Here’s what I learned yesterday: f you want to fill up your restaurant on St. Patrick’s day – at least in the Boston area – serve corned beef and cabbage (we threw in some roasted potatoes, carrot ribbons, and diced turnips) at a bargain price (all for $9.95, with dessert) and the joint will fill up.

How do we do it? Three words: volume, volume, volume.

Though I will admit to liking the taste of corned beef, I don’t really get the attraction of a boiled dinner, as they call it around here. Dropping anything, other than pasta, to cook in boiling water is my least favorite form of cooking. It’s easy, yes. As Robert said last night, you don’t really have to worry about anyone sending the plate back to see if you could boil it a little longer. Any other day of the year, we could put it on the menu and sell about two orders, but on St. Patrick’s Day that’s what everyone wants — that and a pint o’ Guinness or green beer, answering the question: if everyone was eating a plate of boiled stuff would you do it.

Yes.

I woke up before Ginger this morning and came downstairs to feed pups and read something to wake my mind up so I could come back up to my computer and write before I go back to the restaurant for a day that will involve far less water in our cooking. While the pooches were having breakfast, I picked up this month’s copy of Harper’s Magazine, one of my favorites, and turned to an article by Bill Wasik entitled, “My Crowd Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob.”

A flash mob, according to the OED, is “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” By the time the dictionary had come up with a definition, the concept was passé, at least according to Wasik. For him it was a “vacuous fad . . . intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.”

In the short life of the Flash Mob, they did some fun things in New York. My favorite was the word went out to descend on the lobby of the FAO Schwartz toy store in Times Square and – at a designated moment – everyone was to fall to their knees before the giant Tyrannosaurus, cowering and moaning as if they were the road company for King Kong. They did if for exactly six minutes and then all got up and left the store.

I hate to tell Wasik, but my brother was way ahead of him. In 1972 or 1973, when Miller was a student at Fondren Jr. High, he organized a locker slam during passing period. The school had those old clocks where the minute had jumped from one to the next. At lunch one day, he and his friends wondered if they could organize something by word of mouth. So they started telling people to slam their lockers at 1:32, the minute in the center of the passing period. He said, at 1:31 he noticed how many people were standing at their lockers. When the clock jumped, the halls reverberated with the mob action and everyone quickly moved to class.

Miller was never particularly philosophical about the incident; Wasik is talking about these kinds of human actions as artistic in some sense. He talks about seeing his actions as being connected to the experiments of Stanley Milgram, who did sociological experiments deindividuation (people’s inhibitions melt away when we don’t stand out) in the fifties; he also talks about Milgram’s work as art:

The Milgramite tradition in art would be defined, I think, by the following premise: that man, whom we now know to respond predictably to social forces, is therefore himself the ultimate artistic medium.

When he begins to think as an artist, Wasik makes an interesting claim:

It is precisely here that we who would make Milgramite art must keep vigilant: in resisting simple story lines and embracing, instead, the ambiguities in our data.

Thursday night we had a dinner at church – an unboiled one – to look at data from the US Congregational Life Survey we took back in November. We have more numbers and graphs than we know what to do with. The suggested interpretation is one of appreciate inquiry, which means starting with our strengths as a way of looking at how we can grow. I was surprised to see not everyone appreciates that approach. Our default setting, it seems – at least for groups that gather as church – is to focus on what we are doing wrong and try to fix it.

That’s not the way to make art.

I got a note from a friend this week talking about her aversion to organized religion. Though I have spent a lifetime in church, I share the same aversion. Organized religion, to me, has little to do with the creative and artistic expression that comes out of a shared expression of faith as we seek to learn together how to tell our story and embrace our ambiguities. Organized anything is designed to erase, or at least ignore, anything that is the least bit ambiguous. Organized religion is not church in its truest and most creative sense.

When asked why they come to church, I have never heard anyone say, “I just love the way it’s organized.”

I’m preaching tomorrow and the story I’m telling is Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, which is his own encounter with a flash mob. The crowd kept growing and following, until he realized he needed to do something about feeding them. The disciples couldn’t see beyond organizing a meal as a logistical nightmare, as well as a budgetary crisis. Jesus saw it as a creative relational opportunity: here was a chance for everyone to see how our faith leads us to feed one another.

There were even leftovers.

