don't eat alone

I was almost a teenager when Planet of the Apes hit the theaters in 1968. The film was a futuristic cautionary tale of what we were in for if we kept living like we were living, ending with a shocking image of the Statue of Liberty buried up to her armpits in desert sand.

My experiences today showed me exactly how that’s going to happen.

For some time now, the faucet in our kitchen sink has dripped. Today was the day I finally decided to do something about it. I’m not necessarily the quickest to take care of such tasks, but once I take it on I stick with it until I get it done (because I know if I don’t finish it while I’m somewhat motivated I will let it lay there for another six weeks). I took the faucet off – after turning off the water – and removed the cartridge assembly (as I learned it was called) to take with me to the hardware store so I could make sure and get the right part. I stopped first at Taylor Lumber, our local hardware store, because they’re our local hardware store. The last time we had a drip, they had the part. Not this time.

From there I headed to Lowes, where we bought the faucet five years ago when we moved in. The first guy I talked to seemed fascinated with the concept of running water inside the house. He had no idea where to find the part. I went back to the kitchen faucet display and found the exact faucet we have at home. With the model number in hand, I went back to the plumbing aisle and moved one step up the food chain to a guy who did know something about plumbing. He said,

“How old is your faucet?”
“Five years,” I answered.
“Oh! Well, we don’t keep parts for anything that old.”

I was holding a solid metal part for a faucet they still had on the shelf and they did not stock the part. His answer was to buy a whole new unit.

I left and drove to Republic Plumbing Supply, which had been recommended by the guy at Taylor Lumber. The guy looked at the part and asked me what brand it was. When I told him Price Pfister, he said, “That’s one of the home warehouse brands (meaning Lowes and Home Depot) and we don’t carry those parts.” When I asked who did, he pointed me to a place in Quincy – fifteen miles away – and then suggested I go on line. After two hours of running all over the area looking for a ten dollar part, I stopped at a local coffee shop that has free wireless internet access, logged on to the Price Pfister web site and, after a ridiculous number of steps, found and ordered the part I needed. It will be here in a week.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

I’m talking a solid metal piece here with a ceramic center. When I was with the first guy at Lowes, as he methodically pulled down every part on the wall trying to find a match, I couldn’t help but notice everything was plastic; the metal parts were long gone. The parts were created to be replaced quickly. The life expectancy of kitchen fixtures should be longer than five years. How can a culture survive if we treat everything as disposable?

Last night at the restaurant we got to talking about the state of the world and the talk turned to unusual food products. Actually, it started with one of the servers talking about how much she loved Velveeta. Though I will admit it makes a mean chile con queso, I’m not much of a fan of “cheese food.” What exactly is it? From there we moved to Cheez Whiz and then on to Go-Gurt. My issue with the latter (“The Grab-n-Go Yogurt”) is this: if you’re five years old and your schedule doesn’t allow you time to sit down and eat your yogurt, your life is seriously messed up. A five year old should have nowhere to be other than being five in the midst of loved ones who surround and protect him or her, not rushing them off to wherever carrying a tube of cultured nutrition. To put our kids under than kind of pressure is to say we consider them as disposable as our faucet parts.

Why should we throw away either one?

As a youth minister and a high school teacher, I worked with five year olds who were fifteen and sixteen. One summer in Fort Worth, I put an afternoon on the calendar for the kids to meet me at the park between the Amon Carter Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum. About twenty kids showed up. We sat around in a circle for a few minutes and then one of them asked what we were doing.

“This,” I answered. “All we are doing this afternoon is being together.”

We spent an afternoon like that almost every week that followed for the whole summer. It was the most popular youth event by far.

Though this post is starting to smell as though we are heading for a “You see, Timmy” moment, I’m not looking to teach a lesson as much as mark the time. Somewhere around four o’clock on Thursday, October 26, 2006 I realized how the Statue of Liberty will end up buried in the sand: one grain, one faucet, one package of Go-gurt at a time, stacked one on top of the other.

Peace,
Milton

I discovered a new website today in a rather circuitous way.

