don't eat alone

I’m not sure if it was fifteen or sixteen Novembers ago that Ginger came home with an idea for Advent. She had been on staff at First Congregational Church in Winchester for a short time and, since I was trying to finish my master’s degree in English and teach fulltime, I had not gone to church with her much. I walked down the hill on Sunday morning to the Episcopal Church in Charlestown for early mass and then came home to read. One other thing: I had shoulder length hair (which I would still have if it hadn’t decided to fall out) and a beard.

Ginger wanted to find a way to make the passages from the prophets come to life, so she asked if I would come in from the back of the church singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell and then say, “I am the prophet Isaiah (or whoever the prophet was that week) and this is the word of the Lord,” read the scripture passage, and then sing my way out. Until that first Sunday, no one in Winchester knew who I was. For the rest of the time we were a part of that congregation, I came down the aisle every Sunday in Advent, and there were a couple of folks who never called me anything but Isaiah.

When we moved to Marshfield, the prophet came with us. Today marked the beginning of my sixth Advent season by the sea. Today I was Jeremiah, who said:

Watch for this: “The time is coming”—God’s Decree—“when I will keep the promise I made to the families of Israel and Judah. When that time comes, I will make a fresh and true shoot sprout from the David-Tree. He will run this country honestly and fairly. He will set things right. That’s when Judah will be secure and Jerusalem live in safety. The motto for the city will be, ‘God Has Set Things Right for Us.’” (Jeremiah 33:14-16, The Message)

The message of the prophets that holds most true down the years proclaims waiting is central to our theology and our faith: “The time is coming when I will keep my promise,” says God.

This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

However it was that the people interpreted what the prophets had to say in those days, from my perch it seems most of the prophets lived and died without seeing those promises kept. I don’t mean God wasn’t faithful or present, or that the prophets died feeling bitter and cheated. I do mean Jeremiah never saw Jesus; neither did Isaiah or Malachi or anyone else with a book named after them in the Old Testament. And they found hope and meaning in knowing that the time was coming based on the ways God was faithful to them in the days they did live.

Time is a funny thing. The lectionary readings stack prophet, psalmist, letter writer, and evangelist one on top of the other as if their words are concurrent, which – to us – they are even as they span centuries. We can study and even appreciate history, but we don’t know how to think in centuries because our clocks are too small. Life, as we know it, ticks away like this wonderful poem from Barbara Crooker I found this week on The Writer’s Almanac: In the Middle.

In the Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

We live in the creative tension between daily pressures and prophecy, between hurry up and wait.

I’m not sure God has ever moved as quickly as we would like. God seems to relish the unfolding of the story as much as the revelation, the journey over the arrival. In Eden, God came in the late afternoon to walk with those created in God’s image. I wonder how many afternoons passed before one of them asked, “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“Let’s just walk,” was the reply, “I like it when we walk together.”

A more time efficient deity would have incarnated fully grown, rather than showing up as a baby in a poor, insignificant family and probably would have done it several centuries earlier. But time has never been of the essence to God, if it means the point is to get the job done. The essence of time is room to grow, to listen, to become, to create, none of which happens quickly.

I still love to read the Nativity story from Luke 2 in the King James Version. Better yet, I like to hear Linus recite it in A Charlie Brown Christmas:

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

I realize I’m playing with words here, but it strikes me that the closing sentence describes the heart of our waiting: for the days to be accomplished for us to be delivered – from the Hurry Up, from the Not Enough, from the Way Too Much, from the Hurts Too Bad. Mary was delivered and took the tiny child, wrapped him in swaddling clothes (I figure those must fee pretty good), laid him in the manger, and began waiting for him to grow up.

We, too, are delivered, even as we wait for deliverance. Our days stack up like rocks for an altar, calling us to look into the guts of our lives for God’s presence rather than staring up at the sky for some sort of grand gesture. As one of my favorite songs, written from the depths of the Not Yet, says:

I sing because I’m happy
I sing because I’m free
his eye is on the sparrow
and I know he watches me

Peace,
Milton

I have new glasses!

My contact lenses are on back order, or so said the receptionist at Eye Health Services when I talked to her yesterday and convinced her that I needed to see my doctor to get a prescription for glasses so I could function in the world without squinting. On the way to her office, I called a friend who works at LenCrafters’ Optique and asked if they could make the lenses this afternoon. I got to the doctor’s office at 2:15 and had glasses by 5:30.

