don't eat alone

I drove to church in the rain this morning.

Somehow the weather reads the calendar: as soon as September comes there is a marked change. Of course, this year even August cooled off, but we have always been able to count on Labor Day Weekend giving us tangible proof of the end of summer as things cool off. This year it seems the sun will not make much of an appearance either. More folks than I expected made showed up for worship on a wet holiday Sunday and it was a Communion Sunday, which always helps me.

After church and a cup of coffee with Don, my senior pastor; from there I headed to the gym for some treadmill time, where I would meet Ginger, before my well deserved Sunday afternoon nap. Don and I talked about using the September Sundays to preach on different metaphors for the church as a way of trying to engage more of the congregation in the conversation on who our church is and feels God wants us to become. I realized the challenge with such a sermon is to articulate meaningful metaphors without getting caught up in shooting down the ones we don’t find helpful. When I was teaching English, we approached metaphors by starting with an odd comparison and seeing what we could find there, sort of like Forrest Gump: “Life is box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to find.”

I left Dunkin’ Donuts and turned on to the street toward the gym (part of a commercial/industrial park) to find a red Ford truck with its flashers on and a man standing beside it. I pulled over to see if I could help, thinking I could at least offer my cell phone. Abel, the man standing there, didn’t speak much English, but I did learn he had a bad flat, no spare, no phone, and no one to call for help. I offered to drive him to a nearby service station where I knew they had a mechanic. About that time we were joined by Santiago, his friend who had gone looking for help and who also spoke English. We drove to the service station; they had no one on duty that could help us but told us Sears at the mall had an auto shop open on Sunday.

On the way to the mall, I got to learn a bit about my fellow travelers. They were Mexican immigrants who had come up here from North Carolina. Santiago worked as an electrician and Abel helped him. When I told them I was a cook in a restaurant, our talk turned to food, then to the dearth of good Mexican food in our area, and then to a rather wistful conversation about tamales. I do love me some tamales.

When we got to Sears, I realized I needed to hang around because they had no way to get back to their truck. As we got in line at customer service, I also realized my two companions were the only non-Anglos in the place. I was painfully aware of how what seems simple to me is a difficult if not daunting task for those who are new here. There were no signs directing us where to stand in line, nothing that offered much help at all. The salesperson was a bit curt at first, though he warmed up, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much of that had to do with my running interference for Santiago and Abel. Regardless of what the Statue of Liberty says, we are not set up to be kind to immigrants.

We got the tire and I got them back to their truck. I left them to mount the tire and I went on to the gym, though I was tempted to reward my kindness by skipping the time on the treadmill. (Run, Milty, run.) Hey, no good deed goes unpunished. I worked up a sweat in yet another room of white people, watched a little beach volleyball to distract me, and then came home. When I passed the place I had seen Abel, the truck was gone. They had to get to work, Santiago told me: “We work seven days.”

Most of the Brazilians I work with at the restaurant also work at least one other job. Pedro, our head dishwasher and all around handyman, works construction all day before he comes and washes dishes from six to midnight. He just got a new construction job las t week. When I asked if he liked it, he said, “It’s good job. Dishwashing is good job. I like work. I feel good to work.”

In our church, as in many UCC churches, we invite people to Communion by saying, “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” I know we mean it and I know we have a lot to come to terms with to incarnate our words well. I’ve been thinking about the name of the guy I first met this afternoon when I stopped to help: Abel because of this verse:

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I supposed to look after my brother?”
(Genesis 4:9, NIRV)

If church is a family — the Family of God, then the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. Look after your brother, your sister, your cousins, your uncle in prison, and your crazy aunt with all the cats. If church is a meal, then there are seats for everyone and all the seats are the same. There is plenty of food to go around and lots of people working hard to make sure everyone gets to eat. There is also chocolate, ice cream, chicken fried steak, and Guinness. And fried catfish. And hushpuppies. Oh – and tamales.