Quotidian Grace was kind enough to comment on my post about Zambia yesterday, so I clicked over to find out what she has been talking about. Scolling down over the past few days, I read about the theme for the PCUSA General Assembly and her vote for a more prophetic word, which led me to Kruse Kronicle, a blog I had never visited. Reading through some of his posts, I found this map from Maps of War. It’s worth spending the ninety seconds to watch and see what history looks like.

When we were in Cappadocia on what may have been my favorite day of our trip, our guide Seref was talking about the region being the place you invaded on the way to what you really wanted to conquer. In a little over a paragraph, he gave us a list of all the peoples to whom Cappadocia had belonged. He finished by saying, “Today it is inhabited by the Turkish people; we do not know who will be next.”

Iraq became a nation, idependent of its colonizers, in 1932. It’s borders were drawn for the first time — by non-Iraqis — around 1920. This was Persia. In the same way Seref described Cappadocia, this land had belonged to everyone from the Babylonians and the Sassanids to the Mongol hoardes (why are they always “hoardes”?). Bush tried another one of his if-I-say-it-I-can-make-it-happen speeches today in his press conference. At least this time he admitted things were not going so well. One of the things that troubles me is he seems to think Iraq only came on the world stage with any sense of importance when we invaded. He doesn’t have any sense of how five thousand years of history have shaped the land and its peoples.

But he’s not the whole problem. In all the verbal flailing going on as our midterm election nears, I have yet to find anyone who speaks with any clarity and sense of history when they talk about what we should do. Most of the words that come out of the mouths of both Democrats and Republicans sound like little more than playground chatter:

“Your idea sucks.”
“No, your idea sucks.”
“Oh, yeah — well your party sucks.”
“No, your party sucks.”
“You suck.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do too.”
“Shut up.”

Isn’t there someone who can speak cogently about the situation we have created by our invasion in words and not be defensive or condescending? (The question is mostly rhetorical: I can’t think of anyone.)

I have one other question: why aren’t we, the people, angry enough to do something? In Hungary, demonstrations have been going on for over a month with people calling for their president to resign because he lied. Thousands of people are still in the streets. Maybe we have become so cynical that we expect our leaders to lie. While we spend two billion dollars a week to establish a democracy in Iraq, our democratic process is a sham. We have leaders with no vision and a people with no hope. Harsh as it sounds, I know no other way to explain it.

The other night when I wrote about Billy Bragg, I used a Sydney Harris quote that said

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, but is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

I feel cynical tonight. I am more cynical than I was a year ago, or a month ago when it comes to our political process. I’m so cynical that I’m reusing quotes while they are still warm. I did see one hopeful sign this week. I was in Hingham Center a couple days ago and saw about six or seven people, most of them fairly elderly, holding signs that said “Peace” and “Get out of Iraq.” The town has a municpal referendum on the ballot to tell President Bush they don’t sanction the war. No one was screaming, but they were out there.

I need to be reminded they aren’t the only ones.

Peace,
Milton

Yesterday was a day outside; today was a day inside: I worked for twelve and a half hours. I came up to write tonight with few words anywhere in or on my person, so I decided to go back through last week’s poems at The Writer’s Almanac. Maybe reading how someone else puts words together, I thought, would push me to do the same. And I found this poem by Linda Pastan:

Rereading Frost

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

I had never heard of Linda Pastan before tonight. My loss. I took a little time to try and find more written about her and by her. Inspired by her own willingness to sit and read how someone else has already captured the moment, I offer you two more poems I found.

Vermilion

Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he’d add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were
the purest form of love.

That last sentence kills me. I’ve lived that sentence more than once.

Women on the Shore

The pills I take to postpone death
are killing me, and the healing
journey we pack for waits
with its broken airplane,
the malarial hum of mosquitoes.
Even the newly mowed grass
hides fault lines in the earth
which could open at any time

and swallow us.
In Edvard Munch’s woodcut,
the pure geometry of color—an arctic sky,
the luminescent blues and greens of water—
surrounds the woman in black
whose head is turning to a skull.
If death is everywhere we look,
at least let’s marry it to beauty.