At the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie finishes his wonderful subversive story by encouraging a flash mob of his own:

And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both nuts and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three — can you imagine — three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day — I said fifty people a day — walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may thinks it’s a movement.

I don’t want to be a part of an organization; I want to be a part of a movement, a creation, a work of art. Maybe I need to make a substitution for the first hymn in the morning. Come on, sing with me:

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

Peace,
Milton

Today may be St. Patrick’s Day, but yesterday was the meeting of the Greater Marshfield Clergy Spousal Support Group and Book Club (with subcommittees on Fine Ales and Spicy Foods), which meets with some regularity at Namaste, a wonderful Indian restaurant in Plymouth. The group is made up of my friend Doug, whose wife is in seminary right now, and me. We also make up the subcommittees.

Doug is a great guy with a big heart, a strong sense of justice, a great sense of humor, and a desire to grow and learn. He is a surveyor by trade, but that doesn’t even come close to telling the story. He is a master of the backyard grill, a lover of Buddy Miller and other great American music, a painter, and a drummer.

Our two-hour lunches take us all around the world, starting with the Indian food we both love. Yesterday it was Lamb Samosas, Aloo Tikki (spicy potato patties), Rogan Josh (a spicy lamb dish), Malai Kofta (vegetable balls in a spicy sauce), Poori, and Nan (two types of Indian bread).

Our book discussion centered on Parker Palmer’s The Active Life, which Doug read a little while back. Doug talked about being moved by Palmer’s idea of doing what you were most passionate about, which for him is painting. He went on to talk about the creative tension in finding such joy in working with oil and canvas and wondering if it was bordering on being too self-absorbed.

He reminded me of a story I heard on All Things Considered about Joey Cheek, an American speed skater, who won a gold medal at the Olympics and donated his $25,000 award to a foundation that provided play equipment for refugee children in Darfur. Cheek talked about becoming aware of the plight of the children while he was in Athens because, he said, people outside of the United States hear about this everyday. Thanks to the self-absorption of the American media, he knew little of the genocide that is the story of the Sudan. He decided he had to do something and his medal award gave him something to do.

The story connected to what Doug was saying in two ways. One, the kind of focus it takes to become a human NASCAR vehicle on a flat ice track must border on self-absorption and, two, he gave the money to buy play equipment, not food. In the interview, Cheek responded to the second thing by saying play was an essential part of childhood development, even where people are starving and homeless.

“If you don’t help people develop normally as possible then they stand little chance of ever knowing a normal life,” he said.

One of Palmer’s emphases that speaks deeply to me is his focus on creative tension. he talks about comtemplation-and-action, not as polar opposites, but as two things inextricably connected and full of creative energy. I think of it this way: if the poles are the Arctic and Antarctica, wouldn’t it be more interesting to live at the Equator than to pick one ice floe over the other? A speed skater who pays attention to more than his skating form is now helping kids who may have never seen ice; what kind of connections can we make if we pay attention?

Somewhere in our conversations over curry, Doug and I always end up talking about music. As I said, he’s a drummer. I play guitar and sing and I never got to be in a garage band when I was a kid. I still need to get that out of my system. One of these days, we’re going to finish lunch and head back to his house to set up the drum kit and jam. And one of these days, I’m going to sing in a band just for the hell of it.

As I was driving home after lunch, I thought about the band again, even though we didn’t get to talk about it yesterday. I even have a name: Love Dogs, which comes from a Rumi poem.

Love dogs

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing
you express is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

I had a dream last night that Ginger and I were standing on the side of a golf course watching two teenage boys play. They were both on the same hole, but not together, or even aware of each other. One worked hard on his form and went about each shot methodically, as if her were reading from a manual. He was dressed like he had just stepped off of the PGA tour. It was obvious he was taking lessons and was working hard to make sure his form was exactly as he had been told it should be. He swung and the ball bounced up on to the green, but he didn’t seem to find any joy in his accomplishment. His brow furrowed as he began to contemplate his next shot, even though he was still a long way from where the ball had landed.

The second kid was in jeans and a t-shirt. He was carrying his clubs. He also had good form, but it came from a different place, from a place deep inside him. His movements were organic and even joyful. He swung with ease and the ball rolled up next to the one belonging to the first boy. He smiled, picked up his bag, and looked up into the trees as he walked toward the green, thinking about nothing other than how great it felt to be outside on a beautiful day.

