don't eat alone

For a mostly white congregation in the suburbs, we do a pretty good job celebrating Martin Luther King Day. It starts with a breakfast (we had fifty people this year) where we hear excerpts from King’s speeches and writings, and then a worship centered around issues of peace and social justice. Paul Nickerson, the Associate Conference Minister for Evangelism, Mission, and Justice Ministries for the Mass. Conference of the UCC, was our guest preacher. He used the texts of Abraham’s call and Jesus’ calling of the disciples to become “catchers of people” as a jumping off place for a great question:

What is God calling you to do that takes your breath away?

I’d never thought about it like that. Abraham stood under the night sky while God told him his descendants would outnumber the stars. Peter, James, and John walked away from perhaps they most profitable catch of their careers because their hearts had been captured by Jesus. They spent the rest of their lives following Jesus and trying to catch their breaths.

After church, a few of us went to see Freedom Writers, a movie based on Erin Gruwell and her experience teaching high school English in Long Beach, California. The film is well done and the story is both moving and inspiring. It also took me back to the seven years I spent teaching English in an urban high school. As different characters emerged in the movie, I heard myself saying the names of kids I saw in them. As I watched her work hard to make a relational connection with kids who had already learned from life to trust no one, I thought about some of the things I did and some of the breakthroughs I had with my students.

The problem for me was, even as I was having fun with the kids, the bureaucracy of the Boston Public Schools beat me up like a mugger in a back alley. At the same time, in ways I did not yet know how to recognize, my depression was beginning to beat me down. Then there was the grading, which I hated. Assigning grades often felt like a betrayal of the relationships I was trying to foster. Towards the end of my tenure, I used to describe how I felt by saying, “Every day while I’m in the building, part of me dies. I have from the time I leave until I go back again to resuscitate the part of me that died; the problem is I can never bring it all back to life.” After seven years in Boston and three in a suburban high school, I left teaching – even though I love working with students – because I didn’t know how to do it in a way that didn’t eat me up in the process.

As much as I love reading and writing with kids, the job didn’t take my breath away. It knocked the wind out of me. There’s a difference. And I left the movie this afternoon feeling a little guilty. The message of the movie is right: teaching is a noble calling; working with city kids is hard, meaningful, and rewarding work. On this January night in 2007, I can look back eight or ten years and see my depression had a lot to do with me leaving the classroom. I couldn’t help but think, “Maybe if I had been emotionally healthier I would still be teaching.”

Maybe not.

Another way to look at it is to see my life in chapters. For a decade, I taught high school English. I loved those days: I did good work, I helped a lot of kids and learned a lot from them, and I wore myself out. For those years, I felt called to teach. Whatever might have been, I don’t feel called to do that now. I feel called to write and cook. If that sense of calling doesn’t take my breath away, then I have not given the Spirit room to capture my imagination with possibilities. When I let myself dream about how my cooking and writing can build relationships and touch lives – and when I take time to notice the ways they have already done so, leaving me as surprised as Peter with his nets – and I understand what Paul was talking about.

And I’m still uneasy. Maybe a little unrest should inhabit our souls on a daily basis, calling us to question and wonder, not so much about what might have been, but what is. When I moved to the suburban high school, I felt guilty for leaving my kids in the city and I found a whole bunch of other kids who needed just as much care for different reasons. Neither Charlestown High nor Winchester High have closed down since I left. I did important work and life goes on without me.

Part of God’s message to Abraham on that starlight night was he was just one of the stars. His descendants might outnumber all the little lights he saw, but he was only one light that would fade and be forgotten by a fairly substantial number of those descendants. God was saying, “Right now you don’t feel like you matter. Follow my lead and you will leave a trail like a comet.” Abraham only got to see only a small percentage of his progeny, but he trusted the gasp he heard himself make out in the dark.

I had good and meaningful years as a minister and as a teacher. Somehow I breathe easier now that I am not doing either one. Both are essential and important and I’m not called to either, at least for this chapter. I am a writer and a cook. I get a little lightheaded just thinking about the possibilities.

Peace,
Milton

Several years ago, I was singing for a church banquet and came to the point in my set where I was going to sing “Angel From Montgomery,” my favorite song. I prefaced the song very simply — “I relate to this song more than any song I know” — then I started to sing:

I am an old woman named after my mother . . .

