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a good word

Affirmation is life-giving.

When I was teaching high school, I started putting stickers on vocabulary quizzes (and then on other papers and tests) for good grades. The kids went nuts over them. I was teaching junior Honors Brit Lit and they were clamoring for Sponge Bob stickers. I know how they feel. I started back to Weight Watchers a couple of weeks ago. They give you a star for every five pounds you lose. A small, very disposable, gold star. I got my second one on Tuesday. I think I’m as excited about the little sticker as I am about losing the weight.

A good word goes a long way.

Maggi Dawn affirmed me this week by giving me a Thinking Blogger award. I greatly appreciate it. (I would also like to say thank you to two other folks who did the same while I was writing my Lenten Journal. I intended to follow through after Easter and lost track of your comments.) The award is a meme that began with this post.

One of the things I like about the meme — besides getting an award (my first) — is it’s designed to foster greater affirmation. Maggi mentioned me as one of five blogs that make her think; my task is to do the same. Here are some folks who feed me:

tgraypots web log is a wonderful mixture of pottery, faith, and a fair amount of pizza, as well as other cool food. Reading Tom’s work has led me to some great stuff on learning to eat locally and ethically. The passion and tenderness with which he writes is contagious.

Spilt Milk is a blog I discovered recently. Tee’s writing is thoughtful and challenging. She writes about some of the political issues in our world with a personal touch — particularly when it comes to Christian – Muslim – Jewish relations. Her writings and links took me to both Hometown Baghdad and Raising Yousuf, Unplugged.

Look What Love Has Done
is a blog with which I’ve had a connection almost since I started blogging. She was one of the first people to begin to comment with some regularity. Beth writes beautifully and poignantly about what she is learning about faith and family in these days. Her latest post is about affirming her son. She’s a good mom.

Closeted Pastor is a new find for me. Cecilia writes about pastoring and working through not yet being able to come out to her congregation. I’m hopeful that she will find affirmation and encouragement here among the blogs to help her move toward feeling more integrated. I’m thankful I get to be a part of the journey.

Simply Simon is writing about “life, food, faith, and the city” — the city being Melbourne, Australia. Simon is a professor, writer, cook, and all around interesting guy. There’s lots of stuff going on at his place. He’s one who helps me to keep paying attention.

There are others that move me (as it is, I managed to sneak in a couple). Today, these are folks I want to affirm as blogs that make me think. I’m grateful for the connections.

Peace,
Milton

naming the animals

In the weight of these times, I found myself looking for a little relief tonight. And, since we are in the waning days of National Poetry Month, I offer yet another poem.

Naming the Animals

“Our job is to name the animals,” she said.
“All of them?” he asked.
“Why? Where do you have to be?”
She smiled.

“Aardvark — your turn,” she said.
“Dog.”
“Platypus.”
“Pig.”

“That’s a bit plain”, she said.
“Well — what would you call it?”

(pause)

“Pig is OK, I guess.”
“Keep going,” he said.

“Salamander.”
“Sheep.”
“Okapi.”
“Cow.”
“Gazelle.”
“Fish.”

“I have to stop you,” she said.
“Why?”
“Fish won’t do.”
“But wasn’t it my turn?” he asked.

(long pause)

“Poisson,” she said.
“Pwa — who?”
“I switched to French.”
“It’s still a fish,” he said.

Peace,
Milton

global days for darfur

Yes, I know I’m posting a couple of times today. I wanted to talk about the blog tour, but the thing most on my mind is the Global Days for Darfur initiative taking place this week around the world thanks to the Save Darfur Coalition. The volume of voices calling for significant action to save the people of Darfur is rising and things are beginning to happen. This could be a pivotal week in holding our world leaders accountable for changing the plight of the people who are being raped, starved, and murdered in the Sudan.

Please take time to look at the site.

You can find an event in your area here.

You can download a faith action packet with worship resources here.

The time is now for us to step forward and save our brothers and sisters.

Peace,
Milton

(Photographs are from SaveDarfur.org)

blog tour

There’s a new site worth visiting (actually a new version of something already going pretty well called The High Calling of Our Daily Work, which looks at what it means to be called to our vocation whether or not that means we are professionally spiritual. They have some great stuff. I particularly like the categories things they explore: work and family, gifts and talents, leadership, excellence, integrity, attitude, professional relationships, and service. The site is easy to navigate and full of good things.

You can sign up for a free membership here.

