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storm story

3

We wanted to be a part
of the grand equation:
a nasty nor’easter,
an astronomically high tide,
a new moon —
so we set out in the dark
and the cold, blowing rain
toward the sea wall
to see the storm.
The wind drove us home.

This morning we could see
the flooded road
from our kitchen window.
“Why do you think
they call it Canal Street?”
she asked, smiling.
The tide was coming in
again as I left for
work, thankful to have
four wheel drive.

We like to have storm
stories, telling where we
were when the winds
howled and whirled,
when the tree fell or
the power went out:
stories of survival.
I was miserable walking
last night, but that’s not
how I’ll remember it.

Peace,
Milton

new eyes to see

2

One of the things about Jesus’ healing miracles is he asked different things of different people. Sometimes he simply said, “You’re healed” and that was that. On other occasions, he asked questions first or told them to do something. Jesus healed one blind man by putting mud on his eyes and then telling him to go and wash. The first time, the man could only see partially. The people look like trees, he said. Jesus repeated the application of the mud and the man could see after he washed a second time.

Sometimes we gain our vision gradually, if not incrementally.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has offered the world an unprecedented view of the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. In conjunction with Google Earth (a program you can download for free), the museum has made it possible for us to see current satellite photographs of the areas of Darfur that have been plundered, burned, and destroyed. By clicking on the links, you can find photographs, video, and personal testimony to what has happened and what is going on now. Whatever we choose to do or not to do, we can no longer plead ignorance.

If you’re looking for some way to be a part of the solution, savedarfur.org is organizing Global Days for Darfur — April 23-30. They provide ways to find out what is happening in your area. You can also plan an event and register with them to get the word out.

I wrote a few days back about the move to use the upcoming Olympics as a way to pressure China into action on Darfur. Things have moved quickly on that front according to this New York Times article.

I also found new eyes to see a part of the world we hear a lot about, but see very little. Healing Iraq is a blog with words and pictures about life during wartime. Hometown Baghdad is a video blog put together by some guys living there who travel around with hidden cameras to chronicle what life is like. Here is a sample of their work.

After watching and reading, I feel like the man might have felt after the first mud was washed from his eyes: I can see things moving, I just can’t quite make them out. For all of the noise that gets made about Iraq on our side of the water, I had very little idea of how people went about their daily lives. I did notice that, while all our news outlets talked about the bombing of the Iraqi parliament and what it meant that the Green Zone had been compromised, the Iraqi bloggers talked about the loss of the bridge – that’s what mattered most to them.

We are being given a chance to see in ways we have not before. May we wash our eyes clean so we can see clearly and respond with intentionality and determination.

Oh — and apropos of nothing, there’s a new recipe.

Peace,
Milton

do it again

5

From a food standpoint, the wedding this coming Saturday is unusual by Inn standards: it’s all appetizers. Since there is a food minimum the bride and groom must spend to have a Saturday night wedding, there are a lot of appetizers: 330 of each item. And there are ten items. I’ve spent the last couple of days in fairly repetitive motion getting ready for the weekend. Today I finished wrapping the last 150 of the scallops in bacon, cutting and coating all 330 of the sesame chicken, and cutting, seasoning, and cooking nearly 700 crostini for two cold apps. Tomorrow I’ll work on a couple of terrines for the cheese trays, cut the veggies for the vegetable platters, and finish the chicken satay – another 330 pieces.

My days are rarely as solitary or repetitive as today. Since I had some things I wanted to do this afternoon, I went in early – about nine – and was the only one in either kitchen until about one-thirty. When I have to do things over and over, I tend to turn it into a puzzle of sorts, trying to figure out how to do it most efficiently. I laid down a long piece of plastic wrap on the stainless steel table and then put the bacon slices out in a row – about five feet of them, cut in half – with the bowl of scallops at one end and the baking sheet at the other. I moved down the row, placing one piece of scallop on the end of each piece of bacon, and then rolled each one up and put it on the sheet. My system let me make 150 of the scrumptious little things in about fifteen minutes.

