don't eat alone

Yesterday, we packed up and left Thessaloniki and drove to Veroia, which is the modern version of the ancient city of Berea where Paul visited. There was a small outdoor mosaic altar where we had our morning devotional and then we all took off for the local cafes to find the bathrooms, or WCs as they call them here. Many of us came back with little snacks from the cafes as well. From there we continued our trek to Meteoria, a lovely little village at the foot of some amazing rock formations, atop of which stand six monasteries.

By the time we got to town, it was lunch, so we had yet another amazing meal and then began working our way up the switchback road to the first monastery where we could take pictures. The decision to build at the top of these giant rock pillars began with hermits settling in the caves above the town, the first of whom was Barnabas in 985 CE. Later, in the fourteenth century, a monk named Neilos decided to build a small church. In 1382, another monk, Athanasios, built the first monastery at the top of one of the rocks. How they ever got up there in the first place, I don’t know, but they soon rigged a net that allowed them to hoist both people and supplies from the valley below. By the time construction was finished, there were twenty-four high altitude monasteries, none of which was accessible by any other means than the nets.

The Ottoman Occupation sent the monasteries into disrepair because the monks had to flee and no one did anything to them for four hundred years and by the nineteenth century they were in ruins. When the Greeks ran the Ottomans out, the monasgteries were reestablished on a smaller basis; today only six exist: four for priests and two for nuns. Stairs were added in the 1920s. The largest has about fifteen monks; the smallest has one. In the sixties, when the Greek government realized tourism could help them keep the monasteries in shape, they built roads so folks like us could get there without relying on a rope hoist. We went inside two of them, Holy Triinity and Varlaam.

The wall paintings in the churches of both were amazing. Betty our guide, did an incredible job of explaining the logic behind the way the iconographic images were painted on the walls. The narthex was covered with paintings of saints being martyred. There were images of them being beheaded, beaten, stoned, and even skinned. The images were to remind worshippers of the price paid for faith. “They show the two most important things for a Christian,” Betty said, “to be patient and to be faithful.” The icons were done by iconographers from the Cretan school. The colors were dark and subdued; the images were stern and, well, not very handsome.

“The Greek art always shows youth,” Betty said. “The ancient Greeks thought the most important things were to be young, rich, and beautiful. The icons were meant to show that those things did not matter. These are not young people, or rich, and of course they are not beautiful. Look at them.” She smiled. “The icons are painted so you will look at the eyes, so you will see the spirit. They show the beauty of the spirit.”

Inside the church she showed us how the architecture and the icons worked together, giving us a cosmological lesson of the universe: earth and sky. The dome at the top of the church was an icon of Christ Pantocrator (creator of all), flanked by angels, and supported on each of four columns by the four gospel writers. Below them – between earth and sky – were scenes, beginning with the Annunciation to Mary and ending with the Ascension, which showed the life of Christ. (We were not allowed to take pictures in either church, other than the one I took before I read the sign.)

“One of the main reasons these scenes were painted over and over in many churches,” Betty said, “was so the people could learn the stories. They could not read, but they could learn from the icons.”

We came out of the churches and out on to balconies that hung over the valley far, far below. Creation was telling the same story; the rocks were crying out. Even as we walked the forest trail from the road above to the second monastery, I could swear I heard the trees clap their hands. It is spring here and the trees are almost fully leafed. The ground is covered with wildflowers and the air full of bird calls. The one I recognized was the mourning dove. I love that Betty took the time for a walk in the woods in the middle of our tour.

I started reading Paul: A Visionary Life by Edward Stourton as we drove. The author is a journalist with the BBC and does a wonderful job bringing fresh eyes to look at Paul and what we make of what we know about him. He has given me new insights in several places, or at least challenged my presuppositions. Paul was a passionate, brilliant, sometimes arrogant, compassionate, tenacious, belligerent, complicated human being. And he, more than any other one person, is the reason Christianity is a world wide religion and not a small historical sect. Stourton paints a picture of a man who was deeply committed and passionate in his faith, administratively adept, politically astute, and relationally opportunistic. He paints the picture without one ounce of cynicism. He admires Paul and doesn’t let his admiration get in the way of the picture of who the man really is. Like the iconographers, Stourton paints a picture that allows us to see the beauty of the spirit.

