don't eat alone

My writing schedule is off this week because I’m working more at the Red Lion Inn. Robert, the head chef, had a chance to get away for a few days with his family and I’m filling in some of the shifts. He has been so generous in working with my schedule so I could go on our mission trip and to my in-laws’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party that I was more than happy to adjust how I would have spent these days.

What I want to tell you about is seeing Lyle Lovett last Thursday night. My first date with Ginger was to see Lyle Lovett at Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth, Texas, a wonderful little club. Since then, we’ve seen him every year. He never disappoints. I will get a chance to post about the whole evening, but for today I would like to leave you with my nomination for our new national anthem, “If I Had a Boat”:

If I had a boat
I’d go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I’d ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

If I were Roy Rogers
I’d sure enough be single
I couldn’t bring myself to marrying old Dale
It’d just be me and trigger
We’d go riding through them movies
Then we’d buy a boat and on the sea we’d sail

And if I had a boat
I’d go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I’d ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

The mystery masked man was smart
He got himself a Tonto
‘Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free
But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my ass I bought a boat
I’m going out to sea

And if I had a boat
I’d go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I’d ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

And if I were like lightning
I wouldn’t need no sneakers
I’d come and go wherever I would please
And I’d scare ’em by the shade tree
And I’d scare ’em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea

And if I had a boat
I’d go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I’d ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

Peace,
Milton

Since our senior pastor is on vacation, I’ve preached three of the last four weeks. Since the Lectionary in August can’t seem to get away from “bread” passages, I’ve preached from some of my favorite scenes in the gospels. This week I realized I had created an inadvertent sermon miniseries on some of the miracles of Jesus: three weeks ago, I talked about the feeding of the five thousand; two weeks ago, Jesus’ healing of the man at the pool at Bethesda; this week, Jesus’ turning the water into wine at the wedding in Cana. I’m drawn to the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the gospels because they speak to me of God’s creative and risky side, God’s effusive generosity and spontaneity, and maybe even a little of God’s mischief.

Yes, I know God is the Creator of All Things who breathed the universe into existence out of nothing, setting in motion an intricate and interconnected web of existence that continues to confound us at every level of life. And I know that part of the way we have come to terms with what we strain to comprehend is by identifying the order and patterns we can see and quantifying then. We have laws like the Law of Gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics (I never can remember what that one is); we have named everything from animals to asteroids; and we have set about trying to find a way to explain most everything through science and reason. All of that is good work and none of it leaves room for a guy to feed five thousand with a sack lunch, walk across the sea, heal a man with a few words, or change a hundred and eighty gallons of water into mighty fine wine.

He always had some mighty fine wine.

When I was a teenager, I lived, for a time, in Accra, Ghana. One Sunday, a Ghanaian seminary student was preaching. He was Indian by heritage and spoke English with a strong accent. “We cannot weigh God,” he said, “and we cannot measure God, which is a great disappointment to the scientists you know because they want to weigh and measure everything.” The scientists are not alone: there’s some of that in all of us. Most of us like to know what’s coming, like to be able to plan, like to feel some sense of structure and familiarity to life. One of the great paradoxes of our existence is the God who made us lean towards order is a God who is full of surprises and disguises, who loves to ambush us with grace and leave us with gifts we can accept but not explain.

Gail O’Day writes: “John 2:1-11 poses hard questions because the miracle challenges conventional assumptions about order and control, about what is possible, about where God is found and how God is known. Indeed, the impact of the miracle is lost if one does not entertain these and similar questions, because the force of the miracle derives precisely from its extraordinariness, from the dissonance it creates” (NIB IX 540).

The miracle described in John 2 is Jesus’ first recorded miracle. John begins his gospel by waxing eloquent about the Word becoming Flesh, describes Jesus calling his disciples and then recounts what Jesus did at Cana as a way of introducing who Jesus was and what he was about. One of my favorite renditions of the story of Jesus’ life is a play called The Cotton Patch Gospel, which retells John’s gospel as if Jesus had been born in Gainesville, Georgia and grown up in the South. As the wedding unfolds and Mary comes to Jesus and says, “They have no wine,” Jesus steps aside to pray and says to God, “You give me the task of saving the world and here I am playing bartender!”

