don't eat alone

Think Tank Pundits are messing with my mind.

I keep trying to imagine what songs are on their record. I think the first single will be “Cheney’s Fools”: “Che, Che, Che/ Cheney’s fools. . .” I could go on, but I won’t – for now.

I was helped on my semantic sojourn by the linguistic stylings of two blogging buddies: Jeff and Spookyrach. In his comment on my post yesterday, Jeff mentioned his favorite new brand name: Dieselfitters (as in “dese’ll fit her!”). He made me laugh. Spookyrach messed me up something wicked awful with these words:

I bought a new eye shadow called Aubergine Queen. I really like it, but that name has become an ear worm. All week long I’ve been singing a bastardized version of Billy Idol’s Caribbean Queen in my head. Over and over and over…

Aubergine Queen
Now we’re sharing a purple dream
And my eyes they blink as one
’Cause my makeup is done.

I spent much of the day humming Billy Ocean songs as I cooked. I probably gave someone food poisoning. All of the wordplay led me back to my favorite sentence of the summer so far. When we were in Germantown, Tennessee for my nephew’s graduation, my sister-in-law’s parents arrived after having driven for about twelve hours. Mary said (here it is – get ready):

“I’m so tired I feel like I’ve been hit in the back with a dead rabbit.”

Nobody knew how tired that was, or why a person had to get hit in the back with a dead rabbit, or a rabbit of any sort for that matter. When we were in Jackson on the Mission Trip, it was my job to go to the grocery store early every morning to get food for the crews going to the coast. They left at six, so I went to the store at four-thirty. By Friday, my last morning of Krogering, I had an epiphany: I was so tired I did feel like I had been hit in the back with a dead rabbit. I still have to call Mary and tell her I understood.

Words, when gathered together in certain groups, are as much about rhythm and melody as they are about meaning. I’m convinced that Sheryl Crow ended up writing “Everyday is a Winding Road” because she came up with the opening line – “I used to ride with a vending machine repairman” – and it was too good to let go; she had to write a song around it. Then there are the sentences that you never expected to hear.

Many years ago, Ginger and I were at a youth camp for a group of churches where one of the adult leaders was teaching a class on massage (gives you an idea of how camp went). I happened to be walking through the room when I heard her say, “Now reach down and grab your partner’s elbow skin.” I stopped and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to mark this moment. I never in my life expected to hear someone utter those words.” I’ve never forgotten the moment or the sentence.

Sometimes, I just like the sound of the word. As I passed by the TV this morning, someone on one of the morning shows used the word deleterious, which made me want to figure out a way to use it myself. Put the word together with the aforementioned ear worm and you’ve got something to work with: Billy Ocean’s music has a deleterious effect on humanity.

I don’t have a burning point to make other than, perhaps, to say Jason Mraz is right: it is all about the word play.

Peace,
Milton

I don’t know much about the architecture or the geography of the brain. I know the left and right brain thing (I would favor the right side) and I know a couple of names for different regions. My favorite is the hippocampus, not because I know what it does but because it has the word hippo in it and makes me picture a whole bunch of my favorite animals going to college together: the Hippo Campus.

I learned more by reading The Nation this week where college student Sarah Stillman of Yale University wrote the winning essay in the first-ever Nation Student Writing Contest. Her essay is titled, “Project Corpus Callosum.” I learned the corpus callosum is the part of the brain that connects the left brain and right brain, enabling our analytical and imaginative sides to coexist and communicate. She talked about listening to a lecture on the effects of removing the corpus callosum from the brain of an epileptic patient.

As I listened to my professor describe the devastating effects of extracting the corpus callosum – for instance, one exasperated patient pulling up his pants with his left hand as he pulled them down with his right – it occurred to me that this might be the ideal metaphor to describe the split-brained status of my own generation.

(She goes great places from there. Make sure to read the essay.)

My day had little to do with being an activist. It was, however, quite active. I left home for the restaurant about 10:30. When I got to the Red Lion, thinking I was heading into a normal Wednesday (which is pretty slow), I found out we had a group of eight women who were having a baby shower over lunch – and they were early. I got busy setting up the line and getting their meals ready when the ticket printer started going. The short version is we served about sixty-five people between 11:30 and 2. Did I mention I was the only cook working with one bartender and one server? I must say we all rose to the occasion and everyone left full and happy.