It’s a Christmas miracle! What do you think?

My eight days of blurriness left me with a question for my doctor. When I wear contacts, I have to have reading glasses to see up close. Without my contacts or my glasses, I couldn’t see far off (if by far off I mean anything beyond four feet away), yet I could read up close. Before I finished my question, she was nodding.

“It’s one of the conundrums in eye care,” she said. (Extra points for word choice.) I won’t continue with quotation marks, because my recollection is not exact, but here is what she said. For near sighted people like me, our eyes are only able to focus close up. When she writes a prescription for me that will broaden my focus so I can see far away, I lose the near focus, so I have to have bifocals (or reading glasses with my contacts) so I can see close up again.

She had hardly finished speaking before my mind clicked into high gear, trying to focus on the wonderful metaphor I had just been handed. I was a kid when, for the first time in human history those of us who lived on the planet Earth got to see it all at once.

We are still coming to terms with seeing ourselves as “a big blue marble.” Even if we want to believe that “we are the world,” it’s hard to maintain focus when we go from seeing this

to this

How do we make sense and meaning out of our lives when most of the world is poorer, sicker, hungrier, and more frightened than we are? How do we focus on our families and the relationships that sustain us and find time and love to share with people in Iran and Indonesia? How do we invest ourselves in our local churches to do what it takes for us to become who God is calling us to be and find time and energy to generate hope and change in places like Darfur? How do we fight the good fights that need to be fought on our local levels to make sure our towns and cities are caring for our citizens and find energy and determination to bang our heads against the brick wall that is our national government to hold them accountable for their lack of coherent leadership? How do we save the whales, save the rainforest, stop human trafficking, feed the hungry, house the homeless, wage peace, demand equality, struggle with our own biases, cook dinner, get the kids to soccer practice, pay the bills, love our significant others, meet new people, care for our friends, take care of our bodies, get enough sleep, stay informed, have some fun, do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God?

How can both near and far stay in focus?

One of the responses I’ve generally made at moments like this is a quote from Billy Kwan, Linda Hunt’s character in The Year of Living Dangerously (put it on your must see list): “You meet the needs in front of your face.” That’s a good place to start, but we live in a world where even the faraway needs come close up, even if just for a news cycle or two, and then the view changes. We are tyrannized by the immediate and taught over and over that memory has little value, if any. The American Heritage Dictionary defines focus as “Close or narrow attention; concentration” and then quotes a line from one of Anne Tyler’s novels to illustrate: “He was forever taken aback by [New York’s] pervasive atmosphere of purposefulness, the tight focus of its drivers, the brisk intensity of its pedestrians.”

A pervasive atmosphere of purposefulness – now we’re on to something.

Here’s the response I want to make right now: we can’t do it alone. One determined individual does not a pervasive atmosphere make. Several years ago, my friend Billy took me to a “star party” in the hill country outside of Austin. It was a clear summer night and there were at least twenty or thirty telescopes set up on the hillside. We arrived around dusk and set ours (his) up; soon after dark, people began wondering from scope to scope to see what they could see. Some had small scopes and were just learning the sky. Others had scopes that required a small ladder to reach the viewfinder and had come in search of a particular star or other heavenly being. No one gazed in solitude. We were all out there together, one group of beings in the universe staring up at all the others. Sometime after dark, a group of home schooled students showed up for the party as a field trip courtesy of the folks who organized it. I didn’t know they were there. About eleven or eleven-thirty, when the energy of the evening was picking up under a Milky Way as thick as a cloud blanket, the kids started singing:

this is my father’s world
and to my listening ears
all nature sings and round me rings
the music of the spheres . . .

My eyes welled up, filled by the convergence of what I was seeing and hearing, mindful, in ways I had not experienced before, of my place on the planet.

Perspective is a group sport. While I’m seeing one thing, I need you to both acknowledge my focus and call me to acknowledge yours. A pervasive atmosphere of purposefulness means no discards, no throw away moves. With all our eyes, we can see both near and far in focus.