I don’t want to say much. Her words need room to resonate, not to be drowned out, even if it is applause. Suffice it to say, if there is not a Linda Pastan Fan Club, I’m starting one.

Peace,
Milton

Today was a quintessential slice of New England autumn: crisp, cool air; brilliant sunshine; trees ablaze with color; and a hymn sing in our little white clapboard church next to the cemetery.

Ginger left a message on my cell phone yesterday suggesting we spend time together after church driving around to see the leaves and to buy some pumpkins to decorate our yard, one of our family traditions. (What follows is a somewhat unintentional tradition: I leave the pumpkin in the yard way too long and it sort of melts into a big pile of orange goop.) We have had an incredibly beautiful fall this year and it has lasted a long time. As we drove along Route 3A, we saw beautiful stands of trees lining the banks of the North River and variegated forests dappled by streams of sunlight breaking through the leaves. Amongst all the color were the bare branches of those trees whose leaves had already fallen, harbingers of the winter that is to come.

I’m struck every year by the profound irony of the most intense beauty of the foliage coming as the leaves fall and die. They don’t slip away quietly, but blaze to the end, making their last moments their most intense and amazing. For all the lush green of spring and summer, I don’t really notice the leaves until they fire and fall.

We found our pumpkins and we also bought a small bale of hay for one of them to sit on outside our gate. By the time we got back to the house, we knew quite well that they don’t call it “hay fever” for nothing. Thank God for Benadryl. Between the mums and the pumpkins, our house is officially decorated for Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Tonight about twenty of us gathered at the church to sing. Growing up Southern Baptist meant I went to church most every Sunday night for evening worship. What I loved best about it was the singing. The service was less formal and had much more music. Those who were there seemed to be the ones who loved to sing and we all joined in on our gospel favorites to close out the day. Here we gather to sing on Sunday evenings once or twice a year, but many of the songs are the ones so ingrained in me from childhood that I still know them by heart. One in particular seemed to catch the spirit of my entire day, “How Can I Keep From Singing” by Robert Lowry. (You can play the melody in the background while you read if you wish.)

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die?
The Lord my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness gather round!
Songs in the night He giveth:
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of Heav’n and earth,
How can I keep from singing?

I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it:
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing:
All things are mine since I am His—
How can I keep from singing?

As I sat down to write tonight, I did a little research on Robert Lowry, the hymn writer. He is responsible for several of my favorite hymns: “I Need Thee Every Hour,” “All the Way My Savior Leads Me,” “Savior, Thy Dying Love,” “We’re Marching to Zion,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” The last hymn was written in 1864 when he was pastoring. As the Civil War was raging, so was an epidemic in New York and Lowry wondered what prospects for Christian community lay on the other side of death. He wrote “How Can I Keep From Singing?” in 1860, before the war began. In Lowry’s mind, what mattered most was his preaching, yet his music is his enduring contribution. As his biographer wrote:

While Dr. Lowry said, “I would rather preach a gospel sermon to an appreciative, receptive congregation than write a hymn,” yet in spite of his preferences, his hymns have gone on and on, translated into many languages, preaching and comforting thousands upon thousands of souls, furnishing them expression for their deepest feelings of praise and gratitude to God . . .. What he had thought in his inmost soul has become a part of the emotions of the whole Christian world. We are all his debtors.

The Brazilian woman who is our incredible cake maker at the Red Lion loves to sing while she works. She sang when she was a dishwasher, too, before we discovered she was a wonderful baker. She has not seen her husband and her children for three or four years now. She is still struggling to speak and understand English. She doesn’t have an easy life and, most any day you might choose to eavesdrop on the bakery, she will be in there singing. There is an ongoing lamentation to our humanity: we, like the leaves, will only hang on so long before we fall. Hopefully, we, too, can go out blazing. But there is a melody more enduring than the sounds of grief and pain, a song that permeates life at every level, one that we were given from birth.

As life and death swirled around me today, one not so easily separated from the other, how could I keep from singing?