If church is a nation, then the borders are open and citizenship is universal. The debate over who’s in and who’s out is old business. Living in Promised Land has less to do with milk and honey than it does with keeping our promises to love God with all of our beings and our neighbors as ourselves. Homeland security gives way to “ally, ally, oxen free.” The legacy of any civilization is not in conquest but in how it cares for its citizens. We will be remembered for how well we loved one another.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that everyone would want to be a part of a group that is determined to love one another, regardless of the metaphor. Instead we opt for church as business, or fortress, or battlefield, or courtroom. I’m not sure it’s because we don’t want to be loved and to love as much as it is we don’t believe that love is stronger than fear, or power, or insecurity, or even death. We have a hard time trusting God and each other.

If church is a guy with a flat tire on a rainy afternoon, then we stop to help. I know — I went to that church today.

Peace,
Milton

Today marks a week since I joined the gym.

When it comes to exercise, I can think of at least fourteen other things I would rather do than walk or run or do sit-ups. But I am about three and a half months away from my completing my fiftieth year on the planet and I would rather weigh four times my age on my birthday than weigh five times my age, which is where I am now. Years ago, when I was in seminary, I went waterskiing with my roommate Burt and his family. His granddad was driving the boat and he almost drowned me because the motor wasn’t big enough to get me out of the water. He turned to Burt and said, “He’s a big ol’ boy!”

I still am.

I went to the gym this morning and spent about forty-five minutes on the treadmill and stationary bicycle, which is good for me. I punched the “cardio” button on the treadmill so it made sure my heart rate was where it needed to be. To keep from fixating on the digital clock telling me how much longer I had to go, I watched the television screen in front of me (and I thought about the kids in the grocery carts). One of the side effects of going to the gym is I am going to be more conversant about sports than I have been in years. The two viewing choices I had were ESPN and a soap opera. I opted for Sports Center and am on my way to being semi-informed about any number of things I don’t find particularly interesting or know much about.

One of the things they have talked about incessantly is Fantasy Football. Though I’ve heard people talk about it enough to know lots of people play and it has something to do with picking teams, I can’t say I understand it. (And please don’t feel like you need to explain it to me; I’m good.) Twice this week I’ve heard a commentator articulate one of his twenty-five rules for Fantasy Football. Number 18 was “Mike Shanahan hates you” and Number 19 was “The preseason means nothing.” Neither comment was particularly helpful to me.

Last week at work, it was slow and I walked around to the pub to talk to the bartender for a bit. He was watching something called the World Sports Stacking Championship on ESPN. We were both intrigued as we watched kids – I mean ten and eleven year olds – stack cups faster than, well; watch the video of the world champion. (The announcer is annoying, but hang in there.) Now these are kids who are doing more than watching TV in the grocery store. Chris and I talked about the kind of concentration, determination, and focus it took for these kids to get to where they could stack the cups as fast as they did. My guess is it’s pretty good developmentally for them as well.

When I see stuff like that, my mind gravitates to thinking about the kind of practice involved. It took hours and hours for Emily to get where she could stack those cups in less than eight seconds. Mastering the skills can’t be much more interesting than walking on a rubber road to nowhere for thirty minutes. I just need a taste of her determination to walk until the pounds starting falling off. And besides, if I keep practicing, maybe I’ll be as good as these guys.

Check out the video below.

Peace,
Milton

Wednesday is my early release day at work, which means I got to listen to All Things Considered on the way home rather than listening to the Red Sox lose another game on their West Coast slide. They were just beginning a story on Grocery Cart TV. Seriously. Wal Mart (of course) and a couple of other supermarket chains are testing grocery carts with TV’s built in so the kids won’t drive you nuts while you shop. One of the people who commented said she was afraid this was another way we were teaching the younger generation that life happens on a screen rather than by actual experience.

Before long we are going to be a nation of people like Chance, the gardener in Being There: “I like to watch.”