I have one other question. When I look at the church, from both near and far, I wonder how we might describe what the pervasive atmosphere of Christianity is in these days. If it is not purposefulness (and I think it’s hard to claim that it is), then what consumes us? If it were purposefulness, wouldn’t the world be a different place than it is now?

I talked with my brother this week. He is a minister at a large, wealthy church that has an $11 million annual budget. His dream is to get them to see that they could give $100 million. “What if we could adopt a country and go in every year with $100 million to meet the needs we find there?” Purposefulness faraway.

Ginger has had conversations this week with folks in our church about how we keep up with those who feel marginalized, or have marginalized themselves from the community at large. We’re talking about ways to work to make sure no one falls through the cracks. Purposefulness up close.

The last verse of the hymn the kids sang that night begins:

this is my father’s world
o let me ne’er forget
that though the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the ruler yet . . .

Memory is essential to purpose and compassion. Let us look beyond the slight of hand that tricks us into thinking the immediate is all that matters. Look up. Look in. Look out. I can only see what I can see; the same is true for you. Together we can assemble a perspective of purposefulness with eyes open wide to let all the light in.

Peace,
Milton

I have several disconnected things on my mind, so here they are in no particular order.

I got my first birthday-related piece of mail today: an invitation to join the AARP now that I am turning fifty. I am old enough to remember when AARP stood for the American Association of Retired Persons, but that didn’t bring in enough money so now the letters are the official name, the same way Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC so you would think they quit frying stuff.

In the course of conversations a couple of weeks back, I talked with an eighteen year old and an eighty-two year old. I got to thinking about it later and realized I am exactly the same number of years from either age. I don’t really have a point here, I just thought it was interesting.

I also got a package in the mail today from my friend, Billy Crockett, who has a new instrumental CD called Passages that is fourteen original pieces for classical guitar. (Listen to an excerpt of “Pilgrim I.” There is also a companion score available. To quote him:

You can purchase the record through his web site.

I read last night that Robert Altman died a week ago of leukemia. He was eighty-one. Altman was a creative and unique voice in American filmmaking, hitting some out of the park and striking out brilliantly with others. His last movie, A Prairie Home Companion, is a gem. His first breakthrough, M*A*S*H, is worth a look, along with The Player and Shortcuts. CNN has a nice video tribute here. He never won an Oscar, but was given a lifetime achievement award this past year. “The major studios, since I’ve been involved with Hollywood . . . they make shoes and I make gloves,” he said.

Speaking of movies, one of my favorites kept coming to mind today. I think I’m going to watch it tomorrow: Miss Firecracker. It is the story of Carnelle, a struggling girl who thinks winning the Miss Firecracker Beauty Pageant in her home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi will set her free to leave town “in a blaze of glory.” Mary Steenburgen, Tim Robbins, Scott Glenn, and Alfre Woodard are also in the cast. It was directed by Thomas Schlamme, Aaron Sorkin’s partner behind The West Wing and Studio 60 fame.

In the closing moments of the movie, Carnelle says, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.” Scott Glenn’s answer is worth the trip.

I close with a video clip I Stumbled Upon: Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog.

Advent is un-American.

The malls have been decorated for Christmas since the day after Halloween and we are still days away from even beginning to wait for Christ to come. We, as Americans, are not really built to wait. We are accustomed to getting what we want when we want it. But there is more going on during Advent than God saying, “You sit there and wait and Jesus will be born when he’s good and ready.”

Heck, I can’t even wait to start writing about Advent.

There are two qualitative differences between what it felt like to wait before Jesus was born the first time and what it feels like to wait now when we know who’s coming and we capture the story with construction paper donkeys and towel-headed shepherds. The first difference is how long they waited. The four pages in my Bible between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew’s gospel took centuries to turn. The Hebrew people had already been waiting for the Messiah, but by the time John the Baptist showed up, God’s prophets had been silent for three times as long as we have been a country. Generation after generation had come and gone without ever leaving the waiting room. Before there were Cubs and Sox fans waiting for the World Series, before there was a John Mayer, there was century after century of Israelites waiting for the world to change.