However dissonant it feels to us, his mother thought it was an appropriate role. When Jesus seemed reluctant, she told the servants to follow his instructions. Just as he told the disciples to start handing out the loaves and fishes, and the crippled man to rise up and walk, Jesus told the servants to fill the six giant water jars with water and then fill their pitchers from them and serve the guests. They put in water and poured out wine – lots and lots of wine — and top shelf stuff so much that the guests accused their host of holding out on them. They thought the wine was gone and now there was almost two hundred gallons of the good stuff. Unless there were a couple of thousand people at the wedding, Jesus’ extravagance created enough wine to let the party go on for a long, long time.

God’s extravagance is the first stumbling block for us when it comes to miracles. Why have twelve baskets full of leftovers after feeding the five thousand? Wasn’t feeding them a big enough deal? If Jesus could change the properties of liquids so easily, why not have it happen in each guest’s glass? Why give the party a lifetime supply of Pinot Noir? I say stumbling block because we are created in God’s image and called to live like Jesus. If extravagance is the hallmark of our God, we have to come to terms with our unwillingness to live generously. God is extravagant; we are not – that trips us up every time.

We’re created in the image of a God who paints sunsets in so many shades of pink and orange that we don’t even have names for them. We’re created in the image of a God who built the universe out of particles smaller than we can detect and made them stretch out to be larger than we can fathom. We’re created in the image of a God who creates beauty in creatures deep in the rainforests and jungles, or at the bottom of the ocean, that we never see. We’re created in the image of a God who made wildflowers that bloom brilliantly for a couple of weeks a year, springs that flow constantly, hippos who bellow beautifully, and Schnauzers (one of my personal favorites). We’re created in the image of a go-for-broke-swing-for-the-fences-what -can-I-do-next-man-that-was-fun-do-you-know-how-much-I-love-you-you-ain-t-seen-nothing- yet-I-saw-this-and-knew-you’d-like-it-what-do-you-say-we-skip-school-and-go-to-the-beach- drive-with-the-windows-down-singing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs kind of God who does miracles and other things with an extravagance we can’t explain and we live much of our lives in fear. How can that be?

Jesus’ miracles are not the first indicator of God’s extravagance. When we look for it, we can see God has been the Ultimate Spendthrift since the beginning. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes:

So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or to its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity, for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that, as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. (129)

The creative and artistic extravagances we see all around us in creation becomes relational in Jesus, who incarnates God’s love and grace with the same kind of abandon. The first act – the first indicator of what kind of Messiah had come – was to keep the celebration going for one small wedding party. All of Jesus’ miracles have an intensely personal context. There were no grand gestures to rid the world of hurricanes, or eradicate all disease. Even when he calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee he did it because his disciples – his friends – were frightened. Though we may not be necessary to God (in the way Dillard describes), we are essential. Such is the nature of extravagant love: God doesn’t love us because God needs to or is required to; God loves us because God is Love and love thrives only in relationship.

“Be filled with the Spirit,” Paul wrote in Ephesians 5, “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Then he says on more thing: “Subject yourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Actually, Paul finishes the chapter the same way he started it. In Ephesians 5:1 he says, “Be imitators of God.” When he wrote to the Philippians, he said, “Have the same mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

We are called to be creatively extravagant in the way we act towards one another, speak to one another, pray for one another, share with one another, deal with one another, and help one another. John, in one of his letters, said it this way: “Little children, let us love one another.”

And may there always be some mighty fine wine – singing, “Joy to the world, all you boys and girls; joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea; joy to you and me.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger has an unusual attachment to her Wrangler. When she came back from the “southern sojourn” of her sabbatical, I drove her Jeep to Providence to pick her up. When she got to the car, she hugged it – she didn’t think I saw her. On these highs-in-the-seventies-cloudless- summer-afternoon-drive-with-the-top-down kind of days, I understand why she loves her car.

We were driving back from Boston the other afternoon and our soundtrack (you gotta have a soundtrack when the top’s down) was a CD I burned for her southern trip. Two Nanci Griffith songs are on it, both from her album Flyer, one Ginger’s favorite off the record and one mine. My song is a duet with Adam Duritz of Counting Crows called “Going Back to Georgia.” The melody is lilting and lovely and the harmonies full of friendship.

As the song finished, I said, “For all of our CDs — I’m surprised to say it – but I think Flyer is one of the most essential to us over the years.” She agreed.