Quick disclaimer: I have no children of my own. I’ve seen parents in the grocery store try to shop while Jeffy or Mikey or Buffy tries to pull down every box of Pop Tarts or wants an explanation about every can on the vegetable aisle. I see their pain. I can also see the attraction of a screen that will numb them into submission while you grab the Hamburger Helper, though I think the woman who worries about our creating a nation of watchers is probably right. But that’s not my point.

I came home to find a great comment from Suzanne about yesterday’s post on bananas which began, “I hear what you’re saying, Milton. But, at the same time, I’m wistful about times when I could eat without fear.” Put that together with the grocery carts and here’s my point: I’m glad I got to be a kid when I did because I got to grow up without much fear.

• I never knew anyone with a peanut allergy.
• I never wore a bike helmet.
• I hitchhiked in high school (sure, it was in Nairobi, but still –).
• I played with other kids without having to have a play date.
• I climbed trees, dug holes, built forts, and never worried much about being safe.
• I thought skinned knees were part of growing up.

My list is not intended to wax nostalgic or to trivialize the danger that truly exists, though I’m guessing George W. didn’t wear a bike helmet either. (I’m just saying . . .) I do think it’s harder to be a kid because the world is more afraid. Fear changes us and causes us to crave what is safe and familiar. We become too easily accustomed to taking the path of least resistance; we learn not to ask too many questions. We end up being watchers rather than experiencers. (I think I made up a new word.)

In a somewhat related tangent, what just popped into my mind is the scene with Butch and Sundance at the top of the cliff looking down at the river. Sundance flinches before he jumps and says he can’t swim. “Can’t swim?” says Butch. “Hell, the fall will kill you.”

I taught English is a wonderful suburban high school that worked hard to support the kids in every way we could. The guidance counselors were amazing. Teachers stayed late so kids could get extra help. We bent over backwards to help them succeed. The one thing we didn’t do was help them learn how to fail and live through it. I had semester after semester when not one of my one hundred and twenty-five students failed. Our grading system was the bike helmet that kept them from feeling the full brunt of the fall, and kept them from learning that they could live through the pain and learn from it. One bad grade wasn’t going to kill them. We should have told them when the stakes were low; I’m guessing they have had to learn the lesson when people were playing for keeps.

The woman who critiqued the TV carts talked about the grocery store as opportunity for conversation and exploration, as a chance to engage and interact with your kid as you shop. Yes, they do get bored before the shopping is over, and they get to learn – or begin to learn – that life isn’t about keeping them comfortable or out of the way.

Spookyrach had a great post this week about starting a new church that made me laugh out loud and want to join right now. “Church leaders,” she said, “will wear robes and sometimes capes,” which reminded me of my second-favorite Guy Clark song, “The Cape,” that is an appropriate way to end my meanderings.

Eight years old with flour sack cape
Tied all around his neck
He climbed up on the garage
Figurin’ what the heck
He screwed his courage up so tight
The whole thing come unwound
He got a runnin’ start and bless his heart
He headed for the ground

He’s one of those who knows that life
Is just a leap of faith
Spread your arms and hold you breath
Always trust your cape

All grown up with a flour sack cape
Tied all around his dream
He’s full of piss and vinegar
He’s bustin’ at the seams
He licked his finger and checked the wind
It’s gonna be do or die
He wasn’t scared of nothin’, boys
He was pretty sure he could fly

He’s one of those who knows that life
Is just a leap of faith
Spread your arms and hold you breath
Always trust your cape

Old and grey with a flour sack cape
Tied all around his head
He’s still jumpin’ off the garage
And will be till he’s dead
All these years the people said
He’s actin’ like a kid
He did not know he could not fly
So he did

He’s one of those who knows that life
Is just a leap of faith
Spread your arms and hold you breath
Always trust your cape