The second thing is, despite the grand arc of history, when it came to living their daily lives they didn’t know what or whom they were waiting for. Some might not even have known they were waiting at all. We already know the story. We know we’re waiting for Jesus to enter the world just as all of us have done: as a baby. We know the story so well that we wait, perhaps, mostly to tell it. We are not shocked like the shepherds or Mary or Joseph or Herod. The birth does not surprise us; we are too often participants in a sort of spiritual C-section: we get to schedule when the Child arrives. And he will look just like his pictures.

Since it was my day off, I got to listen to All Things Considered this afternoon. A commentary by philosopher Alain de Botton (who is one brilliant guy) caught not only my attention, but my imagination: “Motives Behind a Mantra: Revise, Revise, Revise.”

He stared off by saying that we often see art as a repository of values and meaning and we don’t expect an artist to take his or her painting off the wall to take home and reconfigure. When the book is finished and published, it stays that way. But, de Botton said,

Artists do have the option to pull a creation back into the workshop and mend and update it and then return it to the public realm . . . It’s a particluarly romantic myth that leads us to suppose that artists could never improve what they previously delivered to the world . . . Artists should through time grow more lucid about their work and infuse it with their lastest and most mature insights.

God is the quintessential artist — every word, every breath, every move intentional and imaginative. God is also quite capable of revision. Every layer of the history of creation speaks to God’s dynamic creativity at work, every layer full of change. And we, created in God’s image, are both art and artists, called to give birth to God’s brilliance right where we are. One of the reasons we keep telling the story and making the journey to Bethlehem is to revise the artwork. As Meister Eckhart said, “What good is it if Mary gave birth to the Child fourteen hundred years ago if I do not give birth to Christ in my time and in my culture?”

We are called to revise the story once again, not as spectators but as participants, birth-givers, incarnations of Love and Grace in our time. We are waiting for our turn.

In Fiddler on the Roof, in the scene where the Russian army comes to evict the Jews from their town, their home, one of the men says to the Rabbi, “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?”

Isn’t the answer to that question always, “Yes”?

De Botton spent some time in his commentary talking about the risk of revising. Sometimes the Revised Edition is not as good. So it is with the American revision of Christmas as a shopping holiday. What was once about anticipation is now about immediate gratification. The wonder of the Magi as they followed the Star has been replaced by the guy who got shot standing in line to get a PlayStation 3 so he could resell it on eBay. We’ve lost sight of the story.

Jesus was born into a desperate world. It was a time of war, oppression, abject poverty, gluttonous wealth, and religion with all the heart of a department store mannequin. Once he was born, the waiting was not over. It would be thirty years before the expectation of his birthday night ripened. All he could do was wait, just like everyone else. And, as Tom Petty taught us, the waiting is the hardest part.

We wake up daily to stories of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And those are the stories they tell us. We are not made mindful of much in Darfur, or Congo, or Chad, or any number of countries in dire straits who have no natural resources to make caring for them a part of our national interest. We live in a nation who sees the Great Divide between rich and poor and seems content, overall, to leave things as they are. We live in a country – in a world – of wounded, hurting, and fragile people, all of them children of God.

Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?

Yes.

God is waiting, in this revision, for us to be willing to go into labor. I’m not sure the world can wait much longer.

Peace,
Milton

In the span of a day, I have gone from reveling in knowing that I am uniquely and wonderfully created in the image of God to feeling painfully in touch with my human limitations. I’m not speaking in metaphor here: I really hurt today.

Mondays are my longest days at the kitchen. I get there at ten-thirty and I leave at ten-thirty. In between, I’m the only chef in the house, so if it gets prepped, made, served, or sautéed, I do it. A Monday like today, on the heels of an incredibly busy weekend, means we’ve used up most of everything. One of the guys who worked Sunday night left me about an eight inch list of things that needed to be done. I read his note, changed into my chef clothes and went to work trying to check things off the list between cooking for lunch customers.

The big issue, as far as my work in the kitchen goes, are my feet, or should I say, my shoes. I have a pair of Birkis that have served me well for some time, but they have ceased to do so, leaving me to hobble home at the end of the shift. I don’t know if the change was in my shoes or my feet; either way, I’ve got to figure it out. I tried to buy a pair of Dansko clogs (which is what Chef wears), but the place I called on the way to work only had women’s shoes. Since he wasn’t at work today and we wear the same size, I decided to wear his to see how they felt. I came home with my feet aching in different places.