Not exactly what I meant, but I kept going. Besides, John Prine wrote the song. He must have felt the same way. Today, I feel like this woman more than any other:

Wednesday I called the Inn to tell them I would consider coming back to work if they would give me a raise. For me, it was a way for both of us to save face: they got me to come back and I got to come back with some dignity. Ginger and I got home last night a little after seven to find a message from the Inn on the answering machine telling me the owner wouldn’t go for my offer but would I come back anyway. I called back this morning to say, “No, thanks.” I meant what I said and that was that.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the Inn calling to say the owner had reconsidered and would give me the raise. Please come back. I told them I would think about it. A couple of hours later, I called back again and told them I would be there on Monday. When I went upstairs to check email, I found this note from Gordon who said Blogger had not allowed him to leave it as a comment on “The Next Voice You Hear,” so he sent it straight to me:

Let me begin by saying that I’m sure you’ve already thought of what I’m about to write. I’m not writing it in the spirit of instruction, but more as an affirmation to something that perhaps is already running through your mind.

I’d like to suggest that this new development with The Inn is not an all or nothing situation. It’s not a choice between swallowing your pride and your values and going back to work for the devil, or doing the right thing and telling them to go to hell.

You have now learned something about this place or at least about the owner. You can’t trust him or them (whichever it is). You certainly don’t owe them any more loyalty than they have given you. So perhaps you go back to work for the money, which is an honest reason to work. Many people work in places they don’t like in order to put food on the table. Heck, that’s even a heroic thing to do. I mean, it’s not as though you’re work is hurting children or something like that. You just know that this place cannot be trusted.

But now you can start looking for something new. Perhaps a new restaurant will become available in a few weeks or months. When you find the new thing that is right for you, you say goodbye to The Inn and hello to the next chapter of your life. You give them whatever notice seems right to you, but you don’t spend any time worrying about how they will get along without you.

Perhaps this new development is bit of grace in a hard situation. Just enough grace to get you to the next place.

Enough grace to get to the next place. I like that.

In the past two weeks, the shake up in my life and schedule has given me a chance to see my life from a new perspective, forcing me to look anew at my job, my passions, my time, and our money. I’ve made it to the gym four times a week – enough for it to feel like part of my regular routine. Ginger and I both have worked hard to pay close attention to every penny we spend, not knowing how long I would be out of work. Thanks to words of encouragement and support from several folks, I’ve seen new possibilities for my writing and my cooking. I even made cold calls at a couple of restaurants where I would like to work that may prove promising later on. Standing up for myself on the salary front is new ground for me as well.

Though I am going back to the same place, I’m not the same going back and I’m not going back to the same thing, mostly because I have a different sense of myself. This gut check has made me more sure that the two things I love and want most to do in my life are write and cook (and probably in that order). I’ve also learned, as Gordon said, that choosing to return, in part, because I need the money is not a bad thing. I understand the ground rules at the Inn; I also understand there’s a larger world out there.

The final verse and chorus of “Angel From Montgomery” say

there’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ‘em a buzzin’
and I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today
how the hell can a person go to work every morning
and come home every evening and have nothing to say?

make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
make me a poster of an old rodeo
just give me one thing I can hold on to
to believe in this living is just a hard way to go

What I learned – again – this week is believing in this living doesn’t happen because of a job or a paycheck, but because I don’t let myself believe I have nothing to say. I learned – again — that love and grace are not bound by circumstance. I learned – again – to be thankful that I have choices. I learned – again – that I am rich when it comes to friends and family.

All of that adds up to enough grace to get to the next place.

Peace,
Milton

This morning on the TODAY show, they told of an American Airlines flight from hell over New Year’s Weekend. The flight was supposed to go from San Francisco to Dallas: three and a half hours. Because of severe storms in Dallas, the flight was rerouted to Austin, where it was told to land and wait for clearance to go on to D/FW.

The plane sat on the runway for eight hours without letting the passengers get off.

Evidently, American instructed the pilot not to pull up to a gate so they could keep the other flights on time. The toilets overflowed, they ran out of water, and all anyone had to eat were peanuts. Finally, the pilot disregarded instructions and pulled into a gate anyway, letting the passengers off the plane and into the terminal.

The first question that came to my mind was, “Why did anyone on that plane put up with it for eight hours?”

In this age when they will throw someone off a plane for looking askew at the flight attendant (they’ve even turned a couple of flights around to remove passengers), if even one or two people had gone Peter Finch on the crew in the midst of being held hostage by the schedulers, they would have pulled into a gate faster than you can say frequent flyer. I’m sure someone could have started an inflight insurgency and gotten a good bit of support from the other passengers.

I don’t understand why they stayed in their seats for eight hours.

They aren’t the only ones.

I listened to Bush describe how surging against the insurgents is going to make things better. He said it with a straight face. The reporters parroted his words as their alleged commentary. The morning news programs gave passing notice to what he said on their way to the latest idiocies from Donald Trump. Some members of Congress mouthed off, but were treated with the kind of regard one gives an annoying lap dog. As the war grows closer and closer to the end of its fourth year and the death toll rises on all sides (not to mention those left wounded and maimed), we are being given the presidential equivalent of being told we are going to stay sitting on the runway until the weather clears and we are just sitting there.