Maybe – just maybe – the fall doesn’t kill us.
Peace,
Milton

I came up to write this evening without much on my mind. Today has been another cool, rainy, and gray day (in August!) and I felt on the inside much like the weather felt on the inside. So I began clicking on some of the news links in the sidebar to see if I could find a story that could pull a response out of me. What I learned is The Nation has just published a food issue and one of the articles by Alice Waters is called “Slow Food Nation.” Here’s how she begins:

It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that “the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.” If you think this aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider that today almost 4 billion people worldwide depend on the agricultural sector for their livelihood. Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven’t acknowledged the full consequences–environmental, political, cultural, social and ethical–of our national diet.

I picked up some bananas in the supermarket today because I’m supposed to eat a banana everyday to accompany my high blood pressure medicine. (I sometimes wonder if instructions like that are really doctors’ cute little practical jokes – “tell him to stand on one leg when he takes the pill and then sing the chorus of “Hit Me, Baby, One More Time.”) Bananas are not grown anywhere in the United States. Most of our bananas come from Haiti, I believe. I picked up the almost ripe fruit and checked the price: sixty-nine cents a pound. I tried to figure out any way I could assume, with the cost of shipping and handling, that anyone who picked those bananas could have been paid a living wage. Not a chance. I couldn’t sell the tomatoes out of my garden to my next-door neighbor for sixty-nine cents and make a profit. Someone’s getting screwed so I can eat bananas. When I look at Haiti, I can see how the destiny of nations depends on how they are fed: they are starving and I’m not.

They are also the ones paying the true cost of the banana, not me.

Waters concludes her article by saying:

The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities–to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work it. It follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the real costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we will have laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but a healthier twenty-first-century democracy.

On average, the food we eat as Americans travels over two thousand miles before it reaches our tables. We no longer understand that fruits and vegetables have a growing season; we just have it shipped from the other side of the world and expect to pay about the same as we do for what is grown closer to home. Until about eighty years ago, Americans didn’t even know what bananas were. Once American companies figured out there was money to be made in buying up the farms of Haiti and commercially growing bananas, they taught us to eat and to want what should be a treat we get to have when we visit the Caribbean.

Man, I had no idea I was going to end up ranting about bananas. But Waters’ caution about every decision we make about food having personal and global repercussions hits close to home. There has to be another source of potassium that doesn’t require someone else to pay the price for my health.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t see the kindler, gentler version of this template when I was switching things around. Hope this makes things a little easier on the eyes.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I spent the afternoon at the Marshfield Fair yesterday.

For over a hundred and fifty years, Marshfield has been the town on the South Shore that hosts a fair with everything from lambs to lionhead bunnies and ferris wheels to fried dough. Something about the fair makes me hungry. My afternoon could easily have been mapped by the food booths we visited: corn dog, fried dough, chocolate-peanut butter fudge, and a chocolate shake. We walked through the buildings that housed all the animals, watched a spinning demonstration by one of the kids I know through the church at Hanover, listened to some blues at the bandstand, and strolled among the rides and the barkers trying to convince us that “everyone wins a prize.”

As we passed the shooting gallery, where you had to fire a BB gun and completely erase the red star in the middle of the white card to win, the barker was proudly proclaiming he had a big winner. The prize he was awarding caught me as a bit of a paradox: it was a giant stuffed seal.

The rides every year are provided by something called Fiesta Shows. I don’t know much more about them other than what I found on their website and what I saw at the fair. Most of the rides have to do with strapping you in and flinging you in a circle either sideways or up and down. Each ride is blaring a different heavy metal anthem and is staffed by someone who looks as though they stepped out of a Flannery O’Connor short story or a Lifetime movie. As we walked and watched, Ginger said, “I wonder what it’s like to be a carney.”

Me, too.