When Ginger was working on her doctorate, the record was especially meaningful because of one song – the second one on the disc we were listening to in the Wrangler: “These Days in an Open Book.” Getting through the process of her D. Min. was hard work for Ginger and she handled the challenge with all the grace and tenacity that made me fall in love with her in the first place. As the deadline for finishing the dissertation drew nearer and consumed more and more of her days, Flyer was the only CD in the player. As she began to work, she would press play and Nanci’s voice would begin to sing:

Shut it down and call this road a day
And put this silence in my heart in a better place
I have traveled with your ghost now so many years
That I see you in the shadows
In hotel rooms and headlights
You’re coming up beside me
Whether it’s day or night

These days my life is an open book
Missing pages I cannot seem to find
These days your face
In my memory
Is in a folded hand of grace against these times

No one’s ever come between your memory and me
I have driven this weary vessel here alone
Will you still find me if I leave you here beside this road
Cuz’ I need someone who can touch me
Who’ll put no one above me
Someone who needs me
Like the air he breathes

These days my life is an open book
Missing pages I cannot seem to find
These days your face
In my memory
Is in a folded hand of grace against these times

I can’t remember where this toll road goes
Maybe it’s Fort Worth, maybe it’s a heart of gold
The price of love is such a heavy toll
That I’ve lived my life in the back roads
With your love in my pocket
If I spend the love you gave me
Tell me where will it go?

These days my life is an open book
Missing pages I cannot seem to find
These days your face
In my memory
Is in a folded hand of grace against these times

After the song played two or three times, she would get to work, looking for the missing pages. She found them and her dissertation and has been the Reverend Doctor Ginger Brasher-Cunningham for some time now.

(Brief pause while I beam with pride.)

A couple songs after Nanci and Adam sang in the Jeep, “These Days” began. We both looked at each other and smiled. Over the years, the missing pages and open book have come to stand for different things at different times. What hasn’t changed for me is the truth in the end of the chorus: her face is, for me, a folded hand of grace against these times.

Peace,
Milton

One of the summertime specialties at the Red Lion Inn, as in a lot of New England coastal restaurants, are Steamers. For the uninitiated, they are clams. We get ours from nearby Duxbury Bay and prepare them by boiling them in a mixture of white wine, clam juice, and rosemary. They are boiled until they open up and then served in the broth with clarified butter and garlic bread.

They’re good.

I bring them up because they also take some instruction to eat properly. When you take one out of the pot, it has a black tail hanging out of the shell. When you pull on the tail, the black skin comes off and you can pull the whole clam, both belly and tail, out of the shell to dip in the butter and eat. I had some with friends the other night at dinner and, as I watched them eat the steamers my mind flashed back to a recurring thought I have in similar situations: how did someone ever decide to eat a steamer the first time?

I was in Quincy Market years ago, which is a haven for street performers, and watched a guy juggle chainsaws. They were running at the time. I wondered then how he ever did that the first time, or practiced without ending up with a nickname like “Stumpy” or “Nub.” When the first person jumped out of an airplane, was he halfway down before he thought, “I should have invented the parachute first”?

Working with food offers many opportunities to ponder the question. Who was the first person, when they saw an egg drop out of a chicken’s butt, to think, “I should eat that”? What other animal droppings did they try before they found one that worked? Trial and error – perhaps trial and success – has to be involved. When I start trying to put new ingredients together, or I begin to think about how to prepare a dish, I lean into the history and experience of the cooks who have come before me and have stood staring at the ingredients in front of them, trying to figure out what to make for dinner. I have the luxury of following those who went first, those who gave it their best shot and then said, “OK, don’t do that again.” My seminary preaching professor used to say, “Being original means knowing how to hide your sources.” The truth is when I think of something for the first time, it’s a first for me but rarely is it a first for the universe. I owe much to those who have come before me.

Elaine Pagels has a wonderful book called Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. It has nothing to do with cooking, but it has much to do with how faith gets passed down, as she notes “Christianity had survived brutal persecution and flourished for generations – even centuries – before Christians formulated what they believed into creeds” (5). Faith has been passed down the years not by institutions but by individuals who lived, ate and worshipped together: “These simple everyday acts – taking off clothes, bathing, putting on new clothes, then sharing bread and wine – took on, for Jesus’ followers, powerful meanings” (14). My experience in faith is much like my experience with food: what is new to me is rarely new to the universe. I have learned about being faithful much like I learned to eat steamers: by watching and imitating.

Part of Pagels’ point is the variety we see in modern day theology has been there from the start, just as someone mixed coconut, pecans, and chicken long before I did. But imagination and originality are not the same thing. I don’t have to be the first one to ever think of something to be creative. We do our best work when we are mindful of what we have been given and what we have been taught and then we take the pieces and shape them into our own expression, which is both imaginative and full of history.

