don't eat alone

on the road home the miles feel
faster than those on the road
out of town – my body responds
from muscle memory, my mind
working like a pace car,knowing
what to feel with each passing
billboard, how long to wait,
how to titrate the anticipation.
familiar roads are shorter roads

the road from here to resurrection
is mapped in my mind (and my
heart), from palms to parables,
crowds to cross. I know the days,
the steps, the words, the mileposts.
my feet are covered with the
dust from the feet of disciples
who walked this way when the
road was not so well marked

and Holy Week had not yet
become so hurried or harried.
I don’t want to get to Easter
because the road is familiar,
or the liturgy expected. I want
to be stricken and surprised,
lost and found, broken and
spilled out; I want to find my
old footprints and know

this is not the same old road.

Peace,
Milton

I walked the neighborhood
tonight to The Green Room,
our neighborhood bar,
“serving Durham since Prohibition”
in a small square building
whose green walls are as infused
with smoke as it is with stories.
Beer and basketball were my menu
tonight, as others shot pool and
played table shuffleboard,
each of us speaking to the other
as we crisscrossed the room
like billard balls on green felt.
Michael, the owner, sock hat
pulled over his head, smiled and
worked the room to create
another night that would sink
into the plaster and hold
the place together.
Six rules are posted at the register:

we don’t serve drunks;
use common sense;
respect others;
take care of the equipment;
no drinks on the tables;
don’t talk with your mouth full.

I kept the rules, watched
the game, and helped the
young bartender practice
the art of conversartion.
Then I finished my beer and
walked the block back home.

Peace,
Milton

Two unconnected things crossed my path today and I’ve been sitting here for the last half hour thinking about how they are connected. The first came my way through Jimmy, who served as a conduit to connect me to another guy talking about the fiftieth anniversary of graphic designer Gerald Holtom’s creation of the Peace Symbol, which was initially prepared for a protest against nuclear arms in 1958 in England. The story goes on to explain how Holtom came up with the design: he overlaid two letters of the semaphore alphabet, N and D, to stand for nuclear disarmament, and then put a circle around them. In writing to a friend about it later he said,

I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.

Out of his despair came one of the most enduring symbols of my lifetime.

A couple of years ago, I learned about Improv Everywhere, a group who likes to “create scenes,” as they say by getting people together (agents, as they call themselves) and doing something out of the ordinary to make people break out of their regular routines. Their latest mission is called “Food Court Musical.”

Whether it’s the peace movement or an improvisational flash mob, the questions are: How do you get people to look up from their Big Macs and notice what is going on around them. How do you push through the despair of the world’s situation or the complacency of people to find a way to move them? How do you keep from falling back into despair when they clap and continue shopping or put the symbol on a t-shirt and go on about their day?

At least, those are my questions.

Jesus had his own improvisational flash mob on what we call Palm Sunday, with people waving palm fronds and shouting, “Hosanna,” as he came into town. By the end of the very same week, the title of “King of the Jews” had taken a nasty, ironic turn even as many of the same folks waving palm leaves had taken to hurling insults and clamoring for his execution, making it seem as if despair had the upper hand, which it had.

Over the years, Palm Sunday has bothered me because I feel as though we wave the branches and sing, “Hosanna,” emulating the very crowd that turned on Jesus – and I’m not always sure we’re aware of the irony in our actions. Something in the juxtaposition of semaphore and singing in the food court made me wonder if I’m missing the deeper meaning by describing what I see as a well intentioned miss of the point. Perhaps that, on the last Sunday in Lent, all we know to do is wave palm branches like they did for Jesus speaks to the despair and disquietude of coming to terms with Jesus’ death. News this week of another incident of clergy abuse by someone I knew long ago, along with word that my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law found out she has pancreatic cancer days before her husband is to be deployed to Iraq, to the murder of a student at UNC who was apparently killed randomly as a part of a gang initiation, not to mention the larger crises around the world, and my arms sag like the semaphore signaler, palm fronds drooping downward in despair. How can I keep saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace?

A little over twenty years ago, Reagan bombed Libya in retaliation for the deaths of two American soldiers. A few years later, I was reading Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens, in which Willimon describes a conversation in one of the dorms (here at Duke) about how the church should have responded to our nation’s answering violence with violence. Willimon said something like, “The Christian response would have been for five thousand Christians to have flown to Libya as soon as Reagan started threatening to bomb so he couldn’t have bombed without hurting one of them.” Then Willimon showed his despair by saying, “There was a time when the church could have done that, but church today is incapable of such a gesture.”

Everybody shout, “Hosanna.”

I understand his point and I don’t want to let myself completely buy into his cynicism. Part of what Palm Sunday tells us is the church has been broken and flawed from the start. We’ve always been a conflicted and confused people. We, the body of Christ, have a hard time thinking beyond ourselves: our needs, our dreams, our fears. If the story of Easter depended on us, it would have ended on Friday, with the disciples sitting in the Upper Room talking about what might have been. But we are not the last word.