The hermits climbed into the cave; the monks found a way to live our their calling on the top of the mountain; Paul traveled over twelve thousand miles on his missionary journeys trying to live out his faith; and we wound our way up and down the hills, rubbing up against them all, on a pilgrimage of our own. I don’t understand how the monks live their lives in seclusion and Paul is sometimes hard for me to grasp, yet we all help to tell the story of faith, which winds like a mountain road to the most unexpected places.

Peace,
Milton

Just three days in, our mornings are beginning to take on a regular routine: up at 6:30, breakfast at 7:00, on the bus at 8:00. Most of our group was moving slowly yesterday, but we still pulled away from the hotel by about 8:10. We wound our way out of Thessaloniki and on to the modern day Ignatia Way, which runs closely to the Roman Via Ignatia, which was a highway that ran from Constantinople to Rome (when it got to Italy it was called the Appian Way.) We drove on a four lane highway; Paul walked on a stone pathway about twenty feet wide. We drove about three hours to the ruins of the ancient city of Phillipi, where Paul helped start a church.

The first place we stopped was just outside the ancient city where Paul is supposed to have baptized Lydia, the first European convert to Christianity. We had a devotional time there. Mike, one of the pastors, invited us to remember our baptismal vows as I sang,

I went down to the river to pray, studying about that good ol’ way
And who shall wear a starry crown, O Lord, show me the way
O, sister, let’s go down, let’s go down, come on down
O, sister, let’s go down, let’s go down to the river to pray

As we gathered, we could hear the priest chanting in the baptismal services taking place in the church just above us. The “name day,” or baptism day, is very important in Orthodoxy. Two girls were baptized while we were there: Emma and Natalia. We even talked to one proud grandfather and a couple of folks on our bus came back with snacks from the reception after the baptism, to which they were spontaneously invited. I loved thinking about the gospel coming to Europe through a woman and a weaver of purple cloth.

One of the points Bettty made several times was Paul’s visit to Phillipi marked the coming of Christianity to Europe. When he crossed over from Asia Minor and landed at Neapolis and then came inland to Phillipi he was making history even he did not understand. He had a dream where a man asked for him to come to Macedonia and help, so he went and, in doing so, introduced Europe to the burgeoning faith. Though Peter gets credit for having the keys to the Kingdom and being the first Pope, Paul is the reason there are churches all across Europe.

Phillipi is nothing but ruins. We stood in the agora and the market place, and among the ruins of two huge churches, but there is nothing more than fragments of stones bearing fragments of Latin inscriptions laying all across what once was a vibrant and essential city. The primary reason for its abandonment was bad timing. An earthquake all but destroyed the city not too long before the Ottomans invaded; they saw no need to rebuild the city and focused instead on nearby Karvalla, which is still an active city. In almost every place we have visited, Betty has pointed out things that were destroyed by earthquakes. This is a very seismically active region, even today. When Ginger asked Betty when the last earthquake was, she said, “Oh, a couple of months ago we had one about 4.9 just outside of Athens.” She talked about it like we talk about a Nor’easter: it’s bad, but it’s one of those things that comes with living in New England.

One of the places we saw in the Philippian ruins that was quite well defined was the Vema, which is the place Paul would have argued his case when he was brought before the magistrate. According to Luke, we stood at the place where Paul told them he was a Roman citizen and could not be beaten without a trial. He and Silas were imprisoned and then set free – by an earthquake, though Paul refused to leave until he got an apology.