The bigger issue this whole week has been my eyes. I live with a severe astigmatism in both eyes, which makes finding glasses and contacts that let me see well hard to do. Last Tuesday, I ripped one of my contacts as I was putting them in. I wore my glasses to work. Normally, I wear glasses only for reading and have the habit of setting them down all over the place and then not being able to find them. Somewhere between changing clothes at work and getting out of the shower when I got home, I put my glasses down and have not seen them since. Serendipitously, I learned I can read my computer screen without glasses or contacts, so I have been able to write, but, as far as the rest of life goes, I’ve been squinting my way through.

Both things unleash very basic fears in me.

I love being in the kitchen cooking for people. I even like days like today when I’m challenged to work my butt off to make things happen. The fearful voice in me asks, “What if this is not a shoe issue but a foot or body issue that means you can’t do what you love doing?” The eye thing cuts even deeper. I am afraid of blindness because I can only see that it would separate me from reading and writing, two of the things which feed my soul.

Yes, I know both scenarios are extreme. Yes, I know I’m jumping ahead of myself. But this is not about knowing, this is about deep archetypal, this-is-what-I-think-makes-me-who-I-am feeling. I am a cook and a writer. Those are not just things I do; they are expressions of my being. I am working and squinting through the pain and discomfort, even as I hear the voice of fear inside me ask, “Where do you think this is going?”

One of the stories in the Gospels that has spoken to me most deeply over many years is Jesus’ encounter with Peter after both Peter’s denial of Christ and Jesus’ resurrection. Back and forth they go: “Do you love me?” – “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.” – “Feed my sheep.” Then Jesus says something that has always had a difficult resonance to me. I thought about the verse on the way home.

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” (John 21:18).

Then Jesus added, “Follow me.”

In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago dealt with the pain from the bones spurs in his heel by remembering that he had read that the great Joe DiMaggio had bone spurs and finding hope in Joe’s not giving in to the pain. “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” I thought about Santiago, a favorite literary character of mine after several years of teaching ninth grade English. I wonder if bone spurs feel like my feet do tonight.

The pain in my feet and my blurred vision pale by comparison to the situations of most people on the planet, I’m sure. I am far from fluent in the language of extreme suffering. My reality is I get my new contacts tomorrow and I have a couple of days to chase down some new kitchen kicks before I have to go back to work. I probably also have some things to learn about how to take better care of my feet. And my reality is I’m getting to experience the wonder of my humanity from the temporary side.

Perhaps, as I sleep, I can also dream of the lions on the beach.

Peace,
Milton

Since she got back from sabbatical, Ginger has made a point of preaching on some difficult texts and topics, rather than simply choosing the Gospel reading from the lectionary. She has been doing a great job. This week, her text was “the last words of David.” Her choice of subject sent me back to chorus my senior year at Westbury High School. We sang Randall Thompson’s setting of David’s words at graduation. I was then, and am still, a tenor, so I got to wail on the opening lines: “He that ruleth over men, must be just, must be just, MUST BE JUST.”

Trust me, it’s a killer tenor line.

The piece moves on into a beautiful melodic section that carries the lyric, “And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun rises; even a morning without clouds – after rain, after rain, after rain.” Such was our Friday morning after a Thanksgiving storm that deserved a name. We woke to a cloudless day washed clean and blown dry by the rain and wind of the night before.

David’s final words were to say that’s what justice looks like.

Before it was Ginger’s turn to speak, Kathy, one of our wonderful children’s workers gave the children’s sermon and talked about Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley.

No, not Wilford Brimley. That’s this guy.

Wilson Bentley is a man who lived his whole life in Vermont (1865-1931) and spent his whole life studying snowflakes and photographing them. He is the one responsible for our knowing that no two snowflakes are alike. As she began to talk about snow, I found myself thinking about those mornings I’ve spent shoveling out our driveway so we could get to work. All those unique falling crystals can stack up to create quite a barrier. Bentley grew up where the snow is measured in feet and was able to see beauty in individual, short-lived, unbelievably temporary snowflakes. And on top of that, he was patient enough to photograph them. Though he took over five thousand pictures of snowflakes, some winters yielded no more than a dozen useful images.

What amazing things are possible when wonder and tenacity unite.