“They’re both good,” Ginger said in the dream, “but only one of them is enjoying it. He’ll do this the rest of his life.”

I woke up and thought, “Be a Love Dog.”

Peace,
Milton

PS — Apropos of nothing except today’s date, here’s an Irish soup recipe that I’m making today at the restaurant.

One of the great things about working in restaurants in the greater Boston area is I get to work with Brazilians. If it were not for them, the restaurant industry would cease to function in eastern Massachusetts. We have three folks who work in our kitchen as dishwashers and prep cooks: Thelma, Wesley, and Wanderson (I love that name). I love their friendly spirit and their incredible work ethic. Wesley is always asking what to do next; Thelma sings while she makes onion rings. (Now there’s the first line of a children’s book!)

The biggest challenge of our working together is the language. I speak no Portuguese and they speak very little English. We have somehow found a way to communicate, even in the busiest and most hectic times. When I say the English name of something – potstickers – they respond with their phonetic repetition of what I said –poschticko – and we both know what we are talking about, which I guess qualifies as our own restaurant dialect.

Milton, for some reason, is a familiar name to Brazilians. I spent most of my life thinking only my family inflicted people with this name (I was named after grandfather and father), but I would not feel so alone on the streets of Rio. One of Brazil’s best loved singers is Milton Nascimento, so he’s my lead when I meet now folks from Brazil and tell them my name: “Like Milton Nascimento,” I say and they smile and nod and start to sing. Wesley even said, “Milton is my father’s name.”

“Mine, too,” I told him.

I found an interview with Milton Nascimento where he spoke of the powerful role women had played in shaping his love of music and the way he sings. As a young boy, he imitated the women singers he heard because women sang with their heart and men sang to show power in their voices.. When his voice changed, he was heartbroken because he did not think he could sing in a way that mattered because he could not sing like woman.

“And then the radio was playing a song by Ray Charles and I became very quiet with my eyes close and I said, ‘My God, man can sing with the heart, too.’ So, Ray Charles saved my life,” he said.

His comment makes me think of two things. First, was the record Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, an album that my parents had when I was a kid. I get goose bumps now when I think about hearing “You Don’t Know Me” for the first time – and then again for the ten thousandth time. The second thing I thought of is my favorite song, which has nothing to do with Ray Charles.

If I only got to keep one song, it would be John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” particularly when Bonnie Raitt sings it. The song came to mind as Nascimento talked about how he learned about heart from listening to women sing. I was going to sing “Angel” one night at a coffee house and prefaced it by saying it was my favorite song. I went on to say I identified with the lyric more than any words I knew. Then I sang the first line:

“I am an old woman, named after my mother . . .”

The audience couldn’t help but laugh. And I don’t know that I would have said it any differently because I do feel like the old woman in the song. She speaks from the heart.

Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster of an old rodeo
Just give me something I can hold on to
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go

Thanks to cell phones, Ginger and I both talk to each other on our way home from work. She calls when she’s driving home from the church; I call as I’m winding down Route 3A in the dark after I leave the restaurant. More than once, as I’m dialing the phone, I think about the lyric to the last verse of Prine’s song:

There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ‘em a buzzing,
And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
And come home in the evening and have nothing to say

Wesley, Wanderson, and Thelma all work at least one other job besides the time they put in at the restaurant. Thelma has a husband and two children back in Brazil; she is here to send money home. She cannot go back and forth easily, so she stays here and still finds it in herself to sing and dance while she works. One night, one of the servers needed some help getting a dessert ready and Thelma picked up the pastry bag and began to make wonderful designs on the plate with the chocolate ganache. That’s when we found out she had worked with pastry chef in Brazil. We didn’t know because no one had thought to ask.

When we were redoing the kitchen in Charlestown years ago, we called a guy who advertised in our neighborhood paper to come tile the floor. Vic was from Bosnia and had fled the violence there with his family. In his home country, he was a filmmaker; he became a tile guy here because it was what he could do to make money. The tiles we picked were three different sizes, rather than being a straight pattern. He was elated when we told him he could decide how to lay them out. He approached our floor like an artist to his canvas. It was beautiful. The other thing we shared in common was he wore Chuck Taylors. When we paid him for his art, we gave him some new Chucks as well.