On the way to work, I listened to On Point, a call-in show on NPR. where Tom Ashbrook was interviewing a couple of think tank pundits (doesn’t that sound like a punk band: “And now the new song from Think Tank Pundits. . .”) about what our course of action should be in Iraq. Some of the callers had good questions, but most all of the answers sounded as if they had been put together in a tank far away from the realities that gave birth to the questions. The guys talking were nice enough, and earnest too, but they just didn’t say anything that mattered or would move people. They talked about Iraq as if it was nothing more than live action Stratego.

On Point is aired live in the mornings and then replayed in the evening. The way my day played out, when I turned on my radio on the way home from work, one of the TTP’s was answering the exact same question he had been answering when I turned my radio on going to work. The replay didn’t make him any more relevant because he didn’t have anything creative to say.

I want to hear someone who has something to say. I want to be led by someone who is captured more by his or her passion and conviction than by the latest poll results. I want leaders who use their imaginations to do more than try to hide what they are doing so they can stay in office.

Can you tell I’m excited about midterm elections?

(Yikes. I’ve written myself into a corner. I wasn’t planning on ranting this way. The slope of my frustration is far too easy to slide down. Let me try and climb back to a better vantage point.)

Part of what I must come to terms with is I can go days without thinking about Iraq; or Somalia; or those who were victims of the tsunami, Katrina, and Rita. At least the Think Tank Pundits can say they think about stuff like that everyday. (It’s what made their record so good.) Stillman closes her article prophesying of a time when her generation will begin “a much needed mission to restore the space within our collective conscience where our radical imaginations meet our commitment to everyday action.”

I’m both pulled and convicted by the words “everyday action.”

Ranting about what Bush is doing in Iraq holds as little creativity as his decision to bomb Iraq into freedom. Turning up the volume on the argument is not imaginative; it’s disturbing. Having to figure out how the way in which I spend my day affects the rest of the world is a puzzle that calls me to be both imaginative and analytical. It’s hard work. But I unless I decide to do it, Bush and his buddies are going to be content to put on their headphones, turn on their iPods, and do nothing but listen to Think Tank Pundits all day long.

Peace,
Milton

PS – Don’t you think the Hippo Campus is beautiful this time of year?

Ginger and I moved to Boston in August of 1990 and settled in Charlestown, the neighborhood of Boston that is home to Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution. We had not been in town long when we started going to neighborhood meetings about the impact of The Big Dig, which was the nickname given to the tunnel they planned to build under Boston so I-93 could run under the city rather than through it. The reason we were having meetings was the highway would come back above ground in our neighborhood.

In 1991, even as meetings and protests continued, they broke ground on what has become the most expensive public works project in American history. When we were going to meetings, they said it would cost $2 billion; by the time they said the tunnel was finished in 2004 (even as construction crews have continued to work), it cost $15 billion. The builders were The Bechtel Corporation, who have friends in high places which has helped them land lucrative work rebuilding along the US Gulf Coast and in Iraq – all at far more than bargain prices.

The point of this strange little history lesson is this morning at 3:30 am, a car was traveling through one of the tunnels on the way to Logan Airport when a couple of Bechtel’s concrete ceiling panels, weighing a couple of tons each, broke loose from their steel ties and – to use one journalist’s verb – “pancaked” the car. A woman in the passenger seat was crushed and killed; the male driver was able to crawl out of a twelve-inch hole on his side because the panel fell at an angle. The tunnel and that section of the Mass Pike remained closed all day, as they will tomorrow, and traffic became more of a nightmare than normal. Our State Attorney General announced he wanted to file manslaughter charges and was treating the closed tunnel as a crime scene. All the local news outlets have been filled with stories of speculation, suspicion, and accusation. The politicians and government officials have tried to act as though they cared about the mismanagement of the project all along. Everyone is making lots of noise trying to explain, and no one is saying much of anything that matters.

And I keep thinking about the random tragedy of one car in the tunnel at three in the morning who, in one horrible moment was exactly where the giant piece of concrete fell. Five seconds later and she would have been the one on the news talking about a near miss. Instead, a thirty-eight year old woman is dead.

What do we do with that?

Years ago, my mother, whose sense of predestination would make John Calvin look indecisive, was booked on a Delta flight to somewhere and changed her plans at the last minute. The plane crashed.

“God really took care of me,” she said.

She found great comfort in her statement. I didn’t because, for me, it carried with it an inseparable corollary: God didn’t take care of the others. I don’t see how you can claim one half of the equation without the other. I also don’t think God works in that your-number’s-up kind of way. In the case of the woman in the tunnel, God was not the one dropping the concrete at just the right moment because it was “her time to go.”