Then you can take the blog tour to some of these sites to see who hangs around at High Calling:

Gordon Atkinson
L. L. Barkat
Gina Conroy
Craver VII
CREEations
Mary DeMuth
Karl Edwards
Emdashery
Every Square Inch
Green Inventions
Amy Goodyear
Marcus Goodyear
Al Hsu, Jennwith2ns
Charles Foster Johnson
Mike McLoughlin
Eve Nielsen
Naked Pastor
Ramblin Dan
Charity Singleton
Stacy
Camy Tang
Writer… Interrupted

Peace,
Milton

the country of marriage

We are more together than we know,
how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?

— Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage”

Ginger and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary yesterday. We both had full workdays: I had three functions and she had a funeral, a wedding, and a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration to attend. At ten o’clock last night we pulled out of the driveway to make the forty-minute trip into Boston and the Hard Rock Café, where we go every year because we got engaged at the Hard Rock in Dallas. (Last year, we were at the Hard Rock in Athens.) I didn’t have a function on Friday night, so we had talked about celebrating then, but neither of us wanted to settle for not being there on the actual day. We got home a little after one and went to church feeling tired this morning.

But it was a good kind of tired.

April 21, 1990 was Earth Day, Paula Abdul Saturday (according to VH-1), and our wedding day. In the seventeen years since, we’ve shared four addresses in three different towns and two states, had five Schnauzers, two washing machines, five computers, and six cars. She’s seen me go from working as a minister to an English teacher to a minister again and then a chef. I typed and edited as she got her doctorate. We had no way to anticipate then where life would take us. All we knew was we wanted to be together, wherever we were going. We knew we were moving to Boston, but we had no idea we would be living the life we are today. Regardless of our address, we have made a home in the country of marriage, an unbounded land that calls us each day to a journey for two.

From time to time, Ginger asks me where I think I would be if we had not married. My answer has always been the same: “I don’t think I would be alive.” I don’t mean to be morose or hyperbolic; I don’t know how to picture having lived these years without her. When I look back over these years – my struggle to find my true sense of vocation, my depression, to mention a couple of things – I know I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve been sustained and even reclaimed by the way she has loved me. Maybe I answer the question that way because the prospect is unimaginable to me: I don’t want to know what it would have been like to live without her.

If this sounds over the top, then so be it. And I have one more thing to say. I’ve gotten to do some pretty cool stuff in my life. I’ve worked hard to learn a lot of things and tried my hand at any number of jobs and hobbies. I’m proud of my work and my accomplishments. And what matters more than anything else in my life is I got to be Ginger’s husband. Regardless of how the rest of my days add up, to have spent these years with her make mine an extraordinary life.

I am a proud citizen of the country of marriage.

Peace,
Milton

response

I’m thankful I woke up this morning late enough to miss NBC’s airing of the video of Cho Seung-Hui that he mailed before he started shooting people in Blacksburg. I don’t want to see it. I know I don’t need to. What I did read were the anonymous comments from one angry person to Tracy’s wonderful post at Spilt Milk. If you could scream when you write, this guy was yelling at the top of his lungs about how crazy and angry all the Muslims were. I don’t think he saw his own irony. I read a sad story on Raising Yousuf about a Palestinian woman’s difficulty leaving the Amsterdam airport just because she was a Muslim woman.

The level of violence we reach in the name of “securing the homeland,” or whatever name we use to say we want to be safe, makes me angry. To avoid adding to the violence and turmoil, the best things I know to do are add a new recipe and turn to poetry.

Response

Fear is hand delivered:
trench-coated high
schoolers, hijackers,
car bombers,
suicidal shooters.

Fighting to feel safe
is like eating gravy with a fork.

Get on a plane.
Go to class.
Drop off the kids.
Cross the street.
See what happens.

Life doesn’t follow
an ascending trajectory.

Fearing and fighting
are not our only options.
We can choose faith —
drop our guards
and our guns.

We won’t feel safe, secure
or even in control.
Waging peace
has never been
for the faint of heart.

Peace,
Milton

blogganelle

I found a new blog recently called Poetry Thursday. They have all kinds of cool stuff — columnists, writing prompts, thoughts on poetry, and poems themselves. One of the posts this week talked about the villanelle, a very strict poetic form that requires not only a specific rhyme scheme, but also the repetition of particular lines. Two of the best known villanelles are Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

The form attracted me today as a metaphor for life. In these days full of violence and questioning, it struck me that we have to work to find a form for our expression and action. As we try to figure out how to respond to the world around us on multiple levels, we need some sort of rhyme scheme, if you will: some way to not only articulate our faith but to give it form in a way that connects us in the same manner that a great poem speaks from deep to deep.

All of that said, I took my shot at a villanelle today — my first successful effort. I don’t claim to be anywhere close to Thomas or Bishop, nor do I claim it necessarily lives up to the metaphor; I’m just putting it out there.