I wouldn’t want to live their lives, and there’s an attraction – the best adjective I can come up with to describe it is literary – they are the stuff good stories are made of. Part of the pull, I suppose, is the hint of danger that comes from a life that seems so foreign. These are folks who travel from town to town, always at the margins and always fairly anonymous. At work the other night, I was talking to one of the servers who just graduated from nursing school. When I told her I was going to the fair this weekend, she said she had never been because her mother wouldn’t let her go. When I asked why, she said it was because of what her mother remembered about going to the fair as a teenager: it wasn’t safe. I came away from the conversation wondering what her mother had been up to on those summer nights.

Another part of it, for me, is that they live on the fringes. In the material Fiesta Shows publishes to recruit new employees it says:

Cookhouse – A cookhouse is available at each site to serve meals throughout the day.

Bunkhouse – A bunkhouse is available for housing ride employees. No room guarantee is here or implied. Check with the on-site supervisor for availability.

Employee Comfort Trailer – A mobile “recreation room” has been created to provide employees with an area during the day to relax. The trailer has men’s/women’s room, air conditioning/heat, 2 satellite televisions and vcr’s, as well as soda and vending machines. Please check the posted rules in the trailer for proper behavior.

Now that’s what I call job security. From the fringes, life has a different view. Charles Dickens told his stories about such characters to point out the social injustices of his day. Some of the carnies I saw were not so far removed from Pip and the others. Life viewed from the fringes gives a crosscut perspective, allowing us to see layers not visible from the top, or even the middle. I’m not trying to speak romantically here. Loading and unloading the Tilt-a-Whirl in Anytown, USA over and over, surrounded by hay-covered mud and people who look at you as though you were part of the machine, or look down on you as though you were out to rob them blind is a life that sees the layers of desperation and visceral hopelessness that I don’t touch, even on my most depressed days.

And, that said, part of the pull is the romance of the carnival and the circus as metaphor for being able to take off and follow our dreams. On his first record, David Wilcox sang a Buddy Mondlock song called “The Kid,” which I found myself humming by the time we left the fair:

I’m the kid who ran away with the circus
Now I’m watering elephants
But I sometimes lie awake in the sawdust
Dreaming I’m in a suit of light

Late at night in the empty big top
I’m all alone on the high wire
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no net this time
He’s a real death defier

I’m the kid who always looked out the window
Failing the tests in geography
But I have seen things far beyond just this schoolyard
Distant shores of exotic lands

There’s the spires of the Turkish empire
Six months since we made landfall
Riding low with the spices of India
Through Gibraltar, we’re rich men all

I’m the kid who thought we’d someday be lovers
Always held out that time would tell
Time was talking, guess I just wasn’t listening
No surprise, if you know me well

As we’re walking down toward the train station
I hear a whispering rainfall
Across the boulevard, you slip your hand in mine
In the distance the train’s last call

I’m the kid who has this habit of dreaming
That sometimes gets me in trouble too
But the truth is I could no more stop dreaming
Than I could make them all come true

Every good story has heartbreak as its subtext. The conversation between danger, desperation, and dreams that makes for a good story pulls me in because I want to believe the dreams don’t get bludgeoned to death in the interchange. I want to believe that there is some life in the words exchanged in the Bunkhouse or the Comfort Trailer, some sense of hope and humanity. I don’t have to have a happy ending; I just want to know that some dreams live, even at the fringes. As Steve Earle, a man who has looked at the crosscut of life from some of its most desperate vantage points sings:

Well, just because you’ve been around
And had your poor heart broken
That’s no excuse for lyin’ there
Before the last word’s spoken
‘Cause some dreams don’t ever come true
Don’t ever come true
Aw, but some dreams do

Peace,
Milton

The blog is taking on a new look because it was the only way I could figure out to deal with the disappearance of the sidebar on the other template. As much as I like blogging, that sentence is so boring it makes my teeth hurt. I know way more about HTML code than I want to — not that I know a lot; it’s just more than I want to.

Anyway, I think the new look is going to work. I appreciate your feedback.