Our children’s sermons create a very pregnant swirl at the front of the church each Sunday. Kathy has a way of shaping the energy and excitement into meaning with what I think must be the same kind of deftness and patience that Bentley needed to photograph flakes of frozen water. She began by quoting something Ginger says at each baptism – that we are wonderfully and uniquely made in the image of God – and then asking the kids if they ever wondered what that meant. They had not, but she had and she gave them cause to wonder by the way she unwound the story of Wilson Bentley.

She also took some time to describe how a snowflake starts from a single molecule and then, as it falls, adds more and more, developing its symmetrical six-sided shape, and taking its unique form from the unique set of circumstances – wind, temperature, humidity – that are occurring at the exact moment it is being formed. My mind moved from snowflakes back to the people in the room, each of whom was also formed by all that swirled around them as they were growing into who God created them to be. Some of us have been blown off course, some feel more handicapped than holy, some have caught a glimpse of who we are and who we are becoming. One of the best things we can do is stick together, like snowflakes in a drift, as we live out our faith as the church. Nothing we do or say is any more permanent than a snowflake and everything we do or say is crucial to what happens in our world. We, who are as unique and as temporary as snowflakes, can bring about a cloudless day when we incarnate love as justice and believe that things do not have to be as they seem.

The snowflakes had not melted in my mind when Ginger came to this quote in her sermon (sorry, I don’t have the documentation):

Our own future is not dependent upon what human power has realistically done or can do. For those who dare to imagine it, and give poetic voice to it, the future that is God’s future and therefore is always open to the possibilities of justice, faithfulness, and life no matter how realistic might be our assessment of the powers of oppression, sin and death. Surrounded by a troubled and broken world and the crisis of our own lives, we lose sight of God’s power at work beyond and in spite of our human limitations and sin. In the name of realism, we define ourselves, our goals, our communities by our failures and not by our visions. We settle for problems to solve rather than ideals to embody.

One other thing happened with the children before the sermon. I’m teaching them a song for the Christmas Pageant, so I walked over to the Parish House with them after the children’s sermon to teach them during their opening time. Last week, a small altar was set up and, after we sang, we lighted three candles, one for each person in the Trinity, and then prayed together. Today, when we got over there, things were not set up for either the song or the ceremony. One of the teachers had a boombox and the CD of the song we are learning, but the altar was locked up. I was getting ready to pray and send them to class when one of the boys raised his hand and said, “We can do it without the candles.”

He was right. And so I asked them what each candle symbolized and they answered:

for God, who created us;
for Christ, who loves us;
for the Spirit, who fills us.

I walked back to the sanctuary in the sunshine and took my place in the pew, among the other snowflakes who melted together in prayer and praise. David used his last words to say love has less to do with legacy than with listening, less to do with permanence than patience, more to do with community than accomplishment.

And he learned all that without ever seeing a snowflake.

Peace,
Milton

The last pie is in the oven.

Since I got a late start, there are only eight, most of which will end up on someone else’s table tomorrow. OK, half of them will be somewhere else. I made a couple of old favorites (chess, pecan, pumpkin, blueberry), a new one (chocolate whiskey pecan), and a mistake (walnut – I poured in the wrong bag of nuts). I have to shift into dinner mode for tomorrow, so the baking must come to an end. If you want to see how I prepare my turkey, check here.

The wind is picking up; a Nor’easter in on the way. It’s not cold enough for snow, so we are just going to get a bunch of rain, which is not nearly as much fun. But we have a house full of food and friends and a day to relax. Now that’s something to be thankful for. As I shopped today for my groceries, I was conscious of trying to keep a balance between making a wonderful meal and not going to excess, which I can do quite easily when it comes to food. Ginger and I both are working hard to think the same way about Christmas. It is, as they say, a growing edge for me.