We are not all silent. There are voices of dissent, but I don’t hear much outrage. That’s not even the right word. Beyond “I’m mad as hell” or “Hell, no, we won’t go” we need a response of faithful indignation. And I think it is going to take intense indignation to get Bush’s attention. He has not listened to much in any of the reports he has commissioned. He acts as if things are true because he believes them to be. When there were no weapons of mass destruction, we complained. When he claimed, “Mission accomplished,” we smirked. When we began to see we have fomented a civil war in Iraq, we let the Democrats have Congress. As the body count has risen, we watched Cindy Sheehan make a creative nuisance of herself and left her out there mostly alone.

It’s not that we have done nothing. Many of us have written letters and blog entries calling for change. Some have written songs, even books. Hardly a day passes that I don’t have a conversation with someone lamenting what is going on. Yet, more people stood in line at Christmas to get an Xbox 360 than have taken to the streets demanding real accountability and real change.

We are allowing ourselves to be kept on the runway, out of touch and unable to move.

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen, wondering whose words I can implore to make my point. When I was first learning to play my guitar, Simon and Garfunkel recorded a song called “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.” I went looking for the lyric.

Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with powerful men
And the paper they were signing said
They’d never fight again

And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands end bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And guns and swords and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I also found something else apropos of this discussion: a video clip of John Denver singing the song, prefaced by an interesting poem I’ve not heard before.

As I’ve said before, Denver was one of the folks who helped me learn to play guitar (his records did, anyway). I saw him in concert several times. He was the consummate idealist: he said the words in the poem as though he meant them, he believed them. As I watched the clip, I realized one of the reasons we may not be rising up in indignation is we don’t really believe the world is going to be much different than it is being painted for us by Bush and the other artists in The School of Violence and Cynicism.

The song for our day is more along the lines of John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change”:

now we see everything that’s going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don’t have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

When I was Mayer’s age, I thought we could change the world. Now, it seems, I’m waiting right along with him. I think we will keep waiting until we become both faithful and indignant enough to wage peace.

Peace,
Milton

Something in the day lead me to a poem rather than an essay. I’m less confident in my poetry, but it is what I have to offer.

Alternate Tuning

I’m confused.
I don’t understand.
I’ve played guitar a long time.
But tonight, I’m trying something new.

I press the string against the neck for a
G, but the note that sounds is B.
My fingers go where they have always gone,
Only to find notes they don’t know:
My guitar has learned a foreign language.

My hands know the chords in English, I guess —
But my instrument now converses in
Farsi, French, Urdu — Arabic?
I am a beginner again,
Trying to recognize an old friend
Who has reinvented himself.

I recognize the shape,
The way the curve fits under my arm,
But I don’t understand what he is saying.
I stumble through the dictionary
Of chord shapes, looking for something
I recognize: a meaningful translation,

Looking for a way to not feel so stupid.
I could retune the strings back to the notes I know,
We could go back to the same old chords,
But I think I would always hear
The trace of an accent in the strings.

So I try again, forcing my
Fingers to find the notes in new
Places, to let my guitar lead
Me to a new melody.

Peace,
Milton

God called again, “Samuel!”—the third time! Yet again Samuel got up and went to Eli, “Yes? I heard you call me. Here I am.”

That’s when it dawned on Eli that God was calling the boy. So Eli directed Samuel, “Go back and lie down. If the voice calls again, say, ‘Speak, God. I’m your servant, ready to listen.'” Samuel returned to his bed. (I Samuel 3:8-9, The Message)

As I have tried to listen this week, here are some of the voices I have heard and read:

Joe: It’s not often at halfway to a hundred you get to start all over. Ride on Milton ride on.

Anj: I will be holding you in the Light, as we Friends say, as the Spirit brings you and Ginger to mind.

Zorra: I wonder what God will do with this time in your life?

Bill Hill: Go for it, Milton. Make it happen. Immerse yourself in it. Write your fool head off. Work at other things to support your writing habit. You need to do it, and we need to read it. Grieve over the loss and the injustice of your dismissal, but then write.

Tim Sean: I’m on your side, whatever that might mean.

KQ: I believe two things about your situation (and mine): The twins Danger and Opportunity are always present in the crisis of unemployment. You will prevail over the former and excel in the latter, no matter what professional path you chose.

muphinsmom: I’d say you probably need a much bigger blank piece of paper now.

fishrock: Have faith that you will survive. Keep “a kind heart” to everyone, including yourself. Keep writing.

Lisa in Austin: I was wishing you’d write a book.