I will be back tomorrow with something more interesting than cyber mechanics.

Peace,
Milton

One of the biggest hurdles to clear as a writer is the first sentence. You want to grab the attention of your reader and pull them into your story. One of the first authors I remember as a kid — Snoopy — began his work with, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

That is the way perhaps my favorite book of all time — A Wrinkle in Time — actually begins. And that story still has a hold on me. Back in the late eighties, I came across a book who used that opening line as its title, claiming it contained “the funniest opening lines from the worst novels never written.” I bought the book and learned about The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. (I’m sad to report the book and it’s sequels are all out of print.) I also loaned the book to someone years ago and forgot about it and the contest until The Goddess reminded me of it on her blog. Bulwer-Lytton used the sentence ito begin a novel he finished, and thus gave the inspiration for the contest over a century later:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Oh, yeah, baby!

The winning entry for this year comes from Jim Guigli of Carmichael, California:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

You can find the rest of the 2006 results here and a “lyttony” of winners over the years here. For my post today I offer a few of my favorites:

It had been a dark and stormy night, but as dawn began to light up the eastern sky, to the west the heavens suddenly cleared, unveiling a pale harvest moon that reposed gently atop the distant mesa like a pumpkin on a toilet with the lid down.
— Gerald R. Johnson, Vancouver, WA

Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
— Dennis Barry, Dothan, AL

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn’t heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn’t reacting yet to let you know.
–Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 Winner)

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven–fueled by a single accelerant–and she needed a man, a man who wouldn’t shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.
–Rachel E. Sheeley, Williamsburg, Indiana (1988 Winner)

The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
–Bob Perry, Milton, Massachusetts (1998 Winner)

A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona’s ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.
— Sera Kirk, Vancouver, BC (2001 Winner)

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
— Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.
— Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, AL (2003 Winner)

Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.
–Linda Vernon, Newark, California (1990 Winner)

There are more where those came from; check them out and remember:

Grasshopper, the three secrets of life are as follows: first, keep your eyes and ears open; second: don’t tell everything you know.
— Andy Otes, Frenchs Forest NSW, Australia

Peace,
Milton

Ginger goes back to work today.

Her sabbatical and vacation have ended and she is getting ready to go to her office at the church. She woke up early and has been a bundle of activity all morning: she took Gracie to the beach for a walk and a prayer, washed her car and cleaned it out, did a couple of loads of laundry, and who knows what else — Lola and I slept through most of it.

I love watching her process because mine is so different. When I was teaching high school and it came time for a new year to begin, I would lay in bed and moan, “I don’t want to go back to school.”

“You’re the teacher;” she would say with a smile in her voice, “you sound like one of the students.”

I know returning to a job as relationally intense and complex as the pastorate after having had the chance to live for some time watching a clock without hands makes for harsh reentry. I also know, as I have listened to her prepare for today over the past couple of weeks, that she has missed seeing the smiles and faces of the folks at North Community Church and is truly at her best as a pastor, which is where her best self and what the world needs most from her intersect.

I’ve always admired her singular sense of calling. If purity in heart is “to will one thing,” as Kierkegaard put it, then she is as pure in heart as they come.

“Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus said, “for they shall see God.” I watch Ginger as she both works and plays and expect that if my Bible had illustrations, were I to look up that particular Beatitude I would find her picture. As for my own vocational experience, I think I know why there’s not a Beatitude that begins, “Blessed are those who want to try and do just about everything. . .”

Today, I send Ginger back to work with a poem — one by Mary Oliver, whom we both love:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Being a part of “the family of things” is as wonderful and as complicated as being a part of any family; it is both harsh and exciting. We have a great deal to say about how we choose to perceive and receive it. As we both head off to work today, Ginger to the church and I to the inn, we move in formation with the rest of our family, praying for eyes to see the world with imagination rather than buckling under the weight of obligation.

Peace,
Milton