Though I’ve referenced it before, I can think of no better words on this Thanksgiving Eve than those of Fred Pratt Green’s hymn, “Thanks be to God”:

for the fruit of all creation, thanks be to God
gifts bestowed on every nation, thanks be to God
for the plowing, sowing, reaping
silent growth while we are sleeping
future needs in earth’s safekeeping
thanks be to God

in the just reward of labor, God’s will is done
in the help we give our neighbor, God’s will is done
in our worldwide task of caring
for the hungry and despairing
in the harvests we are sharing
God’s will is done

for the harvests of the Spirit, thanks be to God
for the good we all inherit, thanks be to God
for the wonders that astound us
for the truths that still confound us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Peace,
Milton

Several months ago, I was walking down the aisle of our local Target store when a mother and her son, who looked to be about ten or eleven, rounded the corner and started coming toward me. They were obviously having a fight. I only heard one sentence. The mother said,

“You’re right. I don’t know who Slipknot is. But I know who Led Zeppelin is and I know who Lynyrd Skynyrd is.”

I felt like yelling, “Free Bird” right there between the eye care products and the printer cartridges. What I did was smile and think back to the faces my dad would make when I put on my Jimi Hendrix records. Ah, but those castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually.

I came home from work tonight to find Ginger watching the American Music Awards. She and I are both intentional about keeping up with popular music because we like a lot of it and because we like young people. That said, tonight’s lineup of nominees made me keenly aware of how the music business changes. Many of the folks I grew up listening to are still making good music. Many of them spend their summers singing songs from long ago without any new stuff so we can yell, “Free Bird” from the back row. But many of the ones getting the awards were not easily recognizable to me (except the Isley Brothers – I’m assuming it’s really the Isley Brothers’ grandkids).

When it comes to award shows, I’ve got three or four good essays in me. There’s the one about how cool it must be to work in a business that is determinedly self-promotional and affirming. We don’t have the American Dishwasher Awards, if you know what I’m saying. There’s one about the vanity, opulence, and waste of such an over the top evening. Wait – Vanity, Opulence, and Waste would be a great album title. Better yet: those are good names for rappers, except they would have to be spelled VaniT, Opwelens, and Wayst. I can see it now: “The Bring the Bling Tour.”

Where was I? Oh, yeah. There’s another one on fashion do’s and don’ts. After a few of those outfits, I want to sing, “Ya’ll gonna make me lose my mind up in here, up in here.” There’s one wondering why so many popular artists have to swear so profusely in their songs.

Then there’s this one.

American popular culture, in the form of most of those who crossed the stage tonight, is easy pickings. I like making fun of it because much of it deserves the ridicule, along with several other slices of our society. Most of what makes it to our radios and televisions is not the best stuff out there. The Billboard Hot 100 is littered with well-marketed mediocrity. Just ask Milli Vanilli, Rupert Holmes, and either one of the Simpson sisters. But I have to come clean. I like some of it, too. I’ve been a closet Christina Aguiliera fan ever since “What a Girl Wants.” “Any Kind of Man” is Ginger’s ring tone on my cell phone. Come on – you have to give the girl props for singing “You’ve got soul, you’ve got class, you’ve got style, you’re badass.” Now those are lyrics, my friend. Ginger has danced all of her life, so she gets a kick out of the choreography of the Pussycat Dolls and Justin Timberlake. She’s says I dance a lot like Timbaland.

However dismal I think much of today’s music is, I must remember I graduated from high school in the year that “Seasons in the Sun” was the number one song. It remains one of the worst songs ever inflicted on the world, along with “The Night Chicago Died,” “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero,” and pretty much anything Meatloaf has ever done.

And then, of course, there’s Celine Dion, or, as I like to call her, Satan.

You won’t find an phat beats or mad rhymes on any of those records. The rise of hip hop will not bring the fall of civilization as we know it anymore than Elvis, the Beatles, or Jim Morrison. But it will make me feel old, which is hard to take. Kelly Clarkson, who won the first American Idol competition as a teenager, won an award tonight as Adult Contemporary Favorite Artist. U2 has been making records for twenty-five years. A friend saw Bob Dylan last weekend and said in concert he can’t play guitar anymore because the arthritis in his hands is too bad; he only plays the keyboard.

As I age, I can choose to walk around yelling, “Turn that music down,” and talk about how they don’t write songs like they used to. I can choose to act like I’m hip and cool (or whatever the kids are calling themselves these days) and not act my age. Or, I can continue to do as I’ve tried to do most of my life and that is look for excellence in the sea of unimaginative marketing that is American popular culture. It’s easy to be condescending. When I was writing songs, which were played mostly on Christian radio, I struggled because I wanted to feel better than the guy who was singing about cartoon characters getting saved (that was a real song). It wasn’t easy for me to come to terms with his song and my song getting played back to back because I thought it put us in the same boat.