When my brother was in college, he worked one summer in a Solo Cup factory. His job, eight hours a day, was to stand in an assembly line and when the person next to him had stacked the cups he pulled a plastic bag over them and moved them on to the person with the twist ties. He was the only one on the line who had not worked there for at least ten years. I worked six hours yesterday and five today because I didn’t want to do one long day of repetition, much less a decade.

When we were more short-staffed during the winter months, Chef ordered some pre-made hors d’oeuvres from one of our food suppliers because we couldn’t spare anyone to wrap the scallops by hand. The appetizers were of good quality and helped us meet our obligations, but it troubled me that they all looked exactly the same, even if they looked better than what I can do myself. As I worked today, I noticed the scallops didn’t look exactly alike even before I tucked them into their pork-flavored shrink wrap. When things start looking too perfect or too consistent, chances are we’ve lost the human touch.

One of the things I’ve learned to appreciate about Chef is he doesn’t demand the plates in the restaurant go out looking exactly the same. If you come in and order the Statler Chicken Breast, you’ll get garlic mashed potatoes, the vegetable du jour, and the wild mushroom sauce, but how the plate is presented is up to whoever is cooking that night. It frustrated me at first, but then I realized I was frustrated because I thought my way was the right way and the others were not so enlightened. I had to let it go. We aren’t stacking cups; we’re making meals.

Chances are most of the people ordering the food won’t notice what we notice back in the kitchen. Chef loves garnishes (or, as Ginger calls them: “the extra green stuff that messes up the plate”). He likes to think of new and different things to finish the plate before it goes out. I imagine few, if any, of the diners get the same kick out of the finishing touches as he does, but they are his way of putting his signature on the dishes he makes over and over. What we send out as one in a series, the customer receives as one of a kind. When one of the folks at the wedding picks up a scallop Saturday night, they won’t be wondering why it doesn’t look like the other 329. They will encounter one scallop wrapped in one half piece of bacon. They will probably not stop to wonder who wrapped up the little jewel anymore than I think about the Solo cup people with any sort of regularity. They don’t think about my working to create a couple of hundred individual encounters.

Much of life is spent repeating. We get up, go to work or school or wherever we go. We have some sort of routine that calls us to do the same things over and over more than we do new things. In the midst of the day to day, the things we do over and over are not necessarily the same each time, any more than all those scallops look exactly alike. The details are never exact from time to time. We move, like a server passing hors d’oeuvres, offering what we have to those with whom we come in contact. We may feel like we offer the same thing over and over, but those who receive it see something new, even as they miss the details we worked to display. Or they may see it as a part of something bigger.

Why should they notice the appetizers Saturday night? After all, they’re coming to a wedding. My job is to help create an evening that will help build an indelible memory in their lives for years to come. The food matters, but it’s not the point.

Except for me.

Peace,
Milton

once more, with filling

6

As I was eating breakfast, the dentist’s office called to tell me I was supposed to get my teeth cleaned in March and missed my appointment. There are probably a couple of therapy sessions full of reasons why I didn’t go in March. Tonight, I’m choosing to deal with them in poetry.

Once More, with Filling

I’m not sure why I feel the
need to say anything at

all except your fear is worse

than mine. You have to

have a filling replaced. You,

who treasures her teeth, who is

so faithful to brush and floss.

My mouth has more drilling sites

than a Saudi oil field. This is new

to you, not me. “It’s not so bad,”

I say because I am not the one

subject to the white-knuckled,

chair-gripping, teeth-clenching truth

that you’re never numb enough.


I sit down in the waiting

room and open my novel;

behind the closed door they hook

up the suction on your lip.

The dentist brandishes a loaded

syringe, aiming – she says — to kill

the pain. As the novacaine kicks

in, she dons a mask and blocks the light

with her face, and closing on your

biscuspids, her drill droning, she hides

her glee behind the paper stretched

across her smile. You scream, but I don’t

hear. I finish one chapter and start

another; she continues her attack.


