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

My nephew, Ben, turns twenty today.

On the wall next to the staircase in our house is our “Wall of Fame,” filled with pictures of friends and family, each photograph holding a different story. One of my favorites is now about ten years old. Ben, his brother Tim (sometimes called Scott), and I are all standing together in roller blades about to take off down the skating trail in San Diego. I’ve got another of just Ben and me that’s now nineteen years old. I went to visit Ben and his family in Akron, Ohio and they took me to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I’m holding Ben and he’s wearing his Cleveland Browns jersey. He has very little hair on his wonderfully round head (wait – that’s how I look now) and his eyes are wide with wonder and expectation.

The way life has rolled out, Ben and I have not had a lot of time together in the course of our lives. We have stayed connected, but have not known much about the details of one another’s existence until the last couple of years. So, even though I don’t have any good recent photographs of the two of us together, I feel closer to him than I ever have and that is thanks, largely, to the common love we have for good music.

Whenever Ben, Tim, and I have occasion to send a gift to one another, we send CDs. For a couple of Christmases we even gave each other the same records without knowing it ahead of time. This past Christmas, I tore off the wrapping paper to find a cigar box. Inside the box was this note:

“Uncle Milton, our gift to you this Christmas may be a very dangerous one! These four albums have the biggest affect on us in almost all our music, all done by the same guy – Mark Kozelek. We know you’ll love them! It may take some time (although we know it won’t), but give them a good chance because he’s the man. We love you so much Uncle Milton! We wish that we could walk to the beach with you and hang out.
Love, Tim and Ben”

How often do you get dangerous gifts for Christmas that aren’t a Red Ryder BB gun? (And Mark Kozelek is the man.)

I called Ben yesterday to wish him a happy birthday and we had a great, long talk. I was trying to make sure he didn’t have the CDs Ginger and I wanted to send, so I asked if he had any Patty Griffin.

“Scott and I just found her;” he said; “she’s amazing.”

Our conversation turned to her lyrics and her ability to infuse simple words with profound truth and emotion. Here, for example, is the opening verse of “The Rowing Song”:

as I row, row, row
going so slow, slow, slow
just down below me is the old sea
just down below me is the old sea

The melody is haunting, and she’s crafting a picture with words not so different from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Then comes the next line:

the further I go,
more letters from home
never arrive

She breaks your heart never using more than two syllables. Ben and I talked about the power in her songwriting. I went on to mention my favorite Patty Griffin lyric, in a song called “It Don’t Come Easy.”

I began the line, “If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you.”
He finished it: “If you forget my love, I’m there to remind you.”

And we were both quiet for a moment.

We sent him two CDs by Pierce Pettis, another amazing singer-songwriter, Making Light of It and Everything Matters. I sent the second record because of one song in particular, “God Believes in You.”

When you start to doubt that you exist, God believes in you
Confounded by the evidence, God believes in you
When your light burns so dim, when your chances seem so slim
And you swear you don’t believe in him, God believes in you

When you rise up just to fall again, God believes in you
Deserted by your closest friends, God believes in you
When you’re betrayed with a kiss, you turn your cheek to another fist
It dose not have to end like this, God believes in you

Oh everything matters if anything matters at all
Everything matters no matter how big, no matter how small
Oh God believes in you, God believes in you

When you’re so ashamed that you could die, God believes in you
And you can’t do right even though you try, God believes in you
Blessed are the ones who grieve, the ones who mourn, the ones who bleed
In sorrow you sow but in joy you reap, God believes in you

Ben is no longer hairless or round-headed (as I am), yet he still has a heart full of wonder and expectation. I look forward to seeing how the story of his life continues to unfold, and am excited that I get to contribute to the soundtrack, among other things.

When I was his age, my connection to family was kept alive, mostly, by my aunt, Pegi, who would not let me go. At a time when I could only push away, she kept reminding me I could not afford to break the bonds that created me. She was right. Family ties are better these days and I’m caught in the wonderful irony that now my nephews are key players in feeding my sense of belonging in my family of origin and contributing to my soundtrack as well. It’s just like Pierce says:

let your love cover me
like a pair of angel wings
you are my family
you are my family

I wish I’d known Ben better when he was four, or nine, or thirteen; I didn’t. But we know each other now and I look forward to the days to come when we will put on some good music, tell each other what we missed, and dream about what has yet to be.

Happy birthday, Ben.