Peace,
Milton

I know part of the reason I like to cook is so people will tell me how good the food is. I come by it honest. One of my most enduring memories of dinner time as a kid was my mom biting into the food she had prepared for us and saying, “Isn’t this good?”

It was — as we were all happy to say so.

Last night was the first time I worked the dinner shift by myself. Mondays are notoriously slow in the restaurant business and Mondays at the Red Lion Inn mean only the pub is open, so we don’t need a full staff. Alfonso came in to wash dishes; Chris and Elaine were the bartender and server, respectively. Mondays are also our chef’s day off. I worked lunch and dinner and had the kitchen all to myself, which meant it was my job to come up with the dinner special, which is a challenge because Mondays are the days when our supplies are at their lowest. After perusing the dry storage area and the walk in refrigerator, I created Coconut and Pecan Crusted Fried Chicken. I served it with bleu cheese mashed potatoes, sauteed spinach, and a ginger-coconut rum beurre blanc garnished with a slice of grilled pineapple.

Since I was making it up, I made a plate for the staff to try during the late afternoon. Part of my logic is if I let them try the special they will sell it better. Part of it is, as I said, I just like to hear them say they like the food.

The night was slow, so I only got to make the dish once. Elaine went and got Chris so he could see the plate before it went out. I had to keep myself from going out to the table and watching the customer eat her dinner. Elaine was kind enough to come back and tell me the woman was making yummy noises.

I smiled and said, “It’s good, isn’t it?”

Peace,
Milton

Most Monday mornings, Ginger and I get to take our time eating breakfast and then I come up to my trusty old iMac to write. Two things are different today. Due to some staff changes at the Red Lion Inn, I’m working today so Robert can get his day off. He’s been so good about negociating my schedule that I’m happy to return the favor.

The second thing is I’m taking a step up in the computer world. Thanks to the Tax Free Weekend here in Massachusetts, I’m the proud owner of a new MacBook, which means the blog will become a bit more mobile. It also means, thanks to one of my neigbbors that I have a free wireless connection in my house. I’ll be “coming to you cordless.” (Extra points for anyone who can tell me what movie that comes from.)

I will also have more to say a bit later. For now, I’m off to the kitchen to cook for whoever wanders in on yet another absolutely beautiful New England summer day.

Peace, Milton

Wednesday nights are not supposed to be a particularly busy night at the restaurant; last night was jammin’. For reasons we knew, and some we did not, the place filled up early and stayed that way until the kitchen closed about 9:15. My shift started about 10:15 – that morning.

Joe and I were working the line together. He’s a hard worker at the Red Lion Inn and the two other places he works. I think he gave up sleep for the third job. As fall approaches and the college students go back to school, Joe and I will be working together a lot. That’s a good thing. We work together well. As the evening progressed, we were challenged with the number of tickets that came in, but we stayed organized and focused and we never “got in the weeds” as we say.

I wish I knew how to describe the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with getting a big ticket out correctly and on time. A group of sixteen people came in last night. Besides appetizers, the ordered six burgers, three fish and chips, mussels Dijon, a chicken Caesar salad, fried calamari, buffalo wings, two lobster rolls, and a duck quesadilla. (That’s right – a duck quesadilla — check out the menu.) Right behind them came a party of six and one of eight with similar requests. When it was all said and done, Joe and I kicked some serious kitchen butt because of three things.

First we prepped well. I got there about ten because I was the lunch chef; Joe came in around noon. Afternoons in a restaurant are spent getting ready for the evening. We check all the stations to make sure we have what we need and then we go to work filling in the blanks: chopping lettuce for the salads, making the garnishes, caramelizing the onions, filling the bins in the stations with sauces and dressings, making the chowder and other soups, baking the bread – you get the idea. Though there is a lot of slicing and dicing, which sounds like fairly pedantic work, I’m energized by the process because it is infused with expectation: company’s coming and we’re getting ready for them. Each of us has our favorite things to do, or things in which we take particular ownership. One of mine is the cole slaw, because it’s my recipe. The whole thing is very much a group activity. As we work, we get to talk and laugh. We have a good time together. I think it shows up in the food.

We also did well last night because we communicated effectively once the rush started. When there are several tickets on the board, we have to find a balance between working on individual tickets and maintaining a more global view of everything that ought to be in progress. While a big ticket is being finished up, an order for a bowl of chowder may come in, which requires nothing more than filling the bowl from the soup pot and garnishing it with the fried clam strips, so one of us does that on the way to something else. If I’m making lobster rolls for one order and there are two more coming up on the next ticket, I can make them all at once, which means the person reading the tickets (that was me, last night) needs to say things like, “I’ve got five lobster rolls all day” to make sure we are working as efficiently as we can.