Peace,
Milton

I spent some time on my recipe blog today because I was cooking dinner for someone in our congregation who just had surgery and I realized I’ve not posted any new recipes recently or with any consistency. When I started blogging, recipes were part of the deal for me. In that spirit, I posted my Autumn Bisque recipe, a soup I concocted with what I could find in the walk-in refrigerator at work. The combination of ingredients sounds a bit strange, but it tastes great.

Since I’m the lunch chef four days out of seven, making soup has become my job. I’m the one who’s there all afternoon to let the soup simmer to tastiness. Other than our clam chowder, we don’t have any set soups on the menu, which means we don’t have any set recipes either. I start with basics – bacon, onion, celery, and (sometimes) carrots – and then see what else grabs my attention as I stand in the walk-in. It’s cold enough to spur me to creativity; I can’t stand in there for long. I try to pay attention to what soup we’ve just had. I made meatball and mushroom soup before the bisque, so it was time for something with more vegetables. Since the bisque has cream in it, I’ll do something with broth or lentils or beans tomorrow (I saw some cannelloni beans and pintos in our dry storage).

The metaphor of making something good out of what you have on hand isn’t lost on me these days, though I have to say it’s easier with soup than it is with life. Ginger and I are both getting to do things we love, as far as jobs go, and we are trying to figure out a recipe for finding the time we need together when we don’t share any days off. Her best chance at a day off, Friday is one of the two busiest days in most any restaurant. The other is Saturday, which is her second best chance at some free time. My days off, Tuesday and Thursday, are everyone else’s workday. We’re still in the process of figuring out how to make soup of it all.

While she was at a meeting tonight, I put in some Joni Mitchell while I was cleaning up the kitchen. We bought her Hits CD on a trip some years back when we realized the rental car had a CD player. I washed dishes and sang along with tunes that have carried me across many years. When I heard one particular guitar intro, I stopped what I was doing. opened the window to let the early evening breeze sneak in, and stood there looking out as the day faded while she sang “The Circle Game”:

Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like when you’re older must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

In fifty-odd days I will complete my fiftieth year on the planet and begin my fifty first time round the seasons. I remember in college religion classes, and then again in seminary, being told that the Judeo-Christian perspective of time was unique because it was linear rather than circular: history was going somewhere. So we sang, “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Forward Through The Ages” (both to the same tune) knowing that we were headed for some sort of cosmic finish line. Somewhere in the middle of those discussions, I bought James Taylor’s wonderful album, JT. And he sang:

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time
Any fool can do it
There ain’t nothing to it
Nobody knows how we got to
The top of the hill
But since we’re on our way down
We might as well enjoy the ride

The secret of love is in opening up your heart
It’s okay to feel afraid
But don’t let that stand in your way no
‘Cause anyone knows that love is the only road
And since we’re only here for a while yeah
Might as well show some style
Give us a smile now

Isn’t it a lovely ride
Sliding down
And gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It’s just a lovely ride

Maybe seven weeks before my birthday is too early to start waxing philosophic, but Joni and James have been circling with me for a long time, so they encourage me to reflect. Most of our images of circling are not productive: planes circle waiting to land, going in circles means getting nothing done. In 1991, Sergei Krikalev, a Soviet cosmonaut, spent nearly 312 days in space circling the earth because the Soviet Union collapsed while he was in orbit and he had to wait up there until the new governments figured out who could get him down. But we do circle, over and over.

But there’s more to circling than Clark Griswold saying, “There it is – Parliament, Big Ben” while trapped in a London roundabout. Just as our linear history is made up of one daily revolution after another, so are my years – and yours.

I sang the last verse with Joni and changed one word.

So the years spin by and now the boy is [fifty]
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round In the circle game

Even on hard days, it’s still a lovely ride.

Peace,
Milton

Today was yet another busy day at the restaurant. October and November are our busiest months. Between tomorrow and Sunday we have seven weddings, four rehearsal dinners, a surprise party, and a couple of other small groups (20-25). And we have a total of seven cooks, one baker, and four dishwashers.