Tomorrow Ginger is leading a funeral for a wonderful man from Marshfield named Bob who dropped dead this week at thirty-four. They are still trying to figure out what happened. Bob was co-owner of a skate and surf shop here in town and, from every account, was one of the most kind and loving human beings around. He had a huge heart, an adventuresome spirit, and an open door. He will be deeply missed. They are expecting over five hundred people to gather in the Skate Park for his service tomorrow. The autopsy report will come in the days that follow and answer some questions, but it will not help anymore than saying it was God’s will.

When it comes to tragedy, explanations don’t help one damn bit. The only words that can find us are those who speak to our souls. I “placed my grief in the mouth of language,” wrote poet Lisel Mueller, “the only thing that would grieve with me.” We explain to assuage our fear, or to focus blame; there is another language for sorrow and hope.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
(Adam Zagajewski)

Try to praise the mutilated world
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew,
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in through to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Jesus’ words about tragedy were about God knowing when a sparrow fell. He did not say God pushed the sparrow on cue, nor did he say God caught the little bird before it hit the ground. He said God was present in the midst of even one of the smallest tragedy imaginable.

“I sing because I’m happy; I sing because I’m free,” goes the chorus to one of my favorite songs. “His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me.”

Let us praise our mutilated world.

Peace,
Milton

Since the Round of Sixteen began, I have not gotten to see one World Cup game until today. I got to watch the Final this afternoon. For all of the other games, I was either in Mississippi or in the kitchen at the restaurant. I made sure my schedule was clear today so I could watch France and Italy play. And play they did. For those of you not keeping score at home, Italy won on penalty kicks after the two teams were still tied at the end of the overtime period.

Soccer has provided an important metaphor for me of late, thanks to a story I remembered as we were flying to Memphis for my nephew’s graduation. When my brother’s family lived outside of Akron, Ohio, Ginger and I went to visit. Our nephews were in the eight to ten range then, I guess, and both playing on soccer teams. Scott, the youngest (who graduated this year) had a game, so we went to watch. Soccer for eight year olds often gets called “herd ball” because everyone on the field is in a clump around the ball. Scott’s team was leading the league because of one thing the coach said to them in particular: “Run to the open space and let the ball find you.”

The reason the story came to mind somewhere over Maryland is my life has little open space to speak of. I’ve had a sense that change was on the wind, but I didn’t know how to catch a glimpse of what was coming or what it required of me, because I couldn’t find any open space to let God find me. I’ve felt unsettled for a while, even pulled, as if the various claims on my life were each pulling me in different directions and I was about to come apart at the seams. I’ve also kept returning to something Ken, my spiritual director, said to me soon after I started seeing him last October: “Decide what it is you want to stand for, what it’s going to cost to make that stand, and then pay the bill.” July has come and I’m still coming to terms with his words.

When I began interviewing for the Associate Pastor position at the church in Hanover, my biggest concern was not being able to go to church with Ginger. I love being able to worship with her and I love being the pastor’s husband. I also felt a pull to Hanover. The search committee offered that I only had to be in the 10 o’clock worship service on the one Sunday a month that I preached. (We have an early service at 8:30; I’m there every week and then duck out to Marshfield on my non-preaching days. At least, that’s how it started. Two things happened. One, the job grew. There were more and more reasons to stay for church – good ones – and the equation sort of flip-flopped: I was getting to Marshfield about once a month. The second thing was I realized I couldn’t be an effective pastor and be in worship one Sunday a month. My feeling of missing Ginger has done nothing but grow.

Two weeks ago, I offered my resignation at Hanover. My time there will come to an end on October 1, 2006, which will give me time to wrap things up well and leave things in good shape for the one who comes next. I’m making my move into open space.

Here’s where the soccer metaphor matters most: the coach said, “Run to the open space and the ball will find you.” I’m not running away, I’m running toward. I’m still trying to figure out what I stand for, in Ken’s words. Here in the final months of my fiftieth year, I’m moving to open space where God can find me and I have room to listen.

What I do know is I want to be with Ginger, so the primary direction of my move is toward her. Vocationally, the move is less precise. I keep thinking it’s something with food. The parish house at Marshfield has a good kitchen and great space; we could be feeding people. I want it to be something with writing, so I will keep posting regularly and sending my words out into space of their own. I need it to make some money, which is the hard part since I don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. What all of that means is not only will the ball need to find me in the open space, but also some teammates as well. None of us tells a story with only one character, nor do we tell stories where we are always the central characters. I’m breaking into open space; I don’t know who or what will find me there, I just know it is time to find open space.

