don't eat alone

I have no idea how long Guilford has hosted a tree lighting on the Green, but we have managed to be there with several hundred of our closest neighbors for all but one of the seven Christmases we have been in town, the one exception being 2020. You remember 2020.

Our first year was also the first year for the tree that was being lighted because the one that had been used grew to big for the Parks and Rec folks to string the lights. The young one had been growing for several years as an understudy and finally came of age. Seven years later, it is a teenage tree that stands sixteen or eighteen feet tall, I would guess. Over the past week, the workers have strung the lights on the tree and put up a temporary wooden fence around it, along with a couple of lighted reindeer. Yesterday they moved the trailer that opens into a stage into place, and tonight the Green filled up with people, and beyond those surrounding the stage were people on the sidewalks and in the stores and cafés that had stayed open late.

The weather appeared to understand the importance of the evening, offering a clear, crisp night that began about five o’clock, thanks to the short days of the season. About 5:45 the festivities began, which always include performances from local dance classes and choirs, local musicians, and a word from our First Selectman, which is another way of saying Town Mayor, all of it designed to make the five seconds it takes to flip the light switch turn into an hour long event. I felt like I was in the cast of a Hallmark Christmas movie.

We were far enough from the stage to be out of reach of the sound system, surrounded by people who had brought their children and their dogs, though both seemed like poor decisions to me based on the barks and minor meltdowns. Even so, most of the kids were happy to run around with their glory-sticks, and most of the dogs content to peddle for affection from any passer-by. Meanwhile the choirs sang on in pantomime to most of the crowd and a good time was had by pretty much everyone.

We were getting close to seven before Santa showed up to lead us in the countdown–5,4,3,2,1–and the lights went out on the stage and came up on the tree. We all cheered and started walking to our cars and houses. We had done what we came to do and had had fun doing it.

Even before the pandemic, before most all of us developed a longing for most any reason to be around people, the Green has filled up on this night. It is a night full of activity. High school students line the sidewalks with luminaria, the high school choir and orchestra perform their holiday concert in our church for two nights (and four performances). But the night is known for the tree lighting. That is why we gather. And our little town is not alone.

Why do we do that?

Please hear my question in a tone of wonder. On a night when I was not particularly feeling the season, I walked home in wonder that we, as humans, are built to need each other, to think up reasons to be together.

My friend Christopher Williams wrote and sings one of my favorite songs that answers my question:

to be known, to feel safe
to be honest and unafraid
to leave the past, run into hope
to find together we are not alone

I need you
you need me.
this is why we gather
this is why we gather
to remember why we matter
this is why we gather

to share our story, silence the noise
to hear the wisdom in the tremble of a voice
to carry healing for all the scars
to know we’re more than our broken hearts

I need you
you need me.
this is why we gather
this is why we gather
to remember why we matter
this is why we gather

This is why we gather: to remember why we matter. People practiced and performed songs and dances, vendors packed shopping carts full of gloves-sticks and light sabres, the Boy Scouts sold hot dogs and hot chocolate to raise money to send care packages to soldiers, the men at St. George’s Catholic Church sold soup and pretzels, the strollers on the sidewalks crowded out the Goldens and Labradoodles, and children chased each other in the darkness–all of it so someone could flip a switch and light the tree.

It was a lot of work for a moment that mattered, but moments that matter always take a lot of work, even when we don’t realize it. We live for these moments, again, even when we don’t realize it, because they help us remember why we matter. Why WE matter.

I need you. You need me. So say the Labradors, the little ones, and the lights on the town tree.

Peace,
Milton

Two things: The e-book version of The Color of Together is 99 cents at Amazon (and other ebooks sellers) for the month of December. Please check it out. Secondly, thanks for reading. My website is free and ad-free because of the support of my readers. If you would like to become a sustaining member, click here. You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors.

Here is a story I haven’t told in a while.

In December of 1983 I was working as a chaplain at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. My roommate, Bruce Reece, owned the condo we shared in North Dallas–well, then it was North Dallas; now it is almost downtown. Bruce traveled a lot with his work and that December was no exception. What was exceptional was the weather. In the evening of December 18 the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed that way until the afternoon of December 30. In between those dates, five Arctic cold fronts hit the region.