As our arms tire and our fronds fall to our sides, hope begins to take root in our despair and grace seeps into the cracks in our resolve and the contradictions of our collective conscience. We are not the last word.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve signed my letters and most anything else the way I sign each post on this blog: Peace, Milton. It is more than platitude to me. I know peace is scarce in our world, as much now as most any time in my life, which is only about a year longer than the peace sign has existed. If I truly ache for peace, then I have to move beyond the violence of words that criticize the church without offering something beyond the despair. Waging peace is not a solitary act. I do my best peacemaking when I am willing to see myself as one of those who waves palm branches with both commitment and contradiction, because I want Jesus’ entry into our lives to really change things – to really change us. I, too, am one of the broken and despairing ones, yearning for hope.

Aren’t we all.

Peace,
Milton

Since this is spring break at Duke, the campus restaurant has been closed and I’ve been working back at the restaurant where I started so I could earn my paycheck and also let Chef take her kids to Disney. I’ve loved being back over there. I like the menu (it’s fun to cook), but mostly I enjoy the sense of community. The kitchen is small and filled with cooks, whereas my kitchen at Duke is large and relatively unpopulated. There are a few new faces since I last worked there, one of which is Drew who is an awesome cook and a great guy. He and I got to know each other a little better tonight. He’s originally from North Carolina (from the county where Mayberry is, he said), went to culinary school in New York City and worked there for four or five years, and then came back to Carolina because, he said, “I felt like I was missing something.” He stirkes me as a pretty even-keeled person who doesn’t let much get to him.

Tonight, as the dinner service began to slow down, one of the servers asked him if he had ever been in the military.

“Why do you ask?” he replied in a somewhat suspicious tone, which surprised me.

“I don’t know. You just look like someone who might have been in the military, so I thought I’d ask,” the server answered.

“No,” said Drew, and the server went on about his business.

About ten minutes later, the server came back to pick up another order and Drew said, “Hey. I was in the military. I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t sure what you were getting at with your question.”

“Nothing,” said the other guy. “I just wondered.” The conversation ended there, so Drew never shared what caused his hesitancy.

I know I’m a week ahead, but one of the most poignant scenes for me in the gospel story is Peter standing in the courtyard as Jesus was being tried by Caiaphas and the others. Of all the disciples, Peter is the most captivating for me because of his impulsiveness – sort of faith run amok. My friend Burt has always talked about Peter being the Barney Fife of the New Testament, Jesus, of course, being Andy.

When we tell the story about Peter’s denials, I think we move too quickly past the fact that he followed Jesus after they arrested him and was dangerously close to the room where he was being questioned and humiliated. I’m not sure Peter realized the danger of where he was until the questions started: “You were with him, weren’t you?”

“No,” he answered, perhaps, like Drew, unsure of what was behind the question.

They asked again, and he denied his connection with Jesus a second time.

When they said, “We can tell by your accent that you come from Mayberry,” he exploded, claiming to not even know Jesus. And then he ran out and wept. Jesus was dead before Peter got to straighten the whole thing out. I can’t imagine anyone more grateful for the Resurrection than he.

In a nation so deeply divided over the war, perhaps Drew had reason to be question-shy about his military past, afraid he might step on a landmine in our little kitchen by thinking it was OK to come clean. In our public lives, we have the option of telling or not telling about our past. I don’t know that everyone at the restaurant knows I’m ordained, or that I was a high school English teacher for a decade; I know most of them don’t know I play guitar or love to sing, or that I write this blog. I’m not trying to be secretive; that stuff just hasn’t come up yet with these new acquaintances and colleagues.

Peter wept, not because he had been less than forthright with a bunch of strangers, but because he had betrayed his friend and the one he trusted with his life – his Messiah. He had stumbled when it was time to stand and be counted.

One of my other favorite gospel stories is Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. After their transforming conversation, she runs back into town – a town that wanted little or nothing to do with her – saying, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done.” Though the gospel writers don’t generally get high marks for effectively conveying tone, I’ve always heard a sense a comfort in what she said, which has always been a bit puzzling. For most of us, the prospect of someone – a stranger – telling us everything we’ve ever done would not necessarily be good news, but her words are good news, to me, because of words I hear her say when I read the story that were never written down: “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.”

In a little bit, I’ll turn off this computer and the rest of the house lights and lay down beside someone who has incarnated that kind of love for me. The suspicion sown by strangers may cause us to hedge our bets and measure our steps and our answers, but love casts out fear and suspicion. I know someone who pretty much knows everything I’ve ever done and still loves me with abandon.