Anne: Some of us are aching for such a book…something that validates our lives and feelings as woven into the tapestry of ‘normal’ life.

RLP: Please God, find Milton a job, if you do that kind of thing. I hope you do.

Ginger and I have felt an amazing amount of love and support from people both far and near, in both words and actions. We have also continued to get bills in the mail. I’ve spent a good bit of time scouring the Web, making phone calls, and reading want ads, trying to see what was out there, trying to discern God’s call in all of this.

Growing up in a preacher’s home, I learned early about call. It was how I was taught to think about work: God called you. My father talked about how he was called into ministry – it wasn’t where he was headed to begin with. My mother talked about feeling called to take care of my brother and I. As I sat in Baptist churches growing up, I watched more than one person walk down the aisle during the invitation hymn to answer God’s call to “special service,” which meant the vocational ministry. I never saw anyone come forward to say God had called them to be an accountant, a physical therapist, a truck driver, or a chef.

When we first moved to Boston, Ginger and I both had to find jobs to help supplement our income as church planters. I worked at the Blockbuster Video in Charlestown. One night, I was walking through the store and asked a woman if I could help her find a movie. She looked up surprised and said, “I don’t usually talk to the help in places like this.”

What I wanted to say was, “I have a Masters degree and could talk circles around you when it comes to movies.” What I did was go back behind the counter and leave her to search on her own. It created an identity crisis for me: I had to come to terms with who I was and what I did not being the same thing. If all I was could be summed up in renting copies of Terminator 2, I couldn’t take it.

Once again, I’ve had to learn to live in the creative tension between the two extremes. When people ask me what I do, don’t I usually answer, “I am a chef,” rather than “I cook for a living”?

One of the things I have heard in the past week is both writing and cooking are expressions of my spirit: they are who I am. Regardless of the circumstance, if someone asks who can help with the food, my hand goes up and my mind starts dreaming up what to make. Several times a day, I catch myself looking at what is going on around me and thinking about how to put it on paper so others could be in that moment as well. I do these things; I am a chef and a writer.

The kicker comes when we add money to the equation. A friend used to work in a hospital with a woman who spent all her vacation time working in indigent clinics overseas. The woman said she did her job during the year for those four weeks of meaning. Not everyone in the world gets to think about meaningful jobs. Some get to choose based on necessity and compensation; others have to take what they can find. At different times, I’ve lived on both sides of that line. I’ve come to feel that the sense of calling comes in the doing of the thing: the work ethic, the loyalty, the commitment to excellence, the sense of community with co-workers. Again, not all of those are available in every work place.

About noon today, I heard another voice. The general manager from the Inn called and asked if I would consider coming back to work. She did a good job of saying she knew I had not been treated well over the past few days and she also said they understood what a good worker I was.

I told her I would think about it.

When I hung up the phone, all I could hear was Jackson Browne singing, “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.” Except I don’t feel caught. I do wish there was a clear indication – a Voice, if you will – to show what the best path would be. I won’t know that until I take a few steps, at least; maybe more.

I have some time to keep listening and I will because, before long, it will be my turn to speak.

Peace,
Milton

PS — And I did find time to post a new recipe.

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and one of my heroes because of the way she wages peace with words. When I found a book of her poetry I did not have, You & Yours, I whipped out one of my Christmas gift cards and gave it to myself. This was the first poem:

Cross that Line

Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border
of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.

He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was
not allowed to cross
that line.

Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

When I first read the poem, I recognized Robeson’s name as that of an actor and singer from an earlier time, but I didn’t know why he had to sing into Canada, so I did a little research. Here’s what I found.

Paul Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, NJ, the son of a freed slave who became a Presbyterian minister. He received a scholarship to Rutgers, where he became an All-American football player. He then graduated from Columbia Law School, but left the law soon after because his secretary refused to take dictation from a black man (not the words she chose) and he saw no way around the racism in that field. In the mid-twenties, he entered the theater. After singing “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat, he decided singing full time was what he really wanted to do. One biography describes his growing social conscience this way:

Robeson had been giving solo vocal performances since 1925, but it wasn’t until he traveled to Britain that his singing became for him a moral cause. Robeson related years later in his autobiography, Here I Stand, that in England he “learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.” Consequently, he began singing spirituals and work songs to audiences of common citizens and learning the languages and folk songs of other cultures, for “they, too, were close to my heart and expressed the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music.” Nathan Irvin Huggins, writing in the Nation, defined this pivotal moment: “[Robeson] found the finest expression of his talent. His genuine awe of and love for the common people and their music flourished throughout his life and became his emotional and spiritual center.”