Peace,
(Uncle) Milton

I started my morning, as I often do, listening to The Writer’s Almanac by Garrrison Keillor. Though it plays on WGBH, one of our local NPR stations, I listen to it from the website because I can do that on my own schedule. Along with a poem, Keillor gives a quick rundown of some of the happenings on this particular day, Here’s one of the things he said:

“On this day in 1923, Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ was published in the New Republic magazine. It was Frost’s favorite of his own poems, and he called it, ‘My best bid for remembrance.’

“Though it’s a poem about winter, Frost wrote the first draft on a warm morning in the middle of June. The night before he had stayed up working at his kitchen table on a long, difficult poem called ‘New Hampshire’ (1923). He finally finished it, and then looked up and saw that it was morning. He’d never worked all night on a poem before. Feeling relieved at the work he’d finished, he went outside and watched the sunrise.

But while he was outside, he suddenly got an idea for a new poem. So he rushed back inside his house and wrote “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” in just a few minutes. He said he wrote most of the poem almost without lifting his pen off the page.”

He went on to recite the poem, which I print here because it’s one of my favorites.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

One of the reasons the poem sticks with me is it was the subject of my first big research paper in college, and my first real venture into analyzing a poem. I look back on that experience as the place where I became infected by poetry; I’ve never recovered.

My hours in the library reading commentaries on Frost’s work led me to people who saw in these words traces of solstice, suicide, and Santa Claus. I don’t remember what I ended up saying about the poem. I do remember working hard to learn it by heart (I still have most of it) and I know I keep coming back to it and finding different things: sometimes I’m struck by the beauty of the moonless night; sometimes, that the owner of the land is not the one appreciating it; sometimes,, the curiosity of the horse; sometimes the impending pressure of promises still unfulfilled.

I did not know Frost had written it so quickly until today.

In June of 1990, nearly seventy years after Frost wrote at his breakfast table, I was packing up to drive to Fort Worth after spending a couple of days writing with my friend Billy. We were working on songs for youth camp with my kids. We all knew this was going to be my last camp because Ginger and I were headed to Boston. While Billy was in the shower, I wrote these words in about the time it took Frost to paint his snowy picture:

If there was a place that felt like home, would you go there?
If there was a chance that you could know love, would you try?
It there was a dream that would come true, would you fall asleep?
If there was someone to dry your tears, would you cry?

Come and see, come and see
Take and eat, come and see

If there was a voice that would call your name, would you answer?
If there was a friend who would never leave, would you stay?
If there was a heart that would break for you, would you fall in love?
If there was someone who was listening, would you pray?

Come and see, come and see
Take and eat, come and see

I handed him the lyric when he got out of the shower and while I was cleaning up he wrote the melody. Eventually, it even made it on one of Billy’s records. Some of the stuff we wrote feels like history to me; this one has stayed alive.

Yesterday afternoon late, our friend Janet called asking if she, her daughter, their two dogs, and pet mouse could spend the night. They are moving to San Francisco this week. Everything was loaded into the Family Truckster and they needed to feel as if their journey had begun, rather than spending another night in the old house. Yes is always the answer to anyone who wants to crash here, so we had a slumber party last night with our little menagerie. As I’m writing, they have just shuffled off to Buffalo, the next stop on their journey west.

Over coffee this morning, Janet and I talked about new beginnings. For the first time in twenty years ministry is not her job. No one in San Francisco knows her; she is going with a clean slate: miles to go, but few promises to keep. She and Christine are on a road trip without reservations, knowing only the address they are driving toward. That’s enough to start a new life.

I watched them drive off and am left with memories and empty spaces. At least once every year in the ten years of Janet’s pastorate, I filled the pulpit as a guest preacher. When we were all together at the church in Winchester, Dan, her son, and I were the cooks for the annual Easter Pancake Breakfast. Fajitas and Ritas in Quincy will notice a drop in sales because Janet and Ginger won’t be making their regular visits.

Goodbye, my friend. Go, in peace.

I’ve always been puzzled, haunted, and somehow comforted by one of the lines in “Come and See.” On the cusp of one of the biggest goodbyes of my life, I wrote, “If there was a friend who would never leave, would you stay?” My life is. in some sense, a chain of goodbyes, an ongoing sequence of separation from those I most dearly love. Geography, however, is not the final word. I have left friends and they have left me, yet – thank God – we have still found ways to stay with each other in most cases. We have kept our promises even across the miles and it sucks not to be closer.