The third thing is connected to the second: we trusted each other. I knew Joe was going to do what he said and he knew the same about me. When I called out an order and he said, “got it,” I didn’t worry about his part anymore; I just did my part. We both knew we could ask for help from each other and get it. We both knew the other was capable of doing what needed to be done and doing it well. Together we created food we were proud to serve and we had fun doing it.

According to the time clock, I left work 11.35 hours after I arrived. I was tired, but it was a good kind of tired. There are obvious analogies about the roles that preparation, communication, and trust play in most every aspect of our lives, but what I want to say is more basic, I guess: I love feeding people; I love being in a kitchen; I love my job.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve lived in Marshfield for a little over five years. The town is a small beach community that rambles up and down the coast for about seven or eight miles, it’s two lane roads winding between forests, marshes, and cranberry bogs, which means there is no particular design or logic to the way the streets are laid out — and there are very few street signs, as is the custom in New England. From time to time, I turn down a street I don’t know just to see where it takes me and then drive around until I come to something familiar.

Since I don’t have any burning issues to speak about today, I thought would take the same kind of journey in Blogland, starting at Skewed View and using her blog roll as a signpost to see what sort of new places I could find. Here’s who I found:

Soul & Culture — “pondering my role in a bigger story” is the caption for this blog written from Denver. I liked the cow.

Texas Trifles — written by Cowtown Pattie, who is doing great stuff. Scroll down to her post from August 6 on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Waiter Rant — Since I spend my days in a restaurant kitchen, I can relate to this guy.

Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds — is an incisive and pointed blog written by a “witty and often abused country club employee” in Florida.

Crummy Church Signs — my favorite find of the day, is a collection of just what it says. The website has all of the signs archived by category.

Enjoy the journey.

Peace,
Milton

Today our garage is going to lose some weight.

On what is turning out to be a perfect New England summer day, Ginger and I are going to pull everything out of our garage (which is actually more of a storage shed) and take most of it to the dump. For the five years we have lived here, the garage has been the repository of everything from boxes that haven’t been opened since we left Charlestown to stuff we were going to get to later to stuff we put out there to get out of sight.

Moving as much as I did growing up, I never had much of a chance to accumulate things. We moved often and traveled light. In my adult years, I have realized, I never learned much about throwing things away. I’m a pack rat, pure and simple. Some stuff I hang on to because I think I might be able to use it; most stuff I just hang on to. Something in me would rather put it in the garage, or in a closet or a drawer, than put it out with the trash, take it to Goodwill, sell it at a yard sale and let it live in someone else’s garage. I feel like Steve Martin in The Jerk, walking through the house saying, “The ashtray, the paddleball, and the remote control – that’s all I need . . .”

I think there is something in all of us that resists getting rid of stuff. I worked at the Red Lion Inn last night. The evening was slow, as are most Mondays in the restaurant business, and I took it upon myself to clean out the walk-in refrigerator. We do a pretty good job of making sure what is in there is what is we need and is fresh, but I did find a couple of bain maries with remnants of soup de jours from jours gone by, or pans of things that had, for one reason or another, gotten pushed to the back of the shelf and forgotten. In the kitchen, as in the garage or in life, we have to stop from time to time and deal with what’s left before we continue with what’s new. I’m not good at cleaning out until I need the space for something else or what’s there becomes a nuisance. Part of my resistance to getting rid of things is an irrational fear of throwing away something important. I say irrational because if I haven’t needed what is in those boxes for five years, how could it be that important? Why is it so hard to let go? Why am I so attached to trash?

The way I want to answer those questions is the other reason we are cleaning out today: it’s a jumpstart for a new beginning. Ginger goes back to work in about two weeks, fall means a new church year and – even without kids of our own – a new school year, which changes the sense of time for everyone. We want to start with a cleaner slate (and garage) than we have right now because we want the year ahead to be different for us in how we handle our things or money and our time. Once again, creating open space reaps benefits.

As the space clears, the other intriguing aspect of cleaning out is what I learn about myself as I look at what I have collected. I’m embarking on an archaeological dig, in a way, sifting back through the layers of my life as told by what has become superfluous, stacked in reverse chronology. As we clean, we will find both what we no longer need and what we have forgotten, both calling us to remember where we have been and to evaluate once again who we are now and who we are becoming.