We trust the torturer since we can’t

see inside our own mouths. She talks

about decay and plaque, tells us

our gums are receding, as she pokes

and scrapes and commands us to spit.

We can only lie there slack-jawed,

imagining what life would be

if we didn’t believe this gum-gasher,

this dealer of dread, this sadistic
seer
and sayer of all things teeth.
We are falling prey to a diabolical

plot to control us with spikes

and mirrors and laughing gas.


I drive you home, wondering

why we don’t trust our tiny

tusks to Crest and Scope, brushing

and flossing, saving ourselves

the terror and torment of

these trips, skipping these bouts of

anxiety. Would we find we don’t

need the pain she offers, or would

we count the years by the teeth

that dropped from our heads,

even as we saved them in a shallow

bowl, until there was no recourse

but to slink into her lair and gum

the words, “Pwease hewp me.”

Peace,
Milton

acquired taste

10

About a month ago I got an invitation to do a cooking demonstration for a group at the church where Ginger used to serve. They asked me to cook something and talk about how cooking feeds my soul. Today was the day.

I chose two recipes. One is an old family favorite, Taco Salad, which was what we had for lunch most every Saturday. The other was one I adapted from a recipe I found in Food & Wine and I called Brussels and Berries, which would have been something I would never have eaten growing up. Brussels sprouts are an acquired taste for me, as are several other vegetables and several dark beers. What is it within us that calls us to acquire tastes – to come to a new understanding through experience and effort — that doesn’t necessarily come easily or naturally? What changes?

When it comes to food, sometimes changing the way it’s prepared opens the door to a new experience. I remember hating zucchini as a kid because it only showed up in a casserole my mom made. I didn’t know of it any other way. My mom is a great cook, but even the memory of the way that casserole looked and smelled makes me want to run screaming from the room. She didn’t make it often, but when she did my brother and I had to stare it down at the table since we were expected to eat what was put in front of us. Once I met the squash in something other than that dish, I acquired a taste for it. I love to cut it in thick, long pieces and put it on the grill in the summertime. I even grow it in our small garden.

I grew Brussels sprouts last year as well. They look a lot different in the garden than they do in the store. The little cabbage heads grow on a thick, woody and leafy stalk and they take forever to do so. I planted in May and didn’t harvest until late September. What I learned about cooking them was to do more than treat them like little cabbages. Instead of just boiling them (there’s not too much that tastes good boiled), I learned to half them and drop them into a hot pan with a little oil and sear them. It makes them crisp on the outside and brings out a nutty taste; from there I can add different kinds of liquid to soften and flavor them (I’ve got a good recipe here).

Let me put it this way: Brussels sprouts are the Tom Waits of vegetables.

Peace,
Milton

national poetry month

2

Though we are nine days into April, I think there’s still time to notice that it’s National Poetry Month.


I offer a selection of links to help you celebrate and explore.

Here are some places you can sign up to get a poem everyday by email:

The Academy of American Poets Poem a Day
The Borzoi Reader
The Writer’s Almanac (continues all year)

Here are some great resource sites:

The Academy of Amerian Poets
The League of Canadian Poets
A list of American Poets Laureate (with links)
The Favorite Poem Project (with videos)

Here are some poets worth knowing (not an exhaustive list)

Nathan Brown
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Naomi Shihab Nye
Linda Pastan
W. S. Merwin
Wendell Berry
Billy Collins
Mary Oliver
Stanley Kunitz

And finally, I offer a poem. The beach here in Green Harbor changes everyday. At high tide, the waves come all the way to the sea wall and when they retreat they leave something different each time.

What the Tide Takes Away

We walk the same stretch of sand
Whenever the tide is low
To see how the waves that wandered
All the way up to the sea wall
Repainted the beach
Before they retreated.

We walk on the damp, packed sand
Dropping our words among the rocks and driftwood,
Among the shells and sea glass,
Pounding our feelings
Into the ground with every step,
Leaving them behind like footprints.