The promises we keep to one another as friends are not about obligation or duty. They are the essence of what holds us together against the centrifugal force of existence that scatters us every which way. Here in the dark, we can still find each other across the miles. Come and see.

Peace,
Milton

Packing up the youth group to go skiing is easier here in New England than it was in Texas. For one thing, Maine is a hell of a lot closer to Marshfield than Colorado was to Fort Worth; for another, the vans come equipped with DVD players these days.

We weren’t even through the city before the movie was on and I could hear the simple piano intro that captures me every time I hear it. Then the voices joined:

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

I was driving the van with the musical-theater kids who are getting ready for their Spring Show, Randumb Axe 5 (that’s Random Acts to you and me) and a couple of the RENT songs are in the show. But their connection with the movie runs deeper than that; they have been captured by the film since it came out at Christmas. Jane – the same girl who broke her arm on the trip – has been completely captured by the musical. And I can see why. It moves me, too. I’m sure I’m not alone as one who has found a way to work the lyric to “Seasons of Love” into a sermon (picking up where we left off):

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?
How about love? How about love?
How about love? Measure in love

The way a car DVD player works is the sound fills up the car, but the images can only be seen by those in the back seat. I could only hear the music and the audible responses of my passengers, all but one of them seniors. This was the third trip to Maine I’d taken with most of the kids. We’ve skied the same mountain and stayed at the same place, the Sunday River Inn, which is run by Steve and Peggy Wight. The inn is a step back in time. In an area fast filling up with condos and luxury hotels, theirs is a family style lodge, with some private rooms upstairs, dorm rooms downstairs, and a dining room and common room – with giant fireplace – on the main floor. Everyone is expected to be together. We all brought out books into the common room to read by the fire and ended up in unexpected conversations with the other guests.

There was one big change this year: the Wights are selling the inn and retiring from their career of hospitality. They are ready to measure their lives in other ways besides meals, towels, logs on the fire, and inches of snow on the mountain. It will require a change for anyone who is used to going to the inn because the person who buys it at today’s prices will probably not be able to run the same kind of show. The seasons are changing, just as they are with our youth group.

The recurring musical connector in the movie is a chorus that says:

There’s only us; there’s only this
Forget regret or life is yours to miss
No other road, no other way
No day but today

The words and music filled the car like pure oxygen. When we stopped for dinner they were energized by the sense of urgency and community the movie so beautifully conveyed. They were lifelong friends watching a movie about friends at the end of life all coming to the same conclusion:

There’s only now; there’s only here
Give in to love or live in fear
No other path, no other way
No day but today

Ginger and I saw RENT when the first road company – which was the original cast who are also in the movie – came to Boston. Our friend Patty took us as a Christmas present. The things I felt that night came back as I listened to the movie as we made our way up I-95. I was once more taken by such a story of hope told in the midst of such seeming hopelessness. The eight friends clung to each other in the present tense because what they had done in the past had cut their futures short. Yet, they were not hanging on in desperation; they were relishing the moment. “No day but today” was not a statement of resignation, but of gratitude.

Yes, the characters were full of contradictions and made choices I wished they could have done differently, and I loved their spirit: give into love or live in fear.

Both churches that Ginger and I are involved in are in the process of “visioning.” (I have to say here how much I hate turning nouns into verbs.) We started with the US Congregational Life Survey, a nationally used instrument to give us some data about how we view ourselves. At my church, we are now in the middle of muddling through the stack of statistics we were sent by the survey folks. The graphs and charts are helpful to a point, but they feel without context to me because there are no stories attached. We are all sitting in a circle, looking at photocopied pages, waiting for them to tell us where to go next when what we need most to do is put down the papers and ask and answer the question ourselves.

There’s only now, there’s only this; no day but today.

It’s Parker Palmer’s theme as well. We have come up with all sorts of ways to quantify success, to show what we are achieving and what we think we are making, but we are losing our sense of context: our connection to creation and to community. We are so frightened of failure that we have lost sight of ourselves for fear we don’t measure up.

Give in to love or live in fear; no day but today.

We don’t measure up and we don’t have to because success is not the measure, neither is wealth, or perfection, or effort or ability. “You are loved, you are loved, you are really loved,” as Victoria Williams sings to a different melody than the cast of RENT, neither one of whom is singing an original song. It’s as old as creation and as fresh as the sparkle in the eyes of my seniors. Like the man said,

“Consider the lilies. . ..”

Peace,
Milton