Paul loved the Philippian church. They brought him great joy. Ginger said at one point today, “The way Paul felt about the Philippians makes me think of the folks in Marshfield and the ways they are so kind and loving to me.” That may have been the best connection of the day for me. The other was the sense of calm I felt walking among the ruins. Betty did a great job restoring the scene with a verbal picture of what had once stood where we saw only pieces of pillars and stacks of stones. She showed us the excavation of an athletic venue underneath the church, which had been partly unearthed. No one has even come close to uncovering all that lies in the dirt there. Yet, no one is digging any more in Philippi. They have moved on to other places; they have other priorities. What they have uncovered has given us a brief glimpse of what once was and a chance to brush up against those who had come before us. I’m not sure why that’s so calming, but it is.

Centering may be a better word. I’m a little over six months away marking my first half a century on the planet and walked today where Paul walked forty of my lifetimes ago, as he walked over ruins of those who had been there six or eight lifetimes before that. Two thousand years feels like a close connection when I think of it as forty lifetimes. We have accumulated more than two thousand years of living just by adding up the ages of the people riding on our bus. Stretched out over centuries it is a long time; imagined as a connected web of human existence it is not so far away.

We wound our way down to the Aegean Sea and ate lunch in the port city of Neapolis, where Paul landed. We had another great meal – fish today, freshly caught – and then traveled back down the Ignatia Way (this time in the same direction Paul went) to Thessaloniki. On the way home, we stopped at the same roadside restaurant for coffee as we had on the morning trip. When I stepped up to the counter, the server said, “Hallo, Milton!” He read my name on the tag around my neck. His name was George and he makes a damn good cup of coffee – kaffe magala: coffee with milk. “Effaristo,” I said. Thank you.

After dinner, a group of us decided we would walk down to the harbor to see where Paul landed on one of his later journeys. The Greeks eat dinner between nine and eleven most nights, so when we stepped out of the hotel at 9:30, we walked right into the bustle of a Greek spring evening. We did find the harbor, but we were more taken by the life that swirled around us as we strolled. As we waited on one corner, a guy on a scooter smiled, honked, and shouted, “Hallo, tourists!” as he passed.

In The Sheltering Sky, one of the characters makes the distinction between a tourist and a traveler. A tourist is one who goes to a foreign place and spends most of the time trying to make it feel familiar; a traveler sinks himself or herself into the culture at hand, hoping to be changed. Yes, I am one of those on a big bus riding around with my name tag hanging around my neck, and I came to see more than places and to do more than fill up the memory card on my camera or check off the countries I’ve been to.

The stones continue to speak because I can imagine a time when people moved about in the buildings that once stood; the stories of Paul come to life because I can stack up the years in lifetimes; I will remember people more than things from these days, from baristas to fellow bus riders. History without a face never changed anyone.

Peace,
Milton

Yesterday was a long travel day. We left Athens at eight in the morning and got to Thessaloniki about six in the evening. Since our time here is short, Betty had some things she wanted us to see in the city, so we started at the Acropolis (which, in Thessaloniki, is the remnant of a medieval fortification) and then worked our way down the hill, stopping at the churches of St. George, St. Demetrius, and the Agios Sophia, until the bus met us again to take us to the hotel. We were in true Greek form, finally sitting down to dinner at nine. I dozed in and out of most of the bus trip, since our Easter celebration kept me up late, so I didn’t mind the long ride.

We made a couple of stops along the way. The first was Thermopylae, where there was not much more than a monument to the battlefield. The story of the Lacedemonians was interesting and tragic, and, walking up the small hill that had been at the center of the battle, Ginger and I talked about how different war must have been when you had to look the person you were trying to kill in the eye, or hear his voice. Edith Hamillton talks about the lack of sentimentality the Greeks has when it came to war. Dying was not an heroic act to them.

“We, to whom poetry, all art, is only a superficial decoration of life, make a refuge from a world that is too hard for us to face by sentimentalizing it. The Greeks looked straight at it. They were completely unsentimental. It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one’s country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital ties.