Anybody looking for part-time weekend work?

On the way home tonight I listened to the replay of Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She was interviewing David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He has written a very critical book about the way in which the Bush administration has not followed through on its touting of faith-based initiatives, but I was too tired to stay interested for long. What did hook me was one statement Kuo made in talking about “born again Christians.” That term just flies all over me.

As I know I have mentioned more than once, I grew up Southern Baptist, so I know about being “born again.” I think I even know the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus by heart (King James Version), so I know Jesus said, “You must be born again.” What bothers me is the way it has become a label to divide the “real” Christians from the posers – or at least that’s the way I hear it. Sometimes, it’s also used in somewhat of a derogatory manner by those who are critical of evangelicals or don’t understand much about Christians to begin with.

Either way, the term bothers me. I think, first of all, it’s redundant. To be a serious disciple of Christ means you’re not coming out of the same chute as you were before (pun intended). What I hear in Jesus’ words to Nicodemus is a call to see everything differently: his birth, his family, himself, his job, his faith, his sense of belonging on the planet. Nicodemus was flummoxed by Jesus’ words. Nobody can climb back up the birth canal anymore than you can back up your rental car once you’ve gone over those spiky things. Jesus never referred to anyone as a born again believer as though it were some special category. Neither did Paul, or John, or George, or Ringo. (Pete Best did once and they threw him out of the band.)

I’m also troubled by the phrase because it divides the people of God into us and them. Since Jesus’ time there have been divergent views on life, theology, and just about everything in Christianity. For almost a millennium and a half, the Church was controlled by bishops and the like who could declare those divergent views as heresy and have those people thrown out. Many of those decisions had to do with church politics than anything else. There are a lot of differences between churches, between denominations, between people. Some of them are important and some are circumstantial. However, once we reduce the variety to who’s right and who’s wrong, which is how I hear “born again” versus not born again, we knock grace right out of the conversation because we’ve reduced our faith to being primarily about who gets to go to heaven. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw once that said, “Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.”

(Apropos of nothing, my favorite bad bumper sticker: “I found Jesus. He was behind the couch the whole time.”)

I understand “born again” as a euphemism for conversion. When I was five years old, while my father was preaching a revival at First Baptist Church of Conroe, Texas, I turned from a life of sin and sex and drugs and gave my heart to Jesus. I remember it more because it has been told to me over and over again and I take the experience as an pivotal moment in my young life. But do I think that one decision in my life is what made me heaven bound, or set my spiritual course? No, I don’t.

What I’ve learned from my experience and listening to the experiences of others is that we must be born again and again and again if we want to follow Christ. Jesus was telling Nicodemus to throw out the most basic paradigm of what it meant to be human and allow God to redefine existence. That’s not a one time deal; it has to happen over and over again. Using death instead of life as a metaphor, Jesus said it this way: “take up your cross daily.” We read those words and think about Jesus’ crucifixion as a model: be willing to sacrifice like he did (not that we really plan to do it) — and we know about his resurrection. They heard those words and thought about the way in which criminals were brutally executed: Jesus was calling them to lose everything. Whether talking about life or death, Jesus was deconstructing the very foundations of our existence and reframing what it means to be fully human, as he was: born again.

Ginger keeps saying she wants me to write a book about how a liberal Christian can have heart faith. Here’s where I’ll start: I’m a part of the United Church of Christ because I’m born again. I’m not the same guy who gave his heart to Jesus when he was five. Since that time, I’ve been born again and again and again, leading me to a place in my faith a long way away from what I learned growing up. What I took with me was a love for good hymn singing, a belief in the power of God to change lives, a heart for missions, and gratitude for the way they taught me to study the Bible. Along the way, I was born again when I saw that Paul wasn’t kidding when he said in Christ there is no male or female. I was born again when I saw that what is true for gender is also true for sexual orientation. I was born again when I realized responding to violence with violence accomplishes nothing. I was born again when I sat at the wedding of my good friends Ken and George in Old South Congregational Church. I was born again when I married Ginger. I was born again as I learned how to choose reconciling with my family over my pride and hurt. I am a man of many births. Now God is laboring to give birth to me once more as I seek to find my calling vocationally. All along the way, I have been blessed with an amazing group of midwives who have helped to bring me into these new worlds and even as I struggle to learn to speak and walk anew, I hear Jesus saying, “You must be born again.”