A PBS biography continues the story:

During the 1940s, Robeson’s black nationalist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite his contributions as an entertainer to the Allied forces during World War II, Robeson was singled out as a major threat to American democracy. Every attempt was made to silence and discredit him, and in 1950 the persecution reached a climax when his passport was revoked. He could no longer travel abroad to perform, and his career was stifled. Of this time, Lloyd Brown, a writer and long-time colleague of Robeson, states: “Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever.”

He wasn’t allowed to leave the US for eight years, when the Supreme Court reinstated his passport. By then he had gone from being a noted celebrity to persona non grata to most. It was on one day during those eight years in the fifties that Paul Robeson sang into Canada.

Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into?

At the interfaith service before our governor’s inauguration, a rabbi (whose name I can’t find anywhere) quoted another rabbi, Abraham Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery and then wrote afterwards:

For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

It is a sad thing to me that I grew up in a denomination that is rooted in the South and never met a white minister there who had prayed with his legs.

Remind us again,
brave friend. What lines should we all
be crossing?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is best known for being one of those whose nonviolent resistance broke apartheid in South Africa. Now he is singing across lines about the way the world treats gay and lesbian people.

“We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about; our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given.” Mr Tutu says he could not have fought against the discrimination of apartheid and not also fight against the discrimination which homosexuals endure. “And I am proud that in South Africa, when we won the chance to build our own new constitution, the human rights of all have been explicitly enshrined in our laws,” he said, adding that he hoped this soon would also be the case in other countries.

We talked with one man during the inauguration festivities who told us of Deval Patrick going to visit his eighty-year old father, by his son’s definition, a real Boston Irishman. The son was worried about how his dad might take to the idea of an African-American governor and he wanted his father to meet this man whom he respected and supported. When the old man met Patrick, he apologized: “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to do more back then.”

Remind us again,
brave friend. What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

Darfur is singing.
Sierra Leone is singing.
Iraq is singing (a different song than we are hearing)
Our immigrants are singing.
Our poor are singing.
Our gay brothers and lesbian sisters are singing.

The list is far from exhaustive. The melody, no matter in whose voice, yearns for resonance in our hearts and minds.

Stand up and sing, brave friends.

Peace,
Milton

I opened one of my Christmas presents yesterday. My friend, Lance, gave me a gift certificate to Calabash Music, a global music web site unlike anything I’ve ever seen (or heard). Here’s how they describe themselves:

Calabash Music™ is the ultimate global music destination giving easy access to all the great, but hard-to-find, music from around the world. We’re providing you with the most unique and broadest based international catalog – served the way you like it, via the Internet.

Our equal exchange business model and focus on international artists is revitalizing the music industry in developing nations around the globe. When our artists sell their music directly to you, they keep half the money from each sale and they avoid the high costs of manufacturing, marketing and distributing their music on CDs.

Needless to say, my time spent roaming around on their site, which is full of chances to listen to great stuff — including a free download of the day, helped to lift my spirits. Thanks to their willingness to share, I’m including two things: a video trailer to a movie about The Refugee All-Stars in Sierra Leone and a listening sampler of the Mutubambile Orphan Choir from Zimbabwe, which is what I got with my gift certificate.

The civil war in Sierra Leone is one of those conflicts that doesn’t break into our news cycle very often. Many of the refugees from the war have fled into the neighboring country of Guinea. Calbash describes how the two men who began the band came to do so:

Reuben’s and Franco’s collaboration actually goes back to 1998 in Kalia camp. “I had nothing to do,” recalled Reuben. “In the morning, I would go to the center were all the refugees would just be talking. I saw that many people were not happy. I thought: If I start to play music here, people will really feel well.” Precisely so, and soon a Canadian NGO provided the band with PA gear so they could tour to other camps and raise spirits there. “Me and Franco,” said Reuben, “we were very serious over the matter. At first, my wife was not happy. She didn’t want me to go sing in remote places. But I was so stubborn.” His wife, Grace, eventually joined the band once she saw how the music was helping to build community in the camps, drawing people to meetings where they could discuss their circumstances and options.

You can also visit the official web site of the film and hear an interview on NPR.

The Mutubambile Orphan Choir is made up of children from Zimbabwe who were orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Again, here is Calabash’s description:

‘We are the Orphans’ was produced by popular Zimbabwean musican Oliver Mtukudzi alongside children who are part of the Mutubambile Orphan Choir.

The children composed their own songs with Mtukudzi, who also worked on the musical arrangements. This extra-ordinary album by children who have lost most of their parents to HIV/AIDS reflects a sigh of hope and spreads the message of the disease that has taken their loved ones. Through the beautiful, often sad, songs of the choir, produced in collaboration with Oliver, highlights the national problem posed by the many orphans left by HIV & Aids every year. The sale of their album will contribute to the orphans’ education.