“Completely in line with this spirit is the often quoted epitaph on the Lacedemonians who fell at Thermopylae. Everyone of them fell, as they knew beforehand they would. They fought their battle to the death with no hope to help them and by so dying the saved Greece, but all the great poets who wrote their epitaph found it fitting to say for them was:

“’O passer-by, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.’

“We rebel; something more than that, we feel, is due such heroism. But the Greeks did not. Facts were facts and deeds spoke for themselves. They did not need ornament.” (The Greek Way 81-82)

The Greeks Hamilton spoke of were the Greeks of antiquity, centuries before Jesus walked the earth and several incarnations of Greek humanity ago. We are in a land that marks time in centuries, not years or even decades. Cities have been built and rebuilt, alliances made and lost, power shifted back and forth and back again, all the while the Greeks finding a way to maintain an identity. We stood under mosaics today that were four hundred years old in Jesus’ day, and then we walked out of the building and into a 24-hour Internet Café to use the restrooms. I saw some amazing icons today in the different churches we visited and also listened as Betty described how most of the icons do not date any farther back than the ninth century because of the Iconoclast controversy in the church that took a century to decide if images were going to be a part of worship. No one who started the controversy was there to see how it was resolved.

What came to mind was hearing George Bush try to silence his critics a few weeks ago by saying history would tell if his actions were justified. Standing under archways and in churches that have been around a thousand times longer than he has been president, I thought history is not even going to remember him or his delusions of adequacy. Though we see ourselves as The World Power, our two hundred years as a nation hardly qualifies us for consideration. That’s what the stones seem to say.

The stones stacked as churches had their own words.

Everyone in our group is from some Protestant denomination: Lutheran, Baptist (a couple of flavors), Presbyterian, and UCC (just Ginger and me). Our churches are young, compared to Orthodoxy. While the Iconoclast Controversy was going on in the ninth century, the Reformation was more than a half a millennium away. When we got to the Agios Sophia, we were the only ones in the building, which was beautiful. The icons and mosaics shone, even in the dim light; the acoustic resonance of the building seemed to echo the centuries of faithful voices that had filled it. Betty suggested we have our devotional at that time, but somehow we flinched; no one seemed to know how to step into the moment. We missed an amazing opportunity. We went from there down into the catacombs near the church to see the underground rooms where persecuted Christians had met when they were not allowed churches. As the stone rooms cleared, Ginger called me back and said, “This is too good down here; sing something.” What came to mind was:

We came up out of the tombs as the Easter sun was setting, different than when we had gone in. The bus picked us up and brought us to the hotel. Even with all we had seen, heard, and felt, history gave way to the aches and pains of twelve hours on the bus, leaving some of us more testy than thankful. How can we stand in the midst of all that is around us and let our aches and pains have the last word? I can’t do it. I was not twelve hours on just any bus. I rode out of Athens, along the Agean coast, past Mount Olympus, into Thessaloniki, a city once second only to Constantinople, a place where Paul walked his own share of dusty miles, and found my place in time.

Peace,
Milton

Today is Easter for Orthodox Christians. The big Easter services begin on Saturday night and proclaim the Resurrection at midnight with candles, bells, and fireworks. Athens has Orthodox churches like Boston has Dunkin’ Donuts: they are on every corner. Several of our group decided we would go to church about 11:30 and be a part of the local Easter celebration.

After dinner, Ginger and I sat with Duane and Robin, a couple from Cincinnati whom we are getting to know and talked until the servers asked us to leave about 9:00 so they could get to their own Easter services. We went up to the rooftop restaurant, which has a view of the Acropolis, to get drinks and continue our conversation. They were open because they were expecting a crowd beginning about 12:15. The restaurant was empty except for us at 9:30, but the host told me he had forty-five reservations between 12:15 and 1:00 am; they were going to be open until three. The four of us ordered our libations and began to tell our stories. Duane is a former chaplain turned real estate broker. Robin is a first grade teacher ready for a change. Even though our lives had not intersected until now, we find many ways to connect with one another as we shared our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. We talked until about 11:15 and then met the others in the lobby.