Ray Charles has saved the life of at least two Miltons. I have to say, for me, the same goes for Bonnie Raitt, Patty Griffin, Nanci Griffith, and – of course – Emmylou Harris:

I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
I would hold my life in his saving grace
I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham
If I thought I could see I could see your face

When I’m driving in the dark and the girl from Birmingham who makes my house a home answers the phone, I hear her voice and I feel her heart and I know there will always be something worth saying.

Peace,
Milton

There are days that drain you and days that fill you up.

I got filled up today.

I went back to our old stomping grounds in Winchester to speak to Touchstones, a group of women who gather each week to study, talk, and grow together. They asked me to come talk about my Lenten Journal: how it started, how I write, what it means to me. I took a stack of my favorite books and headed north. Even the Boston traffic cooperated today.

We gathered in a wonderful room on the second floor that has dark wood molding and big windows that look out over the woods and the pond and we started to talk. After I went through how the journal came to be and what it means to me now, I talked about the books and the writers who I count as friends because of the way their books speak to me. Then I asked the folks around the circle to name books that spoke to them. Talk of books led to music. One of the women mentioned David Wilcox and his song, “Show the Way.” She said she had used it in a youth group meeting and one of the adults there said, “Milton used to sing that song.”

I love that song. I think it should be our national anthem. Here’s the lyric:

You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason
We should dream that the world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe
‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy with an Army or a Knife
To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life.

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate, would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late he’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the Evil side will win, so on the Edge
Of every seat, from the moment that the whole thing begins

It is love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play…
For in this darkness love can show the way

So now the stage is set. Feel you own heart beating
In your chest. This life’s not over yet.
so we get up on our feet and do our best. We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears burning in the happy angel’s eyes

It is love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play…
For in this darkness love can show the way

I remember singing the song at a coffee house we had at Winchester, and I remember getting choked up while I was singing. I also remember singing it at the high school when we finished reading 1984; it was the best response I could think of. In this week when we mark the third anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, it’s time to sing it again.

As we talked around the circle, one woman spoke of the synchronicity in her life. What a great word, which I understand as meaningful coincidence. Here’s how it happened for me. It’s been a month since I wrote about what I had learned about the relationship between chocolate and child slavery. I’ve had ongoing conversations with folks around the issue and even talked about it at the church in Marshfield, which has started a conversation about what it would take to be a fair trade church. But I haven’t written the letters I wanted to write and one issue seems to get buried under the mountain of need and information that comes tumbling down everyday.

Last night at Bible Study in Hanover, we looked at Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand. My version of his conversation with the disciples goes something like this:

“These people have been here all day and they haven’t eaten, “Jesus said. “We should feed them.”
“Right,” said the disciples. “Do we look like we have enough money to buy bread to feed everyone?”
“Well,” answered Jesus, “what you got?”

When everyone was served, they began talking about what to do with the leftovers. As I drove home, I thought about chocolate and world hunger and everything else and all I could hear was Jesus’ question: what you got?

This morning, I read an email from my friend Jack telling me about a documentary called Invisible Children that tells the story of the plight of Uganda’s children. I found a website working to stop the use of child soldiers, one working to establish an underground railroad for the women of Iraq, and I got email for The Night of 1000 Dinners, which is an anti-landmine emphasis.

All of them had something to do with what is happening to children in the world and all of them saw the best way to bring about change as starting around dinner tables in homes where people invite their friends for a meal, tell the story, and then ask, “What you got?”

I have a blog. What I’ve done is add another page, don’t eat alone: the possibilities so I can pass along what I am learning and provide links and resources for people to find the place they can offer what they’ve got.

The crazies with the knives are not going to get the last word.

The way the gospel writers tell stories, we have to fill in a lot of gaps. Matthew moves from the loaves and fishes to the leftovers without telling much of how the meal went down. There’s no indication the crowd rushed the kid with the lunch the way we see the refugees in the camps tear open the bags of food the helicopters drop. The food was passed hand to hand, person to person, until everyone was fed.

That’s the way it will happen this time, too.

Peace,
Milton

One of the traditions Ginger and I observe every year is a trip to the New England Flower Show in Boston. Officially, spring is eight days away; realistically, I don’t plant much of anything until after Memorial Day. An exposition hall full of blooms is a welcome sight in these parts.