Blogganelle

I call my blog “don’t eat alone”
and wish for friends at every meal

as I keep cooking in our home


or at the Inn that I don’t own

my joy with food I can’t conceal

I call my blog “don’t eat alone”


the kitchen is where love is grown

at least, for me, that’s been the deal

and so I cook to make a home


‘cause home is not a place I’ve known

since I grew up on wing and wheel

I call my blog “don’t eat alone”


the ache for home lives in my bones

belonging I most want to feel

so I keep cooking my way home


following crumbs that love has strewn

to what is real – (more than ideal)

I call my blog “don’t eat alone”

as I keep cooking in our home

Peace,
Milton

common bond

Besides trying to figure out how to create another sidebar on my blog, I spent a good part of the evening reading how various folks have responded to the killings at Virginia Tech. My heart aches for the families and friends of those who were killed, for all the VT students who never imagined their college days would be so indelibly marked by such an horrific tragedy, and for the school and city officials who have become the targets of so much of the rage that can’t find any other resting place.

We woke up this morning to Matt and Meredith sitting on the campus lawn in Blacksburg with a “special report.” They, along with who knows how many different media outlets, both large and small, descended on the college so we all could have up to the minute coverage. They went to commercial with a special logo and subdued music. One of the reporters did a small piece interviewing a handful of students and closed by saying something like, “They are still trying to figure out how to get on with their lives.” They’re going to be trying to figure that out for a long, long time.

The phrase that hung with me was one I heard repeated several times today: this was the largest killing spree in our nation’s history. Hyperbole or not, the statement is jarring. In all our years as a nation, not until 2007 did we have a day when a person killed over thirty people at once and then killed himself. For all practical purposes, he was a suicide bomber. Blacksburg, it seems, is not that far from Baghdad.

Our local news tonight began drawing lines from Boston to Blacksburg, making note of the kids from New England who were killed. Part of what the news people incarnate is our desire to not let those folks hurt alone. We want them to know this is our pain, not just theirs. Some from our neighborhood died too, we say. In a week that marks the anniversaries of the deaths at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the shootings at Columbine, we are all working hard to be galvanized by our pain, to share the weight of sorrow, to walk together through the valley of the shadow.

It’s good and important work.

We come together because we find comfort and strength, because we can incarnate love and grace to one another; because it hurts too damn much to be alone. Here, at the heart of our pain, comes the call to widen the circle of those who hurt like we do. Hardly a day goes by that thirty people don’t die in Iraq because of a suicide bomber. The people in Jerusalem and Gaza live with the same fear. This week the same thing has happened in Algiers and Afghanistan. Three hundred and thirty die everyday in Darfur. Everyone who dies is someone’s daughter, mother, son, father, friend. Our shared grief is the common denominator.

Since I grew up far away from my extended family, I didn’t go to a family funeral until I was almost out of high school. My first funeral during my seminary pastorate was only the second funeral I had ever attended. The funeral director in town was a retired minister and a great guy. He saw the raw fear in my eyes as I met with him and the family. “Come by in the morning,” he said, “and I’ll show you what to do.”

The man who died was a poor country man. His wife found him on the floor when she came back in from the garden. They were dirt poor. If they had lived in the city they would have been homeless. In the country, they lived in a shanty that was falling down around them. I drove up to their house and the widow met me at the door. I was at a loss as to what to do and, as she expressed her sorrow, I blurted, “I know how you feel.”

She stopped crying and looked up at me with astonishment. “Do you really?”

“No,” I stammered. “I don’t. I just didn’t know what to say.”

About that time, one of the women of the church – a widow for twenty years – knocked on the door and came in all in one motion. She kept moving until she was sitting next to the woman and had her arm around her shoulder. “Vergie,” she said.

“Thank you,” said the woman.

I watched the two women hold the sorrow like an infant, as though they had given birth to hope in that moment. After a little while, the woman looked up at me and said, “He was a good man.” And she began to tell me stories.

I have no idea what it feels like to be a student at Virginia Tech any more than I can grasp what it feels like to live in Baghdad or Darfur. In the past couple of years, I’ve stood with two close friends at their parents’ funerals. I don’t know what that feels like either. What I do know, from being with those friends, is it mattered I was there. It mattered that I called, that I noticed, that I reached out. I’ve missed some of those moments in the lives of other friends and it mattered when I didn’t show up as well.

When we talk about Darfur, the prevailing response, often, is we feel overwhelmed by the distance, by the problem, by our own pain. That we can feel a sense of solidarity with the students in Blacksburg gives me hope that we can find a sense of connection and commitment to the pain beyond our comfort zone. Grief does not have to drive us to fear or isolation. Clamoring for safety doesn’t bring much in the way of comfort. Compassion – voluntarily entering one another’s pain – is how we both grow and heal.

Peace,
Milton

storm story

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