that it takes to live them feels like a cruel joke. There was one other hymn that I loved —

but I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able
to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day

because it told me hope lived in the truth that we were created to do more than wait and hurt; we are called to make meaning of these days with the help of our God who lives in the middle of the pain – in the eye of the storm — with us. Pain is real and hard and even deadly, but it is not the final word.

However long the pain may last, Love lasts longer.

Perhaps, as one who has food to eat and is not having to help my child face pain and death, I run the risk of sounding like I might find a career writing magnet slogans. But understand I’m sharing what I learned from Paul and Martin, from Mark and Clarissa, from Sarah and Thomas, all of them friends of God, all of them out in the eye of the storm, so I’ll say it again:

however long the pain may last, Love lasts longer.

Peace,
Milton

Moving into our new home here on Iredell has been different than moves to Charlestown and Marshfield for any number of reasons, but one most significantly: we didn’t have to redo the house from top to bottom to get in it. The folks we bought it from did that for us. We have done some minor things (that aren’t so minor), namely building a closet, and have repainted a couple of things, but the place is pretty good as it is. Yesterday, however, I embarked on a small construction project to try and make the back yard more accessible to Ella without our having to leave the back door standing open. At the suggestion of Mark Cool, the musician who built our closet (how often do you get to use that phrase?), I installed a screen door that has a puppy door built into it, but the door was too high for the stairs and would have required Ella to become an Olympic gymnast to get in and out of the house. Therefore, I built a small deck yesterday, or, as I like to call it, Ella’s Landing.

It was my first attempt at such a structure. I got a good bit of help from the plans and advice I found online, some advice from the guy at Lowe’s when I was picking up materials, a little pick-me-up from the cold Harpoon IPA mid-afternooon, and – finally, this morning – the satisfaction of seeing our little dog go up and down the stairs. Sometimes, life is brightened by the smallest things.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There are new recipes here and here.

The assignment was simple: meet at the catering shop to pick up the food and then go to the site to cook dinner for eight people:

Appetizers:
curried crab cakes with cucumber yogurt dipping sauce
endive leaves with roasted beets and bleu cheese

Salad of pea shoots and mixed greens with dill, chives, and mint with a sherry vinaigrette

Pecan crusted loin of lamb
Potato and artichoke gratin
Asparagus, roasted peppers, and pearl onions

Strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream and strawberry sauce

The way things are supposed to work is the folks at the shop prepare as much as they can ahead of time and then pack up the stuff I will need to do on site. What I assumed that meant was the potatoes would be done and simply need to be reheated and the lamb would be about halfway done and need to be finished.

I was wrong on both counts. The problem was I didn’t do enough checking beforehand and was, therefore, also late getting the meal out because things weren’t ready when I thought they would be. On a night when the task was easy and I should have done well, I turned in an average performance. We got the meal served and I think those who ate it were OK with things, but I felt like my performance was substandard. I did less than my best. Whatever the shop might have done differently, I didn’t do my job well tonight. And I don’t do well when I feel like I haven’t done my best.

It derailed me. I could feel it happening. I apologized to the staff that had to serve the meal. I could hear myself continue to say, “I’m sorry I didn’t do well tonight.” I know part of that was longing for someone to say, “It’s not the end of the world.” No one did. I could feel the grace leaking out of the room, being replaced by the suffocating sense of my unworthiness, which is all too familiar. Can it be that my self-worth swings on whether or not the potatoes are cooked?

Short answer: yes.

I’m a good cook. I’m a passionate cook. I’m intentional when I’m in the kitchen and I work hard. Tonight, I didn’t do well. I missed some things I should have caught and put out food that was less than what I want to present and all of a sudden I feel as though I’m only judged by that damn lamb and those crunchy potatoes. I felt devastated, defeated, depressed.

As I drove back to the shop to drop off the dirty dishes and leftovers, I began trying to talk myself back into sanity. Wynne and Glen were at the shop. Wynne is the pasty chef at the restaurant and someone I’ve gotten to know a little; Glen is the guy who smokes all our meets and makes the sausage and is someone I’m just getting to know. They asked how the evening went and I told them. They both did a great job of listening and helping me find a sense of myself again. I made some movement, but the real progress was made on the walk I took with Ginger and Ella once I got back to the house. Ginger listened well and asked great questions and, as we turned from Broad Street on to Knox, I could feel my feelings beginning to shift. Part of what helped was being able to articulate what I learned tonight that will help me not make the same mistakes again. The other part was simply getting enough distance from the event to realize the dinner may not have been the best, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It was then I remembered one of the staff had responded when I had apologized for my cooking tonight. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get another chance.”

She’s right. I cook again Friday night and twice on Saturday – and that’s just this week. I don’t get tonight’s lamb and potatoes back, but I can also let them go. (And I wrote those sentences as if the present realizations that are easy for me to incarnate.) A half a century into my life and I remain encumbered by a sense of self-worth that is inextricably tied to my feeling useful. For Descartes, it may have all been in the thinking, but for me, “I do, therefore I matter.” I desperately want to trust that I matter, by the grace of God, because I’m breathing. I certainly believe that’s true for everyone else. Yet, one botched meal and I feel like a failure, two or three days without posting and I think people will quit reading.

I grew up being taught that we are all headed for judgment before God. The image that has stayed in my mind is standing next to God while we watch a movie of my life and the whole time God is groaning and taking notes making me question whether or not I would get out of that room and get to heaven, whether I would measure up or be enough.

Judgment has become far less significant in my understanding of God over the years, though the scene above still has its hooks in me. When I’ve tried to picture it differently, I’ve often moved to a scene where God says, “Good job,” or something similar, but that doesn’t really make it any less about being enough or measuring up. In my breakthrough moments, I picture Jesus meeting me and, opening his arms, simply saying, “Welcome, Milton.” No measures, no tallies, just welcome. As if I belonged.

I want to believe the last scenario. Lord, help my unbelief.

Peace,
Milton