This trip is already filled with meaningful incidental contact. Cybil was Ginger’s traveling companion; she was a kindergarten teacher from Hannover, Germany. She was very gentle and kind and had great red hair. She told us half of her children were immigrants, many of them from Arab countries; she starts teaching them English at age 3 (when they start to school). She was in the States because she has family in Boston and comes over once a year.

I sat next to a man whose name I never learned, nor he mine. He was a Peace Corps physician in Tunisia in the sixties and then had a career as a radiologist on the Cape, where he is now retired. His son has lived in Germany for sixteen years and is married to a German woman. His grandchildren are bilingual because the dad only speaks English to them. He spoke proudly of all of them.

The moments were meaningful not because we found some reason to believe we are going to keep up with each other for the rest of our lives, but because we were present with each other in the time we had. I thought about those incidental connections as we stepped into the church tonight. The building was beautiful, covered with murals and then dotted with icons, both hanging and standing in wonderful wooden canopies. The ornate doors to the altar were open and the priest moved around like a bear in his red and gold robe, chanting as he moved around. The chants sounded like those Chris plays when I’m at icon class, except his are in English. Ginger and I stood at the back of the church, which was filled with people, each one holding an unlighted candle. The crowd was both serious and expectant. We had no other connection than we were there in that moment.

About ten till twelve, the priest went behind the doors and all the lights went out. Then he emerged with a big candle — a torch, really — and those closest clammored to light their candles from his and then began to move through the rest of the congregation. When all the candles were lighted, we all began to file out into the square in front of the church. The priest followed, chanting the whole time, until midnight came. He cried out in a loud voice, the bells rang, and fireworks went off in the street behind us. Everyone began to turn to one another:

“Christos anisti!”
“Alithos anisti!”

The translations are (according to the guy at the hotel):

“Christ is risen!”
“He has really done it!”
(I kept imagining a Greek teenager translating that: “He is so resurrected!”)

The crowd soon began to disperse to wherever they were going to eat and Duane, Robin, Ginger, and I started our walk back to the hotel with our candles still aflame. No one had brought a camera this time; sacred moments never survive on film, only in memory. We talked about what we had seen and heard, and some of our conversation drifted back to things we had said earlier in the evening. We got back to the hotel, all of us so tired we could hardly stand, yet we came close to going up to the restaurant ourselves, despite our promised six o’clock wake up call.

For one night in our lives we four happened to be in Athens and it happened to be Easter and there happened to be a church around the corner and we went to the service together after talking most of the evening. Whatever happens next, or next year, that moment will never happen again any more than Ginger will find herself sitting next to Cybil on a plane ever again. But tonight did happen and the four of us are inextricably bound together in the evening we shared, eating, drinking, and carrying our candles down an Athens street.

Peace,
Milton

“We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and within. We need to walk to remember the songs.” (Joseph Bruchac)

Today we have walked till we are knee deep in melodies and memories.

We woke to a fabulous “Greek breakfast,” which included, among many other things, feta cheese, kalamata olives, fresh pastries, Greek sausage, and a Greek version of Tater-Tots. We then heard a short lecture on Paul from Brian van Deventer, an American pastor who has lived here in Athens for fourteen years working on a number of projects. My favorite line from his talk was comparing Paul’s conversion from persecutor to pastor as imagining something so significant happening as to turn Osama bin Laden into Billy Graham.