It was cold.

Some time a week or so before Christmas, the weather took a turn that meant that those of us at the hospital stayed there for several shifts. My extended stay coincided with Bruce’s travel, so when I finally got home after being at the hospital for three days, I came into an empty apartment and when I stepped on the carpet it squished. The living room had about an inch of water from a broken pipe. We had dripped our faucets, but the people in the adjacent condo had not and their pipe burst into our place, or so it was explained to a person by the management company, who also said they would be by the following day to pull up the carpet and we would need to take down our Christmas tree.

I was handling everything as best I could until he said the tree had to come down. Christmas that year, for me, meant working a half day on Christmas Eve, flying to Houston to see my parents, and then flying back Christmas night to work on the 26th. Bruce’s holiday was about as joyous and we had worked hard to celebrate the season together in a way that gave us both hope. I couldn’t imagine losing the tree.

I was exhausted, and I knew Bruce would be in that night around 1 a.m., so I showered and got ready for bed and then stretched out on the couch so I could explain what had happened. As Bruce tells it (I was too sleepy to remember), as he opened the door and stepped on the carpet, I raised up and said, “The pipes broke from the other people’s place and they are coming to pull up the carpet tomorrow and we have to take down the tree.” Then I fell back asleep and he went on to bed.

The next morning, I had to be back at work, so I was up and gone before he woke up. He had already sent word that he was taking a day off to deal with the mess in the house. I went through my day trying to prepare myself to go home to a concrete floor and no Christmas tree.

This time, Bruce greeted me when I opened the door. He was sitting on the couch where I had been sleeping. The carpet was gone, exposing the concrete slab, but the furniture was still there, as was the Christmas tree, still lighted and decorated.

I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember I began to cry.

“After I saw the look on your face last night,” Bruce said, “I knew we had to keep the tree. I spent the whole morning right here as they were pulling up the carpet, reminding them what was at stake. There was no way I was going to lose that tree.”

It was another two weeks before the freeze finally let up, and a couple of weeks after that before we got new carpet, and through it all that tree held its place and we got to Christmas, mostly because my friend did what good friends do.

Life is hard, I know, and all of us have broken pipes of some sort that are flooding our lives. I also know not everyone reading this celebrates Christmas, but we are all trying to figure out how to keep going. I don’t need to wrap it up more than that; it just seemed like a good time to tell this story.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. My website is free and ad-free because of the support of my readers. If you would like to become a sustaining member, click here. You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors.

For the Advent season, I am returning to a book I have not finished–The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. The nearly five hundred page book is an expansive collection of essays and poems intended to inspire us “to join the community of those who work to create a better world.”

One of the essays I read this morning was a short reflection written by the poet Pablo Neruda who recalled standing in the back yard of his house when he noticed a hole in the wooden fence. When he moved closer to investigate, a boy’s hand reached through from the other side and handed him a small white sheep. He never saw the boy again. Neruda said he kept the sheep for many years until it was lost, and then he never passed a toy shop without hoping to find another one. Then he wrote,

pablo I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses–that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

Such is the power of kindness. It widens out the boundaries, expands our comfort zones, illuminates the connections between us. Neruda’s story reminded me of one of my favorite poems: “Zen of Tipping” by Jan Beatty

My friend Lou
used to walk up to strangers
and tip them—no, really—
he’d cruise the South Side,
pick out the businessman on his way
to lunch, the slacker hanging
by the Beehive, the young girl
walking her dog, and he’d go up,
pull out a dollar and say,
Here’s a tip for you.

I think you’re doing a really
good job today. Then Lou would
walk away as the tipee stood
in mystified silence. Sometimes
he would cut it short with,
Keep up the fine work.
People thought Lou was weird,
but he wasn’t. He didn’t have much,
worked as a waiter. I don’t know
why he did it. But I know it wasn’t
about the magnanimous gesture,
an easy way to feel important,
it wasn’t interrupting the impenetrable
edge of the individual—you’d
have to ask Lou—maybe it was
about being awake, hand-to-hand
sweetness, a chain of kindnesses,
or fun—the tenderness
we forget in each other.