Use the player below to hear samples. It will also connect you to Calabash if you want to buy some of them.

Reuben is right: when I start to play music, I feel well because I can hear what hope sounds like.

Peace,
Milton

There’s the theology you discuss late at night over coffee or beers and then there’s the theology that gets lived out. The challenge, for me, is for the two to be quite similar.

In coming to terms with my job situation, I turned to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Mt. 6:25-34)

When it comes to dealing with adversity, it’s easy to become self-focused. In some sense, that’s exactly what we have to do: put on our thickest skin. In another sense it’s reflex: we turn inward to keep from getting hurt even more. One of the earliest definitions of depression I learned was it was “anger turned inward.” Since the anger couldn’t get out, it cannibalized whoever was trying to hold it in.

Trust me – that’s a good definition.

It’s easy to do the same thing with adversity or despair. Much of the power in Jesus’ challenge to consider the lilies comes from knowing that most of the folks who heard those words that day and the rest of us that have read them over the centuries all have moments when we think, “No one knows how I feel.” I’m not the first person to suffer the anxiety of losing a job, or the humiliation of going to the Unemployment Office, or the tension of wondering how to pay the bills or what to do next for money. I am unemployed, sitting in my house, typing on my MacBook, drinking a cup of coffee, while my wife who loves me works downstairs.

I’m a fortunate person going through a difficult time who wonders what to expect from God.

Every five seconds a child dies from hunger related causes in our world – about 16,000 children a day. Here’s a way I can grasp that number. A Boeing 747 used for domestic flights holds 568 people. Imagine one of those planes packed with children crashing and killing all the passengers every fifty minutes of every day. That’s how many children are dying of hunger in our world. I couldn’t find a number for the adults. Of that number, I have no doubt many are from Christian families who have read the Sermon on the Mount and have prayed for God to provide food. They prayed all the way to the grave.

What do I do with that?

Yesterday, Massachusetts inaugurated Deval Patrick as our seventy-first governor and our first African-American governor. As a part of his inaugural address he said:

On this very day 165 years ago, a young man named Kinna, who had been part of that [Amistad] rebellion, sent a letter from prison to our own John Quincy Adams, who had retired from public life at home in Massachusetts.

Kinna pleaded with Adams to help the 36 captives from his ship to earn their freedom. Adams took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won. As a gesture of thanks and respect, the Africans gave Adams a Bible, called the Mendi Bible, after their tribal homeland.

I took the oath this morning with my hand resting on that same Bible — and with my resolve strengthened by that same legacy. I am descended from people once forbidden their most basic and fundamental freedoms, a people desperate for a reason to hope and willing to fight for it. And so are you. So are you. Because the Amistad was not just a black man’s journey; it was an American journey. This commonwealth and the nation modeled on it is at its best when we show we understand a faith in what’s possible, and the willingness to work for it.

Ginger and I had a chance to be a part of the interfaith worship service that preceded the inauguration. It was an amazing collection of people from all over Massachusetts. I sat with two Sikhs and a Muslim, the four of us standing shoulder to shoulder singing,

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
thou who hast brought us
thus far on the way;
thou who hast by thy might
led us into the light;
keep us for ever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places,
our God, where we met thee;
lest, our hearts drunk with the wine
of the world, we forget thee;
shadowed beneath thy hand
may we for ever stand,
true to our God, true to our native land.

The tenor of the day called us outside of ourselves — beyond our parochialism and our cynicism – to see new possibilities. When Patrick said he was descended from “a people desperate for a reason to hope and willing to fight for it,” I felt he was calling us to claim the same heritage. The story of being human is one of both considering the lilies and working hard to change our circumstances in the midst of adversity.

Face it: the lilies never had to pay a mortgage.

When I lived in Texas, my favorite time of year was early spring, when the bluebonnets bloomed. The beautiful little wildflowers cover every highway median and any number of fields with a purple-blue blanket – for about two weeks. Then they’re gone. They brought Jesus’ words alive to me in a new light. My paraphrase goes something like:

Consider the bluebonnets. They don’t work or punch a clock, but they’re beautiful. They also don’t worry that they last such a short time. They simply revel in being bluebonnets and leave it at that.

If perennial wildflowers are the working metaphor, there is much to learn beyond a bluebonnet spring. After the flowers fade, the Texas Highway Department doesn’t mow the medians until the bluebonnets have gone to seed. Then there is nothing to see beyond the grass and weeds that cover the space between the opposing lanes of traffic. The life of a lily or a bluebonnet involves rest, growth, and some work, along with a little luck and time to bloom. Spring doesn’t come everyday.