After the talk we boarded our bus for a short driving tour of the city and ended up at the Acropolis: Mars Hill, the Parthenon (the parts Lord Elgin couldn’t get in his suitcase to take to Britain), the Temple of Nike (nothing to do with sneakers), and lots of ruins. We climbed the marble stone path to the top of the hill and listened as Betty, our guide, spewed out more names and dates and wars than I can come close to remembering. After her talk, we had time to walk around the ruins, visit the museum, and enjoy the panoramic views of the city, which completely encircles the hill. In her book, The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton says,

We were looking at the remnants of a building erected four centuries before Jesus walked the earth, a building that captures the essence of a group of people who influenced who we are as Westerners more than any other group. It was a sacred space. When we came down off the big hill we had a chance to climb Mars Hill, where Paul debated the Athenians. At the lecture, Brian talked about Paul’s enduring contribution to Christianity being his revolutionary personal ethic. He was less interested in putting forth some sort of theological explanation or treatise and more for talking about how we live out our faith. The mystery of who Jesus was becomes incarnate once more in us: we have to live out our faith in our daily relationships. Mystery and human, truly Paul.

If he could talk there, I could certainly blog there – or at least look like I was (no WIFI hotspot up there).

From there we walked down the hill into a neighborhood called La Plaka, where we had lunch in an outdoor café (moussaka for me). After the meal, Ginger and I broke off from the group and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the city without a map, following our hearts and our noses as we looked for the perfect sidewalk café and a great cup of coffee. We ended up at the Café Metro, which sits on the plaza at the entrance to the Athens Flea Market. There was an Andean band playing on the square, several African vendors hawking bootleg DVDs of every movie currently playing in the theater, all kinds of children and parents crossing back and forth, a rather varied collection of tourists from all over the globe, and lots of dogs.

Athens is full of stray dogs. All of them have been given their shots and have been neutered. The Athenians would rather let the dogs stay in the street (where people in the neighborhoods feed and care for them) than to send them to shelters, according to Betty, where they might be put to sleep or used for experiments. The people of the city see the dogs as theirs and take care of them. My kind of town.

As we walked home, shops were beginning to close down, even though it was only about four, since tonight is Easter night. The Orthodox tradition is to celebrate the Resurrection on Saturday night. The services begin about ten with a vigil until midnight and then the Resurrection service lasts until sunrise. Tomorrow, according to Betty, everyone stays home and eats roast lamb (done on a spit in the front yard) and all kinds of other good stuff. Their Easter service sounds like our Christmas Eve service at 11:00 pm. We want to be awake when Christmas first arrives. I guess they don’t see any need to wait to declare, “Christ is risen!” We may try to go for part of the vigil tonight, if we can stay awake.

Tomorrow morning we begin a road trip that will take us north to Thessaloniki and Phillipi; in a couple of days we will circle south to Corinth and then back here to Athens, where Ginger and I will leave the group and take off for Turkey on our own. Already the first phase of the trip is over and I hardly feel like we’ve gotten off the plane. This is going to go by quickly; I must pay attention.

“All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on the planet,” Hamilton quotes (31). I’d like to offer a revision, with Bruchac’s help: all things are sacred melody when God lets walkers loose in the city. We walked on marble and dust, up hills and down narrow lanes, past churches and shops, street merchants and stray dogs, enjoying the city and being together: a song worth singing indeed.

Peace,
Milton

Greetings from Athens!

We left Boston about 4:40 Eastern Daylight Time, crossed the Atlantic, landed in Frankfurt long enough to change planes, and arrived in Athens at 1:00 (13:00 as they say here), which was 6:00 am to Ginger and me. We got to our hotel about 2:00, checked in, and then had to make a choice of which time zone to honor. We chose to go by Athens time since today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary and we had some celebrating to do.

Sixteen years ago we got engaged at the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas and have done our darndest since to be in a Hard Rock somewhere to celebrate our anniversary. This year was no exception. Athens has a Hard Rock and we got there about an hour before the entire city closed down for Good Friday (according to the Orthodox calendar). We also had some time to walk around the city and feel its vibrancy. This is one cool place.