Whatever that means for the days to come, I know Jesus never meant it to be used as a defining label or a condition of membership. I think he did mean to say that none of us has a corner on the truth.

It’s not about being right; it’s about being loved.

Peace,
Milton

I opened and closed the restaurant today.

I swapped days with the head chef because today is his wedding anniversary. I usually work Mondays. I came in today to find I had a great deal of prep work to do. We were out of clam chowder (our signature soup), caramelized onions, and sliced tomatoes, just to name a few things. Several of the bins in the cold station were empty, or nearly so, and a good bit of stuff was not put where it usually is, so I had to hunt for it. Needless to say, I was frustrated. As with most kitchen issues, I made a list of what I needed to get done, put my head down, and things were alright within an hour or two. Both folks who worked last night know what it takes to open in the morning. I couldn’t help but wonder what they were thinking. I assumed they had forgotten what it feels like to come to work in the morning and find yourself, as we say, “in the weeds” because the night crew didn’t leave you prepared.

Tonight we got slammed. We used up most of the prep work we had done during the day. By the time we closed, we had used up all the cole slaw, most of the soup du jour, all the boiled shrimp, and — one again — sliced tomatoes. The other cook who was working with me tonight asked if I wanted him to slice tomatoes (I’m opening again tomorrow).

“No,” I said, “It’s late and we’re tired; I’ll do it in the morning.”

As I watched him put the pan of whole Roma tomatoes in the refrigerator, I smiled to myself. I know what it feels like to get to the end of a long day, or even just an incredibly busy evening, and only be able to hang in there long enough to get stuff cleaned and put away. That slipped my mind this morning.

Many years ago, when my brother and sister-in-law were living in Tucson, I went to visit them. We went to see the University of Arizona play football. Their stadium is a bowl, where the rows of seats angle continuously from the field all the way to the top row. At one point in the game, one of the cheerleaders stood up on the short wall in front of the first row, turned her back, and fell backwards on to the upraised arms of the people in the first couple of rows. In what seemed like lightning speed to me, the folks in the stands began passing her up towards the top; it felt like she got there in a matter of seconds.

That’s how life gets lived, I think, passed on hand to hand.

At least, that’s how it feels in the kitchen.

Peace,
Milton

First things first: my dad’s report was good. The tumor was a stage two and had not broken through the bladder wall. They found no other cancer cells in the other samples they took from his bladder. He goes back for another checkup in three months, but that’s all he has to do.

And there was much rejoicing.

I had a couple of things on my mind when I came up to write tonight, but they will wait. I want to point you to something I found out about through Africakid called The World Challenge. Here’s how they describe themselves:

The World Challenge is back and looking to reward projects that make a real difference to local communities. World Challenge 2006, brought to you by BBC World and Newsweek, in association with Shell, aims to find individuals or groups from around the world who have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.

World Challenge 2006 is all about global involvement, casting a net for ideas from individuals or groups deserving recognition.

The twelve finalists are doing amazing work. Africakid made specific mention of Cards From Africa, a business in Rwanda that was organized by her brother’s friend, whose aim is to provide “quality employment to the poorest and neediest young people in Rwanda.” You can read an article about CFA, along with the other finalists, in the issue of Newsweek that came out today (dated October 23). The winning business will get $20,000 and the two runners-up will each get $10,000.

Please take time to vote and then tell as many people as you can.

Voting ends November 19. The winners will be announced in December.

Peace,
Milton

On the way to work yesterday I found an old friend, thanks to Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday.