I also have a sense my questions will not be answered quickly. I’m on a transformational journey as much as vocational one. Most every job I’ve had in my life has found me. Someone has come and said, “You’re good at this and we need this done.” I could feel useful and appreciated (both important to someone who grew up learning love was earned), so I took the jobs. (Pardon the over simplification and the overuse of parentheses.) I’ve never taken the lead in this dance, and now I’m seeing I must if I’m to be true to myself and my God.

In his book, Life Work, Donald Hall (our new Poet Laureate) recounts a conversation with his friend Henry Moore, who had just turned eighty. Hall asked him, “What is the secret of life?”

With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possible do!”

His words speak to me in profound ways and I have no idea of what it feels like to so consumed by One Thing. At least I know the next fifty years are going to be full of surprises.

Peace,
Milton

PS — There are new recipes.

Ken Lay died yesterday of a massive heart attack.

The news of his death sent my mind in two directions. First, it sent me back to my belief that the corporation is one of the most insidious inventions of modern life. The giant Greed Machine that is Capitalism gave birth to the corporation the way Rosemary gave birth to her baby, creating a monster beholden to no one with an insatiable appetite for growth and profit. We have been trained to believe that corporations are somehow entities in themselves, so that none of the human beings that make them up are ultimately responsible for anything the behemoth does. A “corporate response” to any issue sees no need to respond ethically or with any degree of humanity because profit is the only measure.

CEO’s of major companies make, on average, 525 times the wage of a production worker. In June, when the stockholders wanted to ask questions about the executive pay package, Home Depot’s Board of Directors didn’t show up for the annual meeting and no one could do anything because that’s how a corporation works. Much of the economic disparity in our world lies at the feet of the multinationals. They somehow have millions to pay athletes for endorsement deals, but only pennies to pay the people who actually make the shoes.

Enron made the news not because they were that different, but because they were the ones who got caught. A jury of people other than members of Congress and lawyers declared the emperor naked and found Lay guilty for what his corporation had done. The verdict came down in May, yet Lay was not to be sentenced until October (you know – it’s the same way it works for all the poor people who get convicted; they get time to go to their vacation homes before they go to prison, too).

Ken Lay dropped dead in his vacation home in Colorado. One news account said it might have been caused by the stress of the trial and the verdict. Evidently, he felt little stress in committing the crimes, which leads me to my second thought.

His death demonstrates the uselessness of the death penalty: Ken Lay is dead; nothing had been made better. He laid waste to the lives of thousands of employees, violating their trust and using them like toilet paper. He destroyed lives and families in ways worse than many who are sitting on death row and he made money doing it. This week the federal prosecutors asked the judge to make him give up the forty three million dollars he made on the crimes of which he was convicted. They were too kind. I think they should have asked for every penny, every piece of art, every house, everything he had except for one change of clothing and a tin cup and left him to beg on the Houston street corner where that slanted E sculpture stood outside what was once his building. Of course, that’s my need for revenge talking.

One of the stories that came out of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was of a woman who saw her husband and her son killed in front of her by the same Afrikaans policeman. When he was convicted before the commission, they asked the woman what she thought his punishment should be.

“I was once a mother and a wife and now I am neither,” she said. “Let him come to visit me so I can be a mother to him.” She then rose and embraced him as the man wept uncontrollably.

Most possibilities for redemption for Lay and many of the former employees of Enron died with him yesterday, as they do with any criminal whom we see fit to kill. Death solves very little, if anything at all. I do wish they had taken every last penny he had, but I wish they had made him personally deliver it to the people he harmed, door to door, so he could see who Enron crushed when it collapsed.

I didn’t want his heart to stop; I wanted it to break.

Peace,
Milton

It was the second night of two sold out concerts at the Cotton Bowl in the summer of Born in the USA and Reaganomics. I had been to both and had watched Bruce Springsteen hold the crowds in the palm of his hand for over four hours each night. When he came out for his fourth encore, he was alone; the E Street Band had stayed in the back.

“Bruuuuuce,” we screamed.

He laughed and said, “Sit down,” and he began to talk about Woody Guthrie’s song, “This Land is Your Land.” Guthrie wrote the song in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which he saw as overly self-focused and naive. His original lyrics differ a bit from the campfire versions we learned over the years. I woke up thinking about them this morning.