We came back to the hotel and, still determined not to fall asleep, went up to the restaurant on the top floor to get coffee. The restaurant, The Olive Garden (not the chain, thank God!), has an outdoor terrace with a view of the Acropolis. We sipped and talked until it was time to meet our group for dinner (we didn’t eat much). We came back to the room and I wrestled with the Internet access until I finally got connected (thanks to some help from a guy in India on the other end of the toll free line) so I could post a few words and pictures.

Tomorrow we are headed to the Acropolis and some more wandering on our own. I can’t believe we are really getting to do this.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I are about to go on the trip of our lives.

Tomorrow we leave Boston for Athens and three weeks of adventure tracing the steps of the Apostle Paul through Greece and Turkey. What I’m looking forward to most is three weeks with Ginger. Here are the places we’re going: Athens, Veroia, Thessaloniki, Philippi, Kavala, Meteora, Kalambaka, Delphi, Corinth, Istanbul, Izmir, and Kayseri (the last three are in Turkey). Most of those names are strange to me, other than the ones that have books of the New Testament named after them. I have a lot to learn.

And a lot to eat. I’m so looking forward to the food!

Trips like this couldn’t happen without friends. Our friend Eloise is staying in our house and Schnauzer sitting; our friends Jena and Marc let me borrow their laptop so I can blog along the way — or at least try — so stay tuned for words and pictures. Lots of friends have sent us off with kind words, cards, hugs, and prayers.

The next time you hear from me, I will be across the ocean; I’ve got a list of things to do between now and then, since my bags are not yet packed and I’m not ready to go.

Peace,
Milton

Jay, Eloise, Ginger, and I met for Easter Brunch at Bob’s Southern Bistro. They had a sumptuous buffet including fired chicken, barbeque, red beans and rice, black-eyed peas, eggs, cheese grits, bacon, macaroni and cheese, and some serious carrot cake, cheesecake, and banana pudding. Put that together with a jazz quartet that was doing some nice covers of old jazz standards and four friends who were happy to celebrate the Resurrection and glad church was over and you have a recipe for a great time.

Between mouthfuls we talked, first about how our various services went and then moving on to other things, both casual and significant. In most UCC churches around here, Easter means adding a morning service. One is a fairly standard service and the other is a “family service,” which means there a re a lot of kids and a lot of energy. At Hanover, the family service is the early one (which is the one I went to) and at Marshfield, it’s the late one (which is the one I went to). Top that off with my starting the day helping the high school kids lead our Sunrise Service at Hanover (at 7, not sunrise, thankfully) and I was celebrated out by the time we got to lunch. But it was a good kind of tired.

When we walked into Bob’s, the band was starting to play “Take the A Train,” which is one of the jazz songs I recognize. That I, or anyone else, know the song is a cool story. Billy Strayhorn wrote the song on his way to try and get a gig with Duke Ellington. He based it on the directions to Ellington’s office that he had been given. It was still a year before the tune was recorded, and only then because Ellington needed some new material while most of his stuff was caught up in a music publishing legal fight. It became both the Duke’s theme song and biggest hit; it started out as a kind of desperate guy trying to make music out of the only directions he had.

The tune is great; the story makes it better.

Since Ginger’s sabbatical leave officially started after church today, we had a lot to get done in worship this morning: three baptisms (one baby, a twelve year-old, and a fourteen-year old), Confirmation, as well as our Easter celebration. Each family had packed their pews with everyone who wanted to be there for This Important Day. For both baptism and confirmation there are rituals – things we say and do, promises we make. The words are both familiar and important, things that have been said before, yet new because these voices have never said them quite like this.

What Ginger does best in these moments rich in tradition is infuse them with the life – the melody – of individual stories. As she baptized the infant she told of her history with the family, particularly of having stood with them not so long ago at the graveside of the grandmother of the little girl who was baptized today. She and our youth minister took time to tell us about the three ninth graders who were confirmed, affirming both who they were and their faith commitment. As the confirmands knelt, parents and mentors stood behind them, placing our hands on their shoulders (I was one of the mentors) and the rest of the congregation stood and touched the shoulder of the person in front until we were all connected in a line of faith, hope, and love. We, too, made music out of the directions we were given.