We are not walking away.
We are walking together,
Leaving a trail of words
And emotions in the sand
At low tide, at sunset,
On our way home.

Tonight while we sleep
The tide will come, the waves will
Wash back up to the sea wall
And wipe the sand clean,
Along with our footprints,
A quiet, grand gesture of forgiveness.

Here’s to all the place words can take us.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: life, clearly

7

I began my evening by checking in on Bloglines to see what various people had to say about their Easters. I found these words from Diana Butler Bass quoted on Scott’s blog, Nachfolge:

The resurrection is not an intellectual puzzle. Rather, it is a living theological reality, a distant event with continuing spiritual, human, and social consequences. The evidence for the resurrection is all around us. Not in some ancient text, Jesus bones, or a DNA sample. Rather, the historical evidence for the resurrection is Jesus living in us; it is the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, bringing back to life that which was dead. We are the evidence.

I love the heart of what she is saying and I got tripped up by the word evidence because I’m not one who feels my faith is something that needs to be proved or defended. When we studied apologetics in seminary, I never got past the idea that we were somehow saying we were sorry for something, even though apology has more than one definition. I think of evidence, first, as a courtroom word, but it, too, has more meanings: the etymology of the word from the Latin means “obvious” and “clear.”

We are those who make the Resurrection obvious or clear.

Here is what was clear to me today. I woke up this morning thinking about the last time we celebrated Easter. Ginger and I were in Athens as a part of her sabbatical on Orthodox Easter.

About ten till twelve, the priest went behind the doors and all the lights went out. Then he emerged with a big candle — a torch, really — and those closest clamored to light their candles from his and then began to move through the rest of the congregation. When all the candles were lighted, we all began to file out into the square in front of the church. The priest followed, chanting the whole time, until midnight came. He cried out in a loud voice, the bells rang, and fireworks went off in the street behind us. Everyone began to turn to one another:

“Christos anisti!”
“Alithos anisti!”

The translations are (according to the guy at the hotel):

“Christ is risen!”
“He has really done it!”

(I kept imagining a Greek teenager translating that: “He is so resurrected!”)

The day here was clear and cold. The winds of resurrection had a bite to them, but that didn’t stop my favorite tradition at our church. We have two services on Easter: a reflective service with Communion at nine and a family service at eleven. Ginger introduced the second service by saying, “If you came for a reflective service, this is not it.” After the service comes the best part: the egg hunt in the cemetery. In a tradition that long proceeds our time here in Marshfield, the children pour out of the church building and into the graveyard looking for the brightly colored eggs the youth group had hidden, if by hidden you mean left in fairly plain sight. Even in the cold, the parents and other adults stood as the children let life loose among the tombstones. (Note to self: ask for a good digital camera for Christmas.)

Many of the names on the markers are pivotal to the history of our congregation; some can still be found in those who fill the pews. The children in the cemetery made clear what’s been handed down, what is alive among and within us. We live among the tombs, well acquainted with death. We have all come, as Julie Miller sings, by way of sorrow. The graves are real and they are not the final word. Life goes on beyond the grave, beyond ourselves, beyond all we can imagine.

One of the kids was baptized today. In our UCC tradition, one would normally assume I was talking about a baby, but the little girl is almost ten. Her family was not in church when she was born and she asked to be baptized. I had the privilege of sitting next to her during worship. I, too, was baptized on Easter Sunday. When Ginger asked her if she wanted to follow Christ, the girl nodded her head energetically before she remembered she was supposed to speak the answer: “I do.” Her actions made her heart clear before she even opened her mouth.

Easter is the one holiday I don’t cook at home. The day is so full Ginger and I have not figured out a way to do everything and get home and eat before we fall asleep for the afternoon. Our intentional family here in Massachusetts is a little scattered, so we met in Boston at Stella for brunch. The food was yet another testimony to life (if you live anywhere near Boston, go eat there. Really. Quit reading and get to eating), as was the Easter Hippo I got in my basket. We sat at the table for a couple of hours, as is our custom, eating and drinking, talking and laughing, marking another moment in our lives together that makes clear we are better together than any one of us would be on our own.