This Land is Your Land

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I’ve roamed and rambled and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

On a cold, cold winter’s night twenty years later, I heard Steve Earle sing, “Christmas in Washington,” another great patriotic psalm:

It’s Christmastime in Washington
The Democrats rehearsed
Gettin’ into gear for four more years
Things not gettin’ worse
The Republicans drink whiskey neat
And thanked their lucky stars
They said, ‘He cannot seek another term
They’ll be no more FDRs’

I sat home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
With an uneasy feeling in my chest
And I’m wonderin’ what it means

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

I followed in your footsteps once
Back in my travelin’ days
Somewhere I failed to find your trail
Now I’m stumblin’ through the haze
But there’s killers on the highway now
And a man can’t get around
So I sold my soul for wheels that roll
Now I’m stuck here in this town

There’s foxes in the hen house
Cows out in the corn
The unions have been busted
Their proud red banners torn
To listen to the radio
You’d think that all was well
But you and me and Cisco know
It’s going straight to hell

So come back, Emma Goldman
Rise up, old Joe Hill
The barracades are goin’ up
They cannot break our will
Come back to us, Malcolm X
And Martin Luther King
We’re marching into Selma
As the bells of freedom ring

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

“Blind faith in your government will get you killed,” Bruce told us that summer, as Guthrie had said before him and Steve Earle after.

It’s still true.

Peace,
Milton

We all made it back from Mississippi safely last night and most of us made it to church this morning to tell of what we had seen and done and experienced. The week was full of good things. Even though I was there, I found the refelctions of the young people full of surprises. Their capacity to make meaning out of the world around them feeds my faith. The church was full (an unusual experience for a summer service in New England) because, after three years of trips, our people know the reflection service is not one to miss.

During the week, we used a song as our theme that was the first song Billy Crockett and I ever wrote together, now over twenty years ago.

here’s another picture of life
all of us together with Christ
it’s an open heart
it’s a work of art
it’s the basic stuff
that makes another picture of love

I came away from the week reminded again that incarnation is the cornerstone word of our faith: God with skin on. I saw one picture after another of love incarnated in the actions of our young people and adults, as well as in the way we were received by the people of Mississippi.

One afternoon we took a prayer walk through the neighborhood around the church. I was walking at the back of the twenty-five white kids and adults as they strolled down the street and at least twenty-five black kids came running out of their houses to greet them because they knew them from Vacation Bible School. As I watched, I realized that in my life time a group of white people that large walking in an African-American neighborhood would have been coming to kill somebody. Because of the love incarnated everyday by the people of Calvary Baptist Church in their faithful determination to minister to their neighborhood and because of the willingness of our young people to walk in heat they were not used to in order to learn more about the kids they saw each day, those little children came running without fear.

That’s the basic stuff that makes another picture of love.

Peace,
Milton

It’s only Tuesday moring and the week has been full already.

Eighty-eight of us made the trek from Massachusetts to Mississippi, thanks to three different flights on Southwest Airlines. We over came storms and schedules, but even under the best circumstances moving ninety people around is cumbersome. Sunday we worshipped with the folks here at Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson. During the rest of the day we took some time with our three church groups to get to know each other. On our first full day of work yesterday, we sent fifteen people to the Gulf Coast to work on a house, put a bunch to work helping with Vacation Bible School here at Calvary, and the rest went to work cleaning and repairing stuff around the church.

Calvary is an historically white church in inner city Jackson that has made a commitment to stay and minister in the city even though most of the white folks have long since move to the suburbs. Their commitment to incarnate the love of God to their neighborhood has not been lucrative. They struggle to pay the bills even as they feel more and more committed to the task to which they feel called. Yesterday afternoon, Linda, the missions minister, took about twenty of our group on a Prayer Walk through the neighborhood, which means the group walked, met the folks in the neighborhood, and prayed for and with them. We were the ones who came back most changed by the world we saw and the people we met.

Today, three vanfulls went to the coast and the rest of us stayed to do VBS and continue working around the church to do things they can no longer afford to pay a custodian to do. We are tired, but it’s a good kind of tired. We are energized and focused. We feel alive.

We are in a town we don’t know, and we feel at home

We are with people we don’t know, and we feel welcome.

We are facing needs we don’t know how to meet, and we feel challenged.

We came thinking we were the givers, and we are receiving.

Peace,
Milton