Some years we have walked through snow to get into the hall. Today it was rainy and over fifty degrees. Inside the Bayside Exposition Center we saw display after display of flowers, plants, and ideas for landscaping. We then followed our regular path, which goes first to the Cactus Club booth for Mexican food and margaritas and then through the exhibit hall to look at everything from strange bulbs to massage chairs to yard art. I always come away with an idealized picture of what I would like our yard to look like. I’m always happy if I manage to pull off one of those ideas. Part of it is the scanner thing; the other parts are time and money.

Two summers ago, we went to Philadelphia for our high school mission trip. We stayed at Old First Reformed Church UCC and worked at a four different sites around the city. My favorite site was the Norris Square Neighborhood Project where we worked with a wonderful woman named Iris who had a heart for her neighborhood and a green thumb. For almost twenty years she has been talking the city into letting her convert vacant lots into community gardens, both for flowers and for vegetables. The earliest ones now have trees thirty and forty feet tall. She has not stopped dreaming. She and her friends, who call themselves Grupo Motivos, were renovating an old house to turn into a restaurant and were always looking for new plots to claim. In what was one of Philadelphia’s roughest neighborhoods, they planted hope and are now harvesting their crop.

One day she came with an armload of stair spindles and a big box of acrylic paints in bright colors.

“We need you to be artists,” she said to the young people. “Paint these so we can use them to decorate our gardens.”

What the kids created out of those old pieces of wood was amazing. They did not just paint them in single colors, but put clouds and faces and all sorts of stuff on them. Iris was ecstatic. When I asked how she would use them, she said she was going to stick them randomly in the flowerbeds for color.

“I think you should use fishing line and hang some of them from the trees, so it looks like they are floating.”

She smiled and looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Are you sure you’re not part Puerto Rican?” she asked.

I loved the compliment. After working alongside those wonderful folks all week and eating their food, I would be more than happy to be Puerto Rican. Last summer, my friend Burt helped me put up a new section of fence in the back to create a larger vegetable garden. I ended up with a small segment of fence that has four thin posts. I’m going to paint it this year and put it in the garden to remind me of Iris and my honorary Puerto Rican heritage.

One of the cool things about living in a place where winter comes in earnest is we know resurrection experientially. From December to April, at least, my garden is dead. I’m of the mindset that the soil gets fed by the dead stuff, so I don’t clear the beds until springtime, which means when we don’t have snow on the ground my yard is a kind of horticultural cemetery with last years dried blooms and stalks serving as markers of what is buried there. After Easter – sometimes a long time after – when I clear the dead stuff away I am greeted by small green shoots pushing up through the soil, refusing to let death have the last word. The trees, who have stood naked through the winter storms, bud, flower, and then adorn themselves in their verdant coats and dance in the summer breezes that blow between the beach and the marsh.

Death is not the last word. It is, however, a recurring word. As Halloween comes and the frost is on the pumpkin, I will watch the garden die once again and wait, once more, for resurrection.

The prevailing view of history in Western culture has been a linear one: we stared at The Beginning and we are moving to The End. We tend to think of events as Once And For All. My garden tells me differently, as do the traditions Ginger and I mark each year, building altars of memory that will feed us when we circle around. Maybe that’s why it took Moses and the Israelites forty years circling around in an area about the size of Rhode Island. They weren’t lost as much as they were living.

Lent is spiritual winter. These days stand like the dead stalks in my flowerbeds, remnants of what once was and frail promises of what is to come. We are moving toward Resurrection, yes. Then comes Ordinary Time, then Advent, and then – before we know it – we will be back in Lent, waiting in the cemetery for life to spring forth once more.

Part of what is coming back to life for me is the self-confidence I can call myself a writer. I was born without any entrepreneurial genes, so I don’t know how to sell what I have. Between that and my depression, I have circled for close to a decade covering the same territory, finding flashes of life, and living through a long, long winter. I’m hoping what grows this time around will take root more than things have in the past. I don’t mind the circle of life, but I am tired of repeating the same scenes. That’s not living in the best sense of the word. Growing is living.

That’s what the dead flowers tell me.

Peace,
Milton

We blow out candles at our church during Lent.

It’s a tradition I’ve not seen anywhere else. One of the members of the church who is an excellent woodworker created a cross that lays at about a forty-five degree angle and has enough holes to represent each of the Sundays in the Lenten season. Each Sunday Don begins the service by extinguishing one of the candles, a reversal of the growing glow of Advent. Each week he asks the children to help identify things we do as people to put out the light of Christ in the world. Last Sunday it was greed; this week it was stealing. The smoking candles always set me to thinking.