I closed my Ash Wednesday reflection with these words:

One of my favorite benedictions in church is “The Lord bless you in your going out and you’re coming in.” When you think about it, that’s pretty much what we do on a daily basis: we go out and we come in. Either way, we’re blessed. I like the image of God in that blessing because God’s presence is infused into every small and seemingly insignificant move we make filling our lives with the substance and flavor of Love, over and over and over again.

The truth in those words is clearer to me now than it was some forty days ago. Here are a few more words I wrote this morning before church, at Ginger’s request:

In the Garden

“He is not here,”
the angel said —

speaking of Jesus —

the only time those words
held any comfort.

“Where did he go?”
she asked,
confused
and mostly
afraid
that things
had gone
from dead to worse.

“Mary,” he said
and she came to life

among the tombs,

the stone rolled away

from the door of her heart.

Christ is risen. He really did it!

Peace,
Milton

PS – for those of you who found this blog during Lent, my writing continues beyond the season, usually five or six days a week. I hope you’ll continue to check in. Peace.

lenten journal: dawn on me

3

I see more sunsets than sunrises at this stage of my life.

Tonight, I stepped out of the kitchen to take a short break just as the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Just above the silhouettes of the rooftops, the sky was still bright, but as my eye moved upward the brightness turned to a burnished orange and then through whatever spectrum of shades it takes to get to azure blue. From the azure, the blue deepened, as if my eye were sinking into the depths of the ocean rather than the expanse of the sky, until the blue was black enough for the stars to shine. Night fell softly like snow or a gentle rain rather than a guillotine.

Daylight comes the same way, just in reverse.

Most of the nights during Lent have required of me to write in the dregs of the day, so I’m usually under a deadline since we choose to say our days begin once the clock strikes twelve. The reason our days begin then is it was the only way to standardize time – or so said Sir Sanford Fleming, who developed the idea so trains could run efficiently. To standardize things required an arbitrary starting point: midnight. We‘ve continued to play with our clocks over the years, acting as if we can make time do what we say, but a day doesn’t begin in the middle of the night.

My days usually begin with Gracie, our youngest Schnauzer, pawing at my head to wake me up. If that doesn’t work, she lets out one pointed yelp right in my ear and then licks me when my eyes open. All of this happens somewhere between six-thirty and seven. As the days grow longer, her paw will move into action earlier, I assure you. Summertime around here means the windows are open all through the house. Most New England homes don’t have central air, so we turn on fans and pray for a sea breeze. Those early summer mornings are filled with waking sounds of birds and waves and people in our neighborhood, all sliding gradually into the beginning of the day.

In the world Jesus knew, days began and ended at sunset. What came first everyday was rest. Or maybe they ate and then went to bed. Halfway through the day, they got up and worked and walked and did whatever they needed to do before the day was over. We think of light as the beginning of the day; for Jesus, the day began in darkness and finished with light. They ate supper first and sang lullabies first. Dawn came later.

I wonder why we changed. (Actually I kind of wonder – my comment is mostly rhetorical.)

The day was half over when Mary went to the tomb to care for Jesus’ body. I can’t imagine she had rested well. The stone had been moved and Jesus was not where they had laid him, but the light fell gradually on Mary until it dawned on her what had happened when Jesus called her name. And just as it takes a while for the morning sun to vacuum up the shadows left from the night before, so the light moved gradually across Peter and John and the other disciples, finally landing on Thomas.

One of the reasons I’m glad life circles around to the Resurrection every year is I know I need to hear the story again because there is still much about faith and life that needs to dawn on me. Here in the dead of night, halfway through the day, I’m waiting again for the dawn, for my every morning metaphor of midday sunrise, to call me again to trust and follow the Risen Christ.