When we walked among the ruins of ancient cities and civilizations in Greece and Turkey, everything we saw had been unearthed, city built on top of city. The dust and debits that had collected over time buried turned one civilization into the foundation of the next. When they dug the subway system in Athens, they found parts of the old city underground, even though people had lived there continually. In her wonderful book, For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes:

New York City’s street level rises every century. The rate at which dust buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortes walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has started sinking, Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago: the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall near the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.

Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial. (123)

I said yesterday that both the present and the future call us to respond with a mixture of wonder, creativity, tenacity, and compassion that can’t be carried in a fist. They also cannot be carried in arms already filled with things.

Here’s hoping I can let go of the ashtray, the paddleball, and the remote control.

Peace,
Milton

I woke this morning, as did we all, to news of more bombings in Lebanon, more rockets being fired into Israel, more uranium enrichment in Iran, more floods in India and Ethiopia, a volcano about to erupt in the Philippines, and a breakdown in oil production in Alaska. All we need now is news that Celine Dion is releasing a new CD and I will know it’s the end of the world.

My friend Jay called yesterday afternoon to read me parts of a “Rapture web site” that has created a “Rapture Index” much like the stock market indexes to measure how immanent the rapture is (my choice not to provide the link – I don’t want to encourage them). They give points for everything from debt-trade ratios to natural disasters to foreign governments to the Anti-Christ (there’s Celine Dion again), creating a number that’s supposed to show how close we are to Jesus’ return to rescue the faithful and leave everyone else behind to read Tim LaHaye novels.

I had email from another friend who pointed me to Bill Moyer’s new PBS series Faith & Reason, specifically his conversation with Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher and writer from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In their conversation, Chödrön made a distinction between pain and suffering:

BILL MOYERS: The Buddha talked about the truth of suffering

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think he meant by suffering? And what do you Buddhists mean by suffering?

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Suffering?

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Well, that’s a complex question, but it doesn’t mean that we could be free of that, if fire burns you, it won’t hurt. If you get cut, it won’t hurt. It also doesn’t mean that if someone you love very dear, deeply, dies you won’t feel sadness. And it doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to you anymore, you know? It doesn’t mean that you won’t have your personal tragedies and catastrophes and crisis. And it also certainly doesn’t mean that you could avoid planes flying into the towers, you know? Do you know what I’m saying?

BILL MOYERS: I do know about that because—

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: So it’s all about that the end of suffering has to do with how you relate with pain. Let’s distinguish just for semantics, the difference between, let’s call pain the unavoidable and let’s call suffering what could what could lessen and dissolve in our lives. So, if there’s sort of a basic phrase you could say that it isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

My friend Kaye wrote in response: “Loss hurts. Suffering is different. Refusing to approve of suffering, refusing to be resigned to suffering is something we see too seldom. It’s something that requires us to be our best selves. We all know how hard that is.”

Growing up Baptist means I got my share of Rapture stuff. It never really made sense to me because it seemed more about escape from pain than it did hope in the midst of suffering. What I heard was, “We’re all going to get out of here before it gets really bad because Jesus loves us; everyone else is screwed.” Funny – the Christians I knew growing up in Africa, who lived most all of their lives in poverty and pain never talked that way. The Rapture makes sense mostly in American suburbs, where we live in fear of losing our SUVs. If Jesus is as angry as the Rapture Rowdies say he is, I would expect the suburbs to be the first targets.

If God is Love and Jesus is the best human picture of that love, why would God unfold the whole story of Creation to bring it to a surprise ending of vengeance? If the Christian Church is the Body of Christ – the continuing incarnation of God’s love – why would Jesus come to pull us all out of here so we could all sit back and watch everyone else writhe in pain and despair? If there is a wideness in God’s mercy, a peace that passes all human understanding, and a love that excels all others, why are we looking to the future as if the ending were going to be directed by Wes Craven or John Woo? When we see how well we have solved problems in our world by responding to violence with violence, can’t we assume God is smarter and more creative than we are?

I wonder if Garrison Keillor was thinking on some of these things when he included Stanley Kunitz’ poem on The Writers’ Almanac today:

Halley’s Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there’d be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground’s edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I’d share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family’s asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

Both the present and the future call us to respond with a mixture of wonder, creativity, tenacity, and compassion that can’t be carried in a fist. Maybe it is the end of the world. Maybe not. Before the credits roll, let us pray for strength to be our best selves rather than looking to the sky for an escape hatch.

Peace,
Milton