Don and I are taking turns preaching a series on the “I am” statements of Jesus in John’s gospel. Today, Don combined “I am the good shepherd” and “I am the gate” to look at how God loves and leads us. I know the shepherd metaphor is big in the Bible, but it doesn’t grab me like it does a lot of people. I understand it, but I am not moved by it partly because I think we have overly romanticized it. The shepherds that show up on Christmas cards and those portrayed by towel-headed third graders in their bathrobes were not the shepherds of Jesus’ day. They were poor people with an odor that preceded them.

As Don was preaching (and not overly romanticizing the shepherds) I wrote on the back of my bulletin, “We romanticize shepherds, but we would not listen to them today. They may make for a cute Christmas card, but who in the church at large really lives as though the poor have anything to say on God’s behalf now?”

I live as a part of two churches: the one where I serve as associate pastor and the church where Ginger pastors. When I took the associate position, my biggest hesitancy was not being able to go to church with her. I love being at church with my wife, both as the woman I love and as my pastor. The search committee offered to let me go to Ginger’s church on the Sundays I was not preaching (I preach once a month). Since we have two services, I go to the 8:30 service at Hanover and then alternate at 10, depending on my preaching schedule. As the associate job has grown, I’m at Ginger’s church far less often than I would like, but that’s not my point here. What I’m getting at is today was one of the Sundays when I got to worship in both places. I drove from Hanover to Marshfield with the image of the extinguished candles in my mind.

During Lent, Ginger is doing a series of sermons on “Simple Truths.” Instead of “I am” statements, she’s preaching on “You are” statements. Last week the truth was “You are loved.” This week it was “You are called,” which begs the question, called to what? She did a great job answering. Her text was Jesus’ call to take up our crosses and follow. She went on to talk about Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Oscar Romero, Tom Fox, Rachel Corrie, and others who have incarnated the call Jesus was articulating.

As she talked, my mind circled around the image of cross-bearing. The Romans were the Texans of ancient times when it came to capital punishment. If someone was a problem, they killed them and made it slow and painful; the more cruel and unusual, the better. Before Jesus died, crucifixion was not a metaphor of faith. It was the way criminals died. Yes, the gospels were written after Jesus’ death and the writers’ understanding of events surely influenced how they told the story, but I kept thinking about Jesus’ words when Jesus said them and how those who were with him might have internalized them.

Jesus was saying live the kind of life that will get you in trouble with the authorities. Love so emphatically, so prophetically, so audaciously that you could be construed as criminally subversive. When we talk about the “crosses we bear” as the hardships we live with, or the difficulties we face we are missing the power of the image. The call is to be holy terrors, to make nuisances of ourselves and wreak havoc in Jesus’ name.

Oscar Romero understood. He said, “I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.”

Thanks to Mark Heybo, I found read this quote from Tom Fox, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams who was murdered in Iraq last week:

“It seems easier somehow to confront anger within my heart than it is to confront fear. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right then I am not to give in to either. I am to stand firm against the kidnapper as I am to stand firm against the soldier. Does that mean I walk into a raging battle to confront the soldiers? Does that mean I walk the streets of Baghdad with a sign saying “American for the Taking”? No to both counts. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life and if I lose it to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan. I struggle to stand firm but I’m willing to keep working at it.”

I left my second service of the day holding in tension the two disparate images of blown out candles and the raging fires of love set by those who claimed their calling. As I drove home, I remembered a poem I wrote when I was still teaching high school. It came about after a discussion one day with a colleague over our concern for one student who was one of those who seemed diminished by just being in the building: high school was killing him. I wrote:

high school

start with a thousand candles
tiny little beacons beaming
together in brilliance

blow out one no one
will notice this one here
on the edge in the back

blow out one no one
will notice one each night
just one – how could it matter

come back in a thousand nights
and stand alone in the dark
no one will notice

the light over the kitchen sink
goes out with the flick of a switch
the light inside dies incrementally

The poem came to mind, I think, because much of our discussion centered around how we dealt with being a part of the dehumanizing system that is American high school education. As the ones with the relational contact, we were called to relight as many candles as we could everyday, even though it never shows up on the standardized tests.