I know the poem doesn’t contain any sheep or children, but I found resonance between the boy offering his sheep and Lou tipping random strangers: both found ways to be kind, to communicate connection through rather ordinary acts. And neither Lou nor the boy were the ones telling others what they did.

I think I will sleep on that.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. My website is free and ad-free because of the support of my readers. If you would like to become a sustaining member, click here. You can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors.

Ginger, Rachel, the pups and I spent the better part of this first day of Advent traveling from Durham, North Carolina, where we spent Thanksgiving, to Baltimore, our halfway stop on the way back to Guilford. We were on the road with several thousand travelers, both coming and going from their holidays, all of us sharing the joys of road construction and thunderstorms. Beyond each other, we have talked only to the people who fixed our sandwiches and checked us out at the WaWa and the hotel clerk and the bartender at the Aloft, a hotel that welcomes pets–oh, and the woman who brought out our food at the pickup spot at the Longhorn Steakhouse.

When we travel, Ginger and I create impromptu playlists that consist of responding to each other’s selections, each of us, in turn, asking Siri to play a song. Since it was raining, Ginger started off with “Rainy Days and Mondays” and we rode the rain theme for about two and a half hours until we stopped just outside of Richmond. When we got back in the car, it was her turn again and she switched to a desert theme choosing “Horse with No Name.” Four or five songs with deserts later, the one that came to mind for me was a favorite from Oleta Adams–“Get Here”

you can reach me by railway
you can reach me by trailway
you can reach me on an airplane
you can reach me with your mind
you can reach me by caravan
cross the desert like an Arab man
I don’t care how you get here
just get here if you can

A couple of hours later, things got quiet in the car and I started thinking about what I would write when we finally got to the hotel because my practice of an Advent Journal is a promise I like to keep and also because I am a long way from feeling like Advent is here, or, perhaps better said, that I am here for Advent. The heart of the season has to do with preparing–with getting ready–and I think I am going to spend most of it just trying to get here.

I don’t mean that statement to sound as dire as it might. In fact, I may not even be saying it well.

What has been going through my mind is we often talk about the season as if something new is happening, like we are waiting or preparing for someone who has not already been born. Yes, I quote Meister Eckhart most every year about Christ being born in our time and our culture, but tonight I keep feeling that we are not waiting on a new birth; we know who is coming. We know who has been born already. We are not preparing for him, we are preparing ourselves to be able to be caught by surprise.

But surprise is not always easy; neither is waiting, one of the other verbs we use often at Advent. Both have rather violent roots. The earliest meaning of wait was “to watch with hostile intent.” The root of surprise is “unexpected attack or capture.” The earliest meaning of surprise party was more akin to an ambush than a celebration. The word preparation carries some of that history as well. We, as human beings, hold a long history of suspicion, it seems, and yet all of those words have grown to mean more than violence. Waiting now carries a sense of expectation, preparation means making room, and surprise harbors hope at least part of the time. However ambushed we may feel, the story is not over.

Many of those associated with the story of Jesus’ birth traveled–some of them significant distances. Mary and Joseph had to deal with holiday traffic to get from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the Magi crossed the desert like Arab men, and the shepherds came running into town in the middle of the night. All of them moved through pain and uncertainty. They all came from complicated situations and Jesus’ birth solved none of them. Still, they got there.

Twenty one centuries later, the story we tell has been layered with life, crowded by the marginalia of tradition and theology, colored by companion stories of compassion and hope, colonized by institutions and patriarchy, midwifed by voices of liberation and diversity, among other things. I find it hard to hear it simply as Love came down at Christmas, true as that may be. I want to hear a version of the story that is more than nostalgia, more than repetition or even ritual, more than being glad we can finally do things like we did before the pandemic.

It will never be before the pandemic again. Do we have the courage to speak up if the way we used to do it doesn’t speak to us anymore? How can we get here if our maps no longer lead us?

As I read over what I have written so far, I am aware it is not particularly linear. I didn’t start with a point in mind other than I feel caught up in the traffic of life and wonder how I will get here for Christmas. Perhaps that makes sense for you, too.

Let’s travel together.

Peace,
Milton