And this night, most of all.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a matter of trust

7

Ginger and I left for work about the same time this morning. She went to be a part of the town ecumenical Good Friday service and I went to work to get ready for a wedding tomorrow and the Easter Brunch on Sunday. While she read through the last words of Jesus, Alfonso and I were making hors d’oeuvres for two hundred. As far as I know, I’m the only one at work for whom this week is spiritually significant. No one is antagonistic when I talk about faith matters or what’s going on at church. Some have family connections to a church, but it’s more like a nationality rather than a faith connection. It makes me sad to think Easter means this will be a busy weekend for brunch. These are good people – people I like working with. For whatever reasons, they are not engaged by the story that has me by the heart.

After work I met Ginger at Panera for some reading time. The place was bustling with folks drinking coffee and chatting, a few families having dinner, and small gangs of teenagers just hanging out together on a school holiday (at least in Massachusetts). It looked like any Friday. Whatever the day meant to me, they were marking time in other ways.

As the gospel writers recount the events around Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, they tell it as if all of Jerusalem was captured by his fate: the crowd waving palms at his triumphal entry, the mob who shouted for him to be crucified, the gathering at the cross to watch him die. I have no doubt there were sizeable crowds at each of those happenings and I imagine there was a larger portion of Jerusalem that was too caught up in getting ready for Sabbath to notice what was happening, or to worn out or disinterested or busy to pay attention to what was happening to Jesus.

Not everyone saw or heard the story unfold the way it has been passed down to us.

At Pentecost, the believers and seekers heard the gospel proclaimed in their indigenous languages. Yet, we are told, those who did not believe simply heard the sound of a rushing wind that carried no particular translation. If the answer was blowing in that wind, it blew right on by much of the crowd.

I remember seeing Field of Dreams for the first time and how I was moved by Ray Kinsella’s pursuit of his dream, as well as his dream’s dogged pursuit of him. To me it remains one of the great stories of grace, forgiveness, and hope. A few weeks later, I saw a news report saying George Bush the Elder had seen the movie and responded by saying, “If someone understands it come explain it to me.” I was incredulous. How could he not get it?

I felt superior then. That’s not how I’ve felt today.

Growing up Baptist taught me to think of all those people who didn’t see what we saw when we looked at Jesus as lost. Some of them were. Some of us were, too. But were they lost just because they couldn’t find themselves on our map?

In the languages of Jesus and the early church, faith was a verb. All we have is a noun. We don’t faith anything, we have faith, making it sound like we possess it or carry it around in our pockets. The verb we often use is believe, which is not the same thing in my mind. As always, it makes me think of an old joke: a person’s got to believe in something; I believe I’ll have another beer. We came up with a language that is driven by verbs – the action words – and we didn’t give ourselves the vocabulary to incarnate our faith.

The difference between those who followed Christ and those who went on their way, or those who heard God’s message in their own words and not just white noise, is not that one believed the “right” things and the other did not. The verb we’re looking for is trust.

I don’t believe in Jesus; I trust him.

I trust the darkness of today is not the last word.
I trust that the story doesn’t end with the Resurrection.
I trust God never quits looking for us and that God finds some people in different ways than I was found.
I trust there are times when God speaks to some and I’m the one hearing nothing but the wind.
I trust Jesus is who he said he was.
I trust my faith makes my life worth it, regardless of what comes next.
I trust, as we say in the UCC, that God is still speaking.
I trust God is speaking to more than just me.
I trust God expects to speak through me, both because of and despite me.
I trust God’s love is the final word.

I trust it will be a word we all can hear.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sounds and shadows

6

Of all of our services of worship during the year, the Maundy Thursday service is perhaps the most meaningful to me, and the most disquieting. At our church, we share Communion and also have a Tenebrae service, which is a liturgy that has roots all the way back to the fourth century. The word tenebrae is Latin for shadows. The service consists primarily of reading the story of Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and crucifixion in sections and extinguishing the light in the sanctuary gradually after each section until the room is dark, save the light of the Christ Candle. Everyone leaves in silence. We will gather again on Resurrection Sunday.