Jesus’ last comment on this topic is the clincher for me (again, my paraphrase):

Don’t start worrying about tomorrow – there’s plenty of time for that. You have enough on your plate just dealing with today.

A little over a month ago, I was working hard to put together a plan for running the Bakery at the Inn. Today I don’t work there anymore. If I had worried then, I would not have let myself dream about the bakery and would not have learned all I did about putting together a business plan. If I had gone to work everyday for the past year stressing about the tenuous nature of my job, I would not have been able to let myself get to know my colleagues, or learn as much as I did about cooking. Now my blooming time is over there and I am called to trust God on a day that is not a bluebonnet spring. Whatever I know of time and circumstance, God was here before it and will be here long after it is over. Whatever shape there is to this life we live, I can only live today.

Now I know why I like to discuss theology with a beer in hand.

One of the readings at the service yesterday was “A Prayer” by Maya Angelou. In the midst of change, they came as helpful and hopeful words for me:

Father, Mother, God
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence
during the bright and sunny days,
for then we can share that which we have
with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence
during the Holy Days, for then we are able
to celebrate you and our families
and our friends.

For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely,
we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed,
we ask you to shower upon them
the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most–Peace.

Yes.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I were watching something on TV on New Year’s Eve when one of the characters said something that gave me my watchword for 2007. I told her I had decided that, when someone asked me how I was, rather than saying, “I’m fine,” or “I’m doing well,” I was going to answer, “I’m living the dream.”

We met at the gym yesterday afternoon and decided to grab a cup of coffee afterwards. In between the gym and the Au Bon Pain – about a three-minute drive – Chef called to tell me I had been laid off. The owner decided to let all of the non-salaried employees go without any notice. In a matter of moments, I joined the ranks of the gainfully unemployed. I was stunned.

I think I still am.

After fifteen months and some choices, on my part, to become a full-time chef, I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of my week and a life in the kitchen. I love what I do and I do it well. Now I’m not doing it. And I’m not making any money. Both things are significant issues.

I’ve spent most all of my professional life in vocations that had some sense of stability to them. If I was going to leave, I gave them fair warning; if my position was going to change, they gave me adequate notice. The idea that they can simply call and say to me, a full-time employee, so long and thanks for the fish is both foreign and shocking.

Here I am, living the dream.

I got up this morning and went to the Unemployment Office sign up for unemployment compensation. I got there at 11:00 and left at 1:37. I was not alone. The room was fairly full of folks filling out the same form I was. There were even a couple of families. I assumed they had nowhere else to leave the kids. While I waited, I looked through some of the want ads that promised good money for delivering phone books and stuffing envelopes, and I looked through booklet of jobs the agency had put together. Out of ten pages of possibilities, with about twenty entries a page, less than fifteen of them paid more than ten dollars an hour.

There were no restaurant jobs, other than an invitation to join the McDonalds’ management training program at $20,000 a year.

I heard my name called and looked up to see a small man with a long grey ponytail and a big smile. I followed him back to his cubicle, which was filled with stacks of papers, Zen books, and pictures of his daughter and felt welcomed there. He worked through the filing process, but did so with grace and humanity, making me feel like a person who had something to contribute. We talked about schools and music and history and books, as well as how to follow up on my application and make sure my checks start coming. He helped me.

Ginger suggested I wait until Monday to begin looking for a new job to give myself time to get over the shock and build a little bit of a thicker skin. On the way home from Plymouth, I stopped at a new Mexican restaurant that just opened (and we like) to see if they had any openings. They don’t. Ginger is right. Even knowing it was a long shot, the rejection was tough to take.

When I started going to spiritual direction about eighteen months ago, Ken said the questions I had to answer were what I wanted to do with my life, what it would cost to make it happen, and how to pay the bill. My passions are writing and cooking. I was doing both everyday, and counting on the second one to bring in at least a little money. These are the things I want to do. This week, I learned part of the cost is working in an industry that sees me as a “cost,” much like the cleaning supplies and the produce. What I see as relational, the owner sees as bottom line: I’m looking to make memories with our meals; he’s looking to make money. When he cut costs, he cut me, just taking care of business.

Though an anti-capitalist rant is tempting and maybe even appropriate, I want to do more with what is going on here than be pissed off. Though I trust that one day I will look back on these days and see lessons learned, I can’t get out from under the pressure to do something to lessen the financial burden that is quickly descending. We live in an expensive part of the world; I need to be working. That said, I want to find a good job, not just a job.

When Chef called, he said (after he apologized for not being able to stop the owner from axing me) if business picked up my job might open up again in anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, but I don’t think I can go back there and maintain my self-respect. I don’t want to feel owned. I, like anyone else, deserve to feel valued. To go back, for me, would be to say I was condoning the way he treated those of us whom he laid off and that I understood why I was cut so he could save a couple of thousand dollars. I don’t, on either count.