“Make me an instrument of thy peace,” prayed Saint Francis of Assisi.

Praying like that will get us in trouble. Good. Let’s pray.

Peace,
Milton

Saturday is the hardest day to write.

Friday morning I can get up and get going before I have to go to the restaurant where I work ten to ten. My schedule is the same on Saturday, but it’s also the middle day. Sundays are full as well at my other job: two services in the morning (or one and then I rush over to Ginger’s church so I can feel some connection there) and youth group in the evening. This week, Sunday also means finding time to sort through the paperwork from the ski trip to get the receipts turned in – my favorite thing.

Last night was slow, so I got away a little earlier than usual. When it comes time to cut staff on a slow night, cooks are like produce: first in, first out. I’m the lunch guy on Friday and Saturday, which means I’m there a couple of hours ahead of the other cooks, so I was the first to leave. Ginger and I actually had part of a Friday night together. it was nice. I found out as I was leaving that we have a party of twenty coming in for lunch today. (Do you remember the part where I said I was by myself?) Today should be interesting.

Much of my work in the kitchen this week has been preparatory. Wednesday I made the cheese fondue, French onion soup, Pomodoro sauce; yesterday I made a roasted tomato bisque (follow the recipe for Roasted Tomato Sauce and add one quart of cream). for some reason, in the middle of all the chopping and slicing and stirring that goes into keeping the fridge stocked and the line supplied, I’m always caught by how much I enjoy both the routine and the work. Though I certainly appreciate being noticed – I know I thrive on affirmation, I love the behind the scense work. The simple tasks and routine actions carry in themselves a deep sense of value and validation.

I can feel a smile come to myself when I get surprised – again – by this very simple and recurring realization. I wonder why I’m surprised. The best I can come up with is I know how much affirmation means to me. I know part of the payoff in doing something for someone else is in being appreciated (not all of the payoff, but part of it). What surprises me in the middle of my routine is how much of the payoff is in simply doing the job well and doing the jobs that make life easier for the other cooks and make them look good. When I’ve done the prep work well, we sail through meal times creating great food and having a great time.

There is great joy in simple work.

As if I’m the first one to notice! That’s so Buddha in the like sixth century BC. But I will relish my insights however they come. The power of daily work may be part of the reason I love listening to Garrison Keillor when he closes out The Writer’s Almanac: “Be well, do good work, and stay in touch.” Not a bad approach to living.

There’s another side to this for me. Growing up, one of the things my dad used to say to my brother and I was, “If you’re going to be involved in something, you might as well be in charge; someone has to.” He worked hard to instill in us a sense of leadership: we were people born to lead others. I took his words to heart, with mixed results. I am someone who will speak up and take charge. The downside of that is I struggle to know when to shut up and let someone else take their turn.

Over the years, I have had to learn that, though I do have some leadership skills, my father’s lesson was more for him than me. Some of the places in my life where I have been happiest and felt most deeply fed have been in supporting roles. I still have to own that I speak up way too much in committee meetings, I just don’t have to be the chair. I’m a better associate pastor, for instance, than a senior pastor. I like being the line cook better than the head chef.

When I was in seminary, my Dad came to visit and we went to dinner. I was just beginning to learn how to articulate what I’m saying here. “I don’t want to always be in charge,” I said. “I just want to be ordinary.”

“You don’t have a choice,” he answered.

Ah, but I do. And it is a choice I’m continuing to learn how to make.

Marge Piercy has a wonderful poem that I first learned about through Bill Moyers’ work. It’s called, “To Be of Use.”

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

That I’m still surprised by the simple power of slicing tomatoes and that I can still so viscerally recall the conversation with my father speak how desperately I need to learn this lesson and how the somewhat rocky soil of my life makes it hard to take root. But it is growing. I can feel it with every move of my hand across the cutting board.

Peace,
Milton

This is one of those mornings where I have to write like the wind.

Yesterday was errand day: grocery shopping, filling up the car with gas, filling my Celexa prescription, and finding a birthday present for our friend Todd – which means a trip to Borders. I took Parker Palmer with me as I planned to take an hour out of the day to sit in the coffee shop and read.

As I was looking for Todd’s present, I picked up a book and read the questions on the cover:

Don’t know what to do with your life?
Are you drawn to so many things you can’t choose one?
Do you ache to find the right direction so you can settle down and just do it?
If this is you, you should . . . REFUSE TO CHOOSE!
(I half expected the words following the ellipsis to be . . . buy this book, Milton!)