Though the passages are read thoughtfully, the candles put out quietly, and the service has a meditative tone, there is something visceral and unsettling about the experience, so much so that I find I’m almost agitated when I get to church on this particular Thursday each year. For much of the gospels, Jesus is the subject of the sentences; on this night he becomes the Direct Object of vicious verbs: they kissed him, betrayed him, abandoned him, spat on him, slapped him, whipped him, flogged him, beat him, questioned him, mocked him, ridiculed him, put thorns in his head, dragged him out to Golgotha, crucified him.

With each action, another light went out in the sanctuary. Those of us reading last did so by a single candlelight. The darkness outside the church was on pace with our failing candles, shadows pouring through the windows as we grew our own inside, until there was one light. One single light.

In our service, the final acts are for Ginger to carry the Christ Candle out of the sanctuary as we sing “Were You There.” Tonight, the choir sang the first verse, the congregation sang the second verse, and I sang the third from the balcony as the candle left the room:

were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
were you there when they laid him in the tomb?

sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble . . .

I left the verse unfinished and turned to ring the church bell thirty-three times to commemorate each of the years Jesus walked on the earth. As those tones drew to a close, Ginger returned the candle to the front of the church and we sat in silence. People then left when they chose to do so.

Our church bell is as quaint as they come, just like our white clapboard New England church building. A rope hangs down in the balcony from the steeple and requires a fair amount of effort to render a ring. Outside the church, you can hear the bell. Inside the church, you hear the muffled sound of the bell, the scrape and moan of the rope going back and forth, and – tonight – the labored breathing of the middle-aged man pulling hard on the rope and trying to keep count of the tolls. At about number twenty, I must say I wished Jesus had died a few years younger. At thirty pulls, I was glad he didn’t live to be my age. When I got to thirty-three, I stopped the rope from moving and the bell from ringing and I sat down in the nearest chair, my arms weak and my shoulders sore, to catch my breath as everyone else sat in silence. I thought back to the first hymn of the evening:

I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place

When I was working as a minister at another church, I decided to get the point of my sermon across by having the people in the congregation move around. (I’m trying now to remember exactly what the point was.) I wanted those on the right side to move to the left and vice versa as a tangible way of showing our need to find new perspectives in our lives. There were a couple of things I had not anticipated logistically, but things went pretty well. The following Tuesday at deacons’ meeting, I asked for feedback, since it was something they had not done before. Everyone seemed to appreciate the idea except for one who said with a perturbed tone, “I come to church to feel comfortable.”

I knew right then I was not going to be one of her favorite preachers. As the old saying goes, I think we ought to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. On my way to work today, the discussion on NPR centered on pressuring China to bring about change in Darfur, since China is one of the few governments in the world that has a relationship with the Sudanese government. As one guest noted, “China buys 2/3rds of Sudan’s oil. China’s investments in Sudan have made the US sanctions irrelevant largely in Sudan.” Much of the discussion centered on using the 2008 Olympics, scheduled for Beijing, as a focus of shaming China into action. One of the callers said something about moving slowly because so much was at stake politically. Eric Reeves who was pressing the issue said to the host, “I’m on Darfur time, so I don’t care about the politics. On Darfur time, ten thousand people die every month. On Darfur time, four and a half million people have been displaced and are in need of urgent attention right now. On Darfur time, there is no room for political maneuvering; we must act now.”

I wondered, as the bell was wringing me, how the people outside the church tonight interpreted what they heard. We, on the inside were keeping time with each toll, counting the years of Jesus’ life, watching the lights go out and the shadows grow, setting our hearts and our clocks for Easter. For our neighbors around their supper tables or in front of their televisions, I wondered if they were curious or annoyed or nonplussed. I was moved, rattled, exhausted, disquieted, encouraged. After everything, shadows and all, the light was still burning.

I could see it through the window, even when I got to my car on the other side of the street.

Peace,
Milton