For each of the times Peter denied his Lord, Jesus asked, “Simon, do you love me?” and gave him the chance to repaint the picture, ultimately telling him to turn his pain into compassion: “Feed my sheep.” The Samaritan woman went to the very people who treated her like crap to give them a chance at finding grace and forgiveness. As many times as Barney was the laughing stock of Mayberry, Andy kept believing in him.

And then they headed over to Thelma Lou’s to watch a little TV.

Peace,
Milton

I broke my promise, or at least my practice.

I missed writing the last two days, even though my commitment was to write everyday during Lent. The combination of the move, trying to get the phone company to get wifi hooked up at our new home, work, and sheer exhaustion conspired to the point that I chose to sleep rather than write. It was a semi-conscious choice (because I was semi-conscious when I made it), but a choice nonetheless. Therefore, this season, I will also learn something about forgiveness. The point of my writing practice during Lent over the years has been to give me a sense of focus in working to intentionally live these days and to give me a sense of connection, which is why I write publicly. Missing two days doesn’t change either of those things, in the larger picture. Easter will still come.

The best part of the last two days was sharing it with our nephew, Tim, who came to visit. He is sophomore at Wheaton College, outside of Chicago, a wonderful musician, and all around great guy. He and some of his friends were coming to North Carolina to hang out and do some hiking and he took time away from them to come see us when he realized he was going to be close by. As far as I’m concerned, his visit was an incredible gift.

Because our families have never lived close to each other, Ginger and I have not gotten to be around Tim and his older brother Ben very much over the years. We have a good connection with them, but we haven’t been around each other to really get to know one another. Having him for a couple of days (he got to spend the first night with us in our new home) gave us time to relax and talk and move beyond the what-have-you-been-up-to-and-what-is-your-major kind of conversation. Tim and I also had a chance to spend a couple of hours, our two MacBooks connected by fire wire, swapping music files and sharing our favorites. I came away with about forty new CDs worth of tunes and came pretty close to doing the same for him.

Age is a funny thing. I’m about thirty years older than he is and yet that distance wasn’t part of the mix this weekend. I didn’t have to try and be twenty, neither did I feel compelled to take the I-remember-what-it-was-like-to-be- your-age approach. We laughed and talked and listened as ourselves talking to one another. There are things he knows about I want to learn and, I suppose, the reverse is also true. I knew him when he was a kid. It’s much more fun to let him grow up.

I was talking to someone the other day who is about eighty and preparing for surgery. She likes her doctor and she said, “You know how old he is? He’s forty-two,” in a tone that made it sound as if he was going to have to wash the sand from the sandbox off of his hands before he started operating. I wanted to say, “When you were forty-two, you didn’t think of yourself as a kid or as inexperienced. Why not think of him that way as well?” That doctor has probably spent half of his four decades honing his craft. He’s not a novice. She’s missing the chance to see him by keeping him a kid.

I think that’s part of the reason Jesus didn’t hang around Nazareth much. When he went back they kept saying things like, “Isn’t that the carpenter’s kid?” and “Hasn’t he turned into a handsome lad?” and “What are you going to do with your life?” He took his disciples and his miracles and went elsewhere.

I think we all want to feel as though we get credit for who we are, no matter the age. I know I think that’s true for everyone (though I’m pretty sure it’s not, at least at the intensity with which I feel it) because the lesson I internalized early in life was that love was earned, which means I’ve spent a lot of years trying to be enough to deserve to be loved. Staying a kid – or being treated as though you’re still a kid – doesn’t let me be enough. I, like Paul, want credit for putting away childish things.

Like Lazarus coming out of the tomb still bound up by the grave clothes, though I know how deeply and unconditionally I am loved by God and by Ginger (I’ll start with those two), I stumble around still tied up because I don’t know how to loosen and lose all that keeps me from being fully alive and aware that I am so loved.

The working motto of the UCC is, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” The way I hear those words is, “When you come to church, you be you and will be who we are and move on from there.” Last night, I drove Tim down to meet his friends. As I drove back, listening to some of the music we had shared, I prayed when his friends asked how the time was one of the ways he would answer was that he felt like he could be himself and that we were ourselves around him. I wanted him to feel the way my Aunt Pegi made me feel every time I was around her.

Over the years, one of the things I’ve become aware of by watching families around me is that family doesn’t come easy for me, and I think I have a lot to do with why it doesn’t, much of which is connected to the whole love is earned thing. In a song I’ve mentioned before, Cliff Eberhardt’s “The Long Road,” he sings

there are the ones you call family
there are the ones you hold close in your heart
there are the ones who see the danger in you
and don’t understand

The song came around as I drove home last night after meeting Tim’s friends and I was thankful because I had been with him, my family, and it was good. He made me feel loved and understood; I hope I did the same for him.