I did buy the book, but before I did I spent some time with it over coffee. The author is Barbara Sher (a new name to me), who appears to be one of those PBS self-help kind of folks (John Bradshaw, et al.), or at least that’s what I gleaned from her web site. Once I started reading, I was less concerned with her credentials and more taken by what she was saying.

According to her, I’m a Scanner.

I’m assuming Sher is not an Eighties movie buff, or she might have picked a different name fo the type of person she is describing, but at the risk of being taken for an alien, I found myself in her book. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to know as much as could about everything, wanted to take a shot at most everything, and was afraid I was going to miss something while I was doing something else. As a result, I do have a working knowledge of a bunch of different things, live in a house of a variety of almost finished projects, and am a fairly reliable repository of fairly useless facts and information.

Stacked around me on the shelves and tables in my office/studio are candle molds, jewelry-making equipment, dry pigments for my iconography, boxes of paper scraps for my card and collage making, cookbooks, notebooks filled with yet to be songs and poems, the draft of my novel, my guitar, and a bunch of books I have yet to engage on everything from aardvarks to Armageddon. (I went for the alliteration; actually, those are two subjects I haven’t covered.)

I love being interested in lots of things and that same love has a nasty scorpion’s tale that stings with guilt and regret because I’m so easily pulled by tangents and possibilities that I’m not a good finisher. One of the exercises Sher has in her book is to draw a map of your house and go through each room making a list of the unfinished projects in that room. I read it and thought she was adding a new layer to hell. I didn’t even have to finish the paragraph, much less start a drawing, before my mind was taking a virtual tour of our kitchen (caulking behind the sink, closet), the laundry room (replace ceiling), the bathrooms (more caulking), our bedroom (finish painting stars on the ceiling, hang knick-knacks), my office (organize!), and the back yard (finish the fence, clean up the driveway). Every space we own has something in it to remind me I’m not good at finishing.

Fair enough, says Sher, let’s look at it another way. I’m good at starting things. That’s where the payoff is for me. I have started a bunch of things because I’m interested and I like doing a bunch of things. Now the list of What Has Yet To Be Done is overwhelming and disheartening, so I move to start something else, rather than slog through the to do list. Drawing the map of the house and coming to terms with what there is to do and who I am are her ways of both validating and confronting me as a scanner. I had never thought of my life in terms of the payoff for me being in the starting of the thing rather than the finishing. When something is finally finished, I think I feel more grief than I do a sense of accomplishment. It’s over. I won’t get to feel the rush of the beginning because I’ve written the ending.

I’ve never looked at my life that way before.

According to the dust jacket, Sher is going to teach me:

what’s behind my “hit and run obsessions” (there’s a good reason for them, she says);
when (and how) to finish what I start;
how to do everything I love;
what type of Scanner I am (and which tools I need to do my very best work).

All that for $25. What a deal.

One of my attractions to working with young people has always been reaching out to the kids on the fringe: the ones who keep to themselves, enjoy being alternative, or just don’t fit the mold. When I was teaching high school in Winchester, there was boy in my tenth grade class who had enough energy for everyone in the room trapped in his body. He was always buoyant and he was always talkative. One day he came into class and said, “Mr B-C, is it OK if I stand on my head?”

It was about three minutes until the bell rang to start class, so I told him he could do it until the bell rang. He stood on his head, back against the wall for those three minutes and then took his seat with the others when class started. Other days, as I was taking attendance he would ask if he could tell a joke.

“Think about it for a minute,” I would answer. “Is it appropriate for class?”

Some days he would smile and say, “I guess I’ll pass today.” Other times he would give us all a chuckle. His best friend in the class was a terribly depressed and bitter kid who his polar opposite. Once we got past the opening burst of energy, my head-stander would settle in beside his friend. He proved to have enough hope for both of them. I’m convinced the depressed kid lived through high school because of the care of his more energetic chum. When it came time for graduation two years later, I told my joke-teller how I admired the quality of his friendship over the years and how I would remember him for his head stands and his big heart.

He was a C student who graduated at the top of his class, as far as I’m concerned.

I thought of him as I read Sher’s questions. And then I thought about doing a head stand in the coffee shop, or at least telling the barista a joke.

Peace,
Milton