I also have to remember, according to the Global Rich List, Ginger and I fall in the top one percent of the richest people in the world, even without my salary included. 400,000 are dead in Darfur and another two million displaced who have never known anything close to my standard of living even in the best of times. I also think about the Brazilians I work with who got the same call yesterday and face bleaker circumstances than mine. I’m not the first one to go through this, nor am I at the bottom of the pile. Therefore, I must live in the creative tension between my privilege on a global scale and my personal problems. Both are very real.

Three days on, this is not what I expected from 2007. But what can I say? I’ve got to just keep living the dream.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger told a wonderful story for the children’s message yesterday.

A second-grader was having trouble with his writing assignment and kept making mistakes. Each time, he would erase what he had written to the point that he tore a hole in his paper. He went up to the teacher unsure of what to do. She said, “Why don’t I give you a new piece of paper. It’s a fresh start.”

Ginger then went on to give each of the children – and then each of us in the service – a clean sheet of paper as a symbol of the fresh start available to us.

A bit later in the service, a man in our congregation who grew up going to British schools commented that Ginger had helped him understand something about Americans. In British schools, he said, the pencils don’t have erasers on the ends. He continued with his point, but my mind went its own way since I, too, spent a couple of years in British schools when we lived in Zambia. They taught me to write.

With a fountain pen.

Each of our big wooden desks had an inkwell and inside was a nib pen with a big handle like a paintbrush. Blotting paper was part of the school supplies we were supposed to have. Along with learning to make our letters, we learned how to dip the pen, blot it, and then begin writing. Neatness was always a part of the equation. If we made a mistake, we were to draw one line through the error and then write it correctly. My teacher explained we didn’t have to mark it out over and over and it didn’t matter that there were words marked out on the page in order for it to be neatly done. One line said, “I made a mistake and I corrected it.” We didn’t write in pencil, she said, because writing in ink meant we meant what we were putting on the page. Pencils were for arithmetic.

Her lesson stuck with me in ways I didn’t even know. As a high school English teacher in America years later, my students struggled to understand why I would not accept work in pencil, which was what most brought with them to class.

“Writing in ink means you’re serious about what you’re writing,” I said.

However language came into being, “Oops” must have been one of the first words ever uttered, along with a few more colorful expressions as the mistakes mounted up. Error and failure are essential elements to our humanity. Screwing up is one of the things we do best – and one of the things that leads us to our most brilliant successes. What we do with our mistakes is more profound than choosing to erase or cross out. Life rarely divides into such an easy either/or.

Something tangible, even visceral, happened in the room yesterday as the deacons passed out the clean sheets of paper to the adults seated in the pews. We all knew more about erasing until we had destroyed the paper than our children did. We all have things we would like to do over, things we hope are not irrevocable. The small blank sheets were leaves of grace and forgiveness, even hope that failure is not the final word, nor perfection the ultimate value.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark,” tells of Alymer, a scientist, and his love for Georgiana, his wife and a woman of incredible beauty. Alymer saw her beauty as perfection except for the small birthmark on her cheek. It was only a problem for him, as Hawthorne noted:

In the usual state of her complexion — a healthy though delicate bloom — the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts.

Nothing would do but Alymer find a way to erase what he saw as a blot on her beauty. Georgiana was not so sure.

I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into the world?

He continued to obsess until she relented to its removal, a process that ultimately cost her life. The quest for perfection is an exhausting, even deadly, enterprise. Whatever the yardstick, we can’t measure up. Sooner or later, we’re going to drip ink on the page, or erase a hole in it trying to correct our mistakes. The stains go as deep as life itself.

In a past life, I played golf fairly regularly. I was with some friends one day when one of our group hit a ball into the rough ten or twelve feet off the fairway and behind a tree. When he got to his ball, his kicked it a couple of times until it was lying on the mowed grass and in full view of the pin. One of the other guys in our group said, “You can’t just kick the ball like that. It’s against the rules.” The conversation that ensued was instructive.

“Are we playing for money?”
“No.”
“Are you going to give me a trophy if I win?”
“No.”
“Are we even keeping score?”
“No.”
“Then relax and enjoy the game. I’m out here to have fun.”

When Jesus said, “Forgive and you will be forgiven,” I think he meant hand out as many blank sheets of paper as you accept. The more we make room for one another to fail and try again, whether we are working in pencil or pen, the more we come to terms with our humanity and then with the amazing possibility of the grace we can incarnate to one another.

I’ve got a small clean sheet of paper in my pocket to help remind me.

Peace,
Milton