Back in the mid-eighties, a couple of the guys in my youth group in Fort Worth showed up with Billy Bragg’s record, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry. Bragg is an English folk singer with punk roots who has been a prophetic and progressive voice for twenty-five years. We even got to see him one night at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas (where you can still hear some great music). One of the songs that stuck with me from that album was “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” an amazingly sad song about the power of music to help us name our loneliness:

With the money from her accident
She bought herself a mobile home
So at least she could get some enjoyment
Out of being alone
No one could say that she was left up on the shelf
It’s you and me against the World kid she mumbled to herself

When the world falls apart some things stay in place
Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face

The next record I bought was Back to Basics, which contained a tune called “The Milkman of Human Kindness.”

If you’re lonely, I will call –
If you’re poorly, I will send poetry

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

If you are falling, I’ll put out my hands
If you feel bitter, I will understand

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

In the interview, Simon referenced a song I didn’t know called “The Space Race is Over,” which Bragg wrote for his son whose first word besides “Mommy” and “Daddy” was “moon.” For Bragg, the space race was a metaphor for our decreasing ability to dream.

Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone and I’ll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can’t help but feel we’ve all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

I was twelve when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. I can remember standing in my yard in Lusaka, Zambia and staring up at the sky on that July night, lost in wonder that people just like me were standing on the moon shining down at me. The possibilities seemed limitless. I never imagined that would be as far as we would go, or that “space travel” would reduce rockets to the equivalent of astronomic eighteen-wheelers. Somewhere we lost sight of the possibilities.

Billy Bragg has never given up being a dreamer and an activist; he still sings about what’s possible. Much of his music has a strong political edge. He makes no bones about coming from the Left, and he is determined to speak hopefully. When Scott Simon asked him to describe what it meant to him to be a songwriter, Bragg said:

You have to kind of discern issues that other people might not be talking about that you might have something to say about and write about those things . . . You have to learn to overcome your cynicism and believe in humanity and the ability of people working together to make the world a better place. Cynicism is the enemy of that – not capitalism, not conservativism, but cynicism — and to do this job you have to be able to overcome your own to help people overcome theirs.

Today at Church Council, one of the folks handed out a sheet from our State Conference office that did not do much for me other than this quote from the late columnist Sydney Harris:

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, but is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

We had some friends over for dinner tonight and the talk turned, at least for a while, to politics. The consensus around the table was our elected officials are directed by polls and lobbyists for the big corporations and not by their own integrity or the people they supposedly represent. When it comes to our national leaders, I am prematurely disappointed in the future. I want desperately to be able to trust someone we have elected to office and I’m not sure I think that is possible anymore.

I hate feeling that way.

The November election is drawing closer. As it does, our gubernatorial race is descending into the ditches. As much as I would like to see the Republicans lose control of Congress, the Democrats have offered little vision more than “we’re not them.” Dreams are not fueled by who we don’t want to be. Ginger preached this morning on Jesus’ encounter with one we’ve come to know as the Rich Young Ruler. Jesus offered him a chance at love, but the young man’s wealth-induced cynicism caused him to turn away.

In the late Nineties, Bragg collaborated with Wilco to record some of Woody Guthrie’s unrecorded lyrics on a project called Mermaid Avenue. One of the songs is called “Christ for President.”

Let’s have Christ for President.
Let us have him for our King.
Cast your vote for the Carpenter
that you call the Nazarene.

The only way we can ever beat
these crooked politician men
Is to run the money changers out of the temple
And put the Carpenter in

O It’s Jesus Christ for president
God above our king
With a job and a pension for young and old
We will make hallelujah ring

Every year we waste enough
to feed the ones who starve
We build our civilization up
and we shoot it down with wars

But with the Carpenter on the seat
away up in the capital town
The USA would be on the way
prosperity bound!

I don’t know much about the song, other than the lyric I found on Bragg’s web site. I know enough about Woody Guthrie to imagine at least some sense of irony in the words; I know he was not writing an anthem for Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed by any stretch. What Woody saw in Jesus was someone who was not beholden to wealth and power and was determined to meet the needs of the poor and oppressed. He saw hope – a reason to move beyond cynicism. Billy Bragg is living in that legacy and doing it well.

I’m glad to find him again.

Peace,
Milton