We were.

There are folks out there in every genre – in every field — working hard to do it well and doing good stuff. There are also bunches of people phoning it in or just meeting the minimum daily requirement. Not everyone lives in the same category all the time. Most of the best songs I know never made it to Number One. When they did, it had less to do with how great the song was and more to do with timing.

I’m with the lady in the store. I don’t know who Slipknot is, other than a thrash metal band. I also don’t know much about Chamillionaire, one of the presenters tonight. I’m guessing, based on what I saw, that excellence is not his primary pursuit. But, that I don’t know who is doing excellent work in hip hop or metal has less to say about those genres than it does about me. I like guitars rather than drum machines. I prefer singer-songwriters to digital sampling DJs. And I wonder if we have hip hop Muzak to look forward to in the elevators of the future.

John Mayer, one of the young and excellent ones, sings:

me and all my friends
we’re all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there’s no way we ever could
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

I remember feeling like that when I was his age. I also remember feeling like that driving to work this morning listening to the news. I’m not going to be much help encouraging him or me to do something other than wait if I spend most of my time stating the obvious about American popular culture.

Excellent work never settles for stating the obvious.

Peace,
Milton

About a month ago I found out I was going to have to work on Thanksgiving.

The Red Lion Inn has a long history of serving dinner on Turkey Day and we serve a lot of them. There are three seatings – 11:30, 2:30, and 5:30 – and over three hundred people will stuff themselves with everything from clam chowder to turkey and stuffing to pumpkin pie. The whole place has to fire on all cylinders to make it happen. The Head Chef simply said, “Everyone has to work on Thanksgiving.”

I came home and told Ginger and the first words out of her mouth were, “Then quit!”

She wasn’t joking. Despite the financial straits such a move would put us in, she was calling for a values check. Thanksgiving is the one major holiday for her, as a minister, that doesn’t carry religious overtones in one way or another. She never has to work on Thanksgiving. It is our best family day, as I mentioned yesterday, full of deep emotion, tradition, ritual, and meaning. The arc of the day goes something like this: we have breakfast (with bacon!) and then, while I get the turkey started, we bring in the old futon mattress from the garage (which has been well wrapped in plastic) and put it on the floor in front of the couch, where it stays until New Year’s. Ginger covers it with sheets and blanket and it becomes our bed for the holiday season. It’s something we’ve done since we lived in Charlestown, though I don’t remember how it started. I love it. There’s something that happens to our sense of expectation when we move downstairs for the season.

Ah, but I digress. Thanksgiving Dinner is always at two o’clock. Again, I’m not sure why, but that is when we sit down. Once we are seated, we stay a long time, way past the eating. Some of my best memories of the day are the conversations around the table after dinner. More than one year, we’ve sat there so long that we’ve filled our plates for a second time with what were leftovers by then.

What follows is a trip to the movies. The same is also true on Christmas Day. This year, I’m hoping we pick Happy Feet. After the show, it’s a late snack before settling down on the palate.

Every time the schedule came up at work, I talked about what the day meant to us and that we had friends coming for dinner. Chef worked hard to accommodate me, but couldn’t figure out a way to let me be off all day. On Saturday, he said he could get me out of there after the first seating if I would come in early to help prep. When I told Ginger that this morning before I left for the restaurant, she said, “I still haven’t given up on you not working on Thanksgiving. I am willing that you will not work.”

When I got to the Inn, Chef said he thought he could get me out pretty early if I came in at the crack of dawn to help get things ready. Late in the day, he came back to say something had come up that meant he had to be away from the restaurant most of the day tomorrow. He asked if I could cover for him. I said yes. What that means is by the end of my day tomorrow I will have worked twenty-two hours this week. The owner won’t let us work past forty.

“If you work tomorrow,” said Chef, “you can take Wednesday and Thursday off.” I said thank you.

When I called Ginger to tell her the news, what she said first was, “I knew it.”

My pie making will get pushed back a day, but I can live with that. I get to revel and relish in Our Favorite Day around the table with people we love and maybe even get to see some dancing penguins.

I am a thankful boy.

Peace,
Milton