Peace,
Milton

We moved into the house today for real. For the first time in eight months, we don’t have a Pod in our driveway. The new place is stacked full of boxes and furniture several wonderful folks helped us carry in. In a few minutes, I’m driving up to Greensboro to pick up one of my nephews who called and said he wanted to come hang out for a couple of days during his spring break. And, at the center of local news, the Duke and UNC men’s basketball teams are playing tonight. (The women play tomorrow for the ACC championship.)

The lectionary passage for Sunday is John 11, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. In these days when the flow of life runs counter to my finding time to write, I chase words like a salmon trying to get upstream. Though the gospel accounts don’t say so, reading it through my eyes it’s easy to imagine Jesus was hindered in getting to his sick friend by the circumstances of his life. That was my starting point for my poem tonight.

second funeral

When Jesus got word Lazarus was ill
he waited two days before he started
toward Bethany – not that far away.
You have to assume he had the best
of intentions, after all he was Jesus.

I know the story says he was sure
the sickness wouldn’t get the best
of his friend, but by the time he got
there, Lazarus was bound and buried,
When he got to the grave, Jesus wept,

then he called Lazarus out of the tomb
and back into life. The scene might have
played a little better had they undone
the bandages before Lazarus woke up.
We don’t know much else about him –

how long he lived, or how he felt about
his reanimation; how could he be the same?
No one recorded how much longer
he lived, or how those days played out.
The part of the story I wish I knew

was what happened at his second funeral.
I’ve always assumed he was outlived by
his sisters (they struck me as stronger),
so they would have buried him again,
this time without Jesus, who was gone.

Some things familiarity can’t soften.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve only crossed the threshold a half dozen times,
sat on a folding chair in the dining room eating
Krispy Kreme doughnuts once and yet it feels
more like home already than this house we’ve
occupied since we came to town last year.

Occupied is the right word, like an invading
army occupies another country, or a passenger
occupies an airplane restroom. We’ve been
interlopers here, never once believing these
walls were strong enough to hold our stories.

I can stand in the empty rooms of our new home
and tell already it is more than a one-story house.
I can hear the conversation of friends around our
dining table, see the vegetables coming up in the
back yard, hear Ginger coming in the front door

as Ella slides across the dark hardwood floors
to greet her. And on a spring afternoon, several
springs from now, I can see us sitting on the
front porch, drinking sweet tea and Guinness
respectively, as if it had always been that way.

Peace,
Milton

When I get to work on any given afternoon, I have to walk through a wall of sound to get into the kitchen. The big boombox that sits on top of our giant mixer is blaring the Spanish AM station loud enough to curdle the milk. The good news is I get there at two and the guys who like listening to “La Recha” leave at three; that’s when I change it to NPR so I can get my news fix until dinner service begins. By about four o’clock I was weary of the endless analysis of Hillary’s victories and Obama’s delegate count and blah, blah, blah. I had heard most all of it on Morning Edition. There wasn’t much new to say, so they just repeated themselves and I started looking for listening alternatives. I noticed one of our take out boxes holding six or eight CDs, which I had never see there before, so I went looking for tunes and found “Black Cadillac,” the CD Rosanne Cash recorded after her parents died.

I’ve been a big fan of hers for years, so I was glad for the chance to hear what she had to sing, even if it was going to be background music. About three songs in, Ramon said, “What kind of music is this?”

For lack of a better label, I said, “Country music.”

“I like this a lot,” he replied.

I did, too. The record is full of grief and searching and love and even hope. When things slowed down at the end of the evening, I pulled out the liner notes and began to read the lyrics I had only been able to catch in bits and pieces, and I found this song, “God is in the Roses”:

God is in the roses
The petals and the thorns
Storms out on the oceans
The souls who will be born
And every drop of rain that falls
Falls for those who mourn
God is in the roses and the thorns

The sun is on the cemetery
Leaves are on the stones
There never was a place on earth
That felt so much like home
We’re falling like the velvet petals
We’re bleeding and we’re torn
But God is in the roses and the thorns

I love you like a brother
A father and a son
It may not last forever and ever
But it never will be done
My whole world fits inside the moment
I saw you be reborn
God is in the roses
And that day was filled with roses
God is in the roses and the thorns

The images of God in the beauty and the pain is resonant even beyond the words. My sense is she wrote the song out of her grief rather than trying to make a theological point, so she ended up a lot closer to the truth of who God is and where God is in our lives. And her singing the truth brought me comfort.

Ginger and I are living days of roses and thorns as we settle in here in Durham, sliding back and forth between the grief of all we left behind in New England and all that is unfolding here and getting caught in the crunch of all the details that have to be attended to in order to make home mobile, at least for a time. We are not living the level of grief Cash knew in losing both her parents, but we are grieving, even hurting sometimes, alongside of feeling hopeful and excited.

And so I learn again the rose and the thorn draw life from the same stem.

Peace,
Milton

PS — There’s a great live performance clip of the song here.