After the service my favorite thing about North Community Church happened: the Easter Egg Hunt in the cemetery. The church emptied out to watch the little ones run between the tombstones looking for brightly colored eggs filled with candy. The sun was bright today, which made it even better. Long after the eggs were found and a good portion of the chocolate consumed, we stood under the slowly budding trees and told stories of our own. I talked with one woman whose husband is twenty-eight days from leaving Iraq. He is in Mosul. When he comes home, his time in the Army will be over and they will figure out what life looks like together. I played with Mia, a new baby to our church who was quite fascinated with my big round face (our faces were the same shape), as I was with her big blue eyes. And I got to hug one who was back at church after a long hospitalization and is beginning to feel like herself in ways she has not known before. Today really was about new life for her.

I didn’t write a song, but I did think of a poem: William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read Each Other”:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Jay commented at lunch that he had been to see Friends With Money, a new movie. When we asked how it was, one of the things he said was, “It had a weird ending; nothing was resolved. It quit at a strange place.”

Eloise said, “Milton will like it.”

She’s right. Easter has come, Lent has ended, and thus, so does my Lenten Journal, without much resolution but with a great deal of gratitude, wonder, and – I hope – at least a little bit of music. Thanks for making the journey with me.

Peace,
Milton

PS – I’m taking tomorrow off.

One of the regular joys of my life is reading Lewis Lapham’s “Notebook” each month in Harpers. Lapham announced in the May issue that he is stepping down as the editor, though he will still continue to write for the magazine six times a year. I love reading Lapham because he believes and demonstrates that words matter. He also has the ability to contextualize what is going on today with an amazing grasp of history. And he writes some amazing sentences that leave me speechless because they show what a person can really do with the English language. For example:

“In other words, a long if desultory conversation with people whom I wouldn’t recognize in a bookstore or a police lineup, but from whom I’ve learned that it is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader – the writer’s labor turned to the wheel of the reader’s imagination – that produces the energies of mind on which a society depends for its freedoms and from which it gathers the common store of its hope for a future that doesn’t look like an early Mel Gibson movie.”

He makes me believe words can change things. He starts each of his essays with a quote. This month, it was from Wallace Stevens.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon a blue guitar.

I went to the kitchen late today because I was asked to participate in an Eagle Scout ceremony for two of the kids in my youth group. Hanover is Boy Scout Central. I’ve never seen a town support scouting the way they do. They have so many guys who qualified for Eagle this year they’ve had to do the ceremonies in two. Most of the ceremony was designed to educate the audience on the basics of scouting and the amount of time, energy, and determination the two guys put in to earn their Eagle. I got the point.

As they were going through the various things a scout is (none of which I can remember right now), the scout master annotated each one. The explanation I remember related to the word “obedient.” (Not one of my favorite words.) His explanation, in part, said, “If you disagree with a law, you work to change it through the system, rather than disobeying it.”

My mind immediately jumped to a piece of an old interview with William Sloane Coffin I heard yesterday on Fresh Air, as Terry Gross’ tribute to him. He was a man who saw civil disobedience as a crucial means of protest. I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the brave souls who sat at lunch counters knowing they would be beaten for breaking a stupid hateful law. I wanted to offer a minority report: wear your Eagle proudly and play a blue guitar. We don’t need more obedient people who wait for things to change. Life means more than, “Thank you, sir, may I have another.”

They killed Jesus for being disobedient. He just wouldn’t go along with the status quo, so they killed him. That’s the short version. Jesus played a blue guitar – on the Sabbath, no less. You don’t make the Keepers of Order happy by breaking into the guitar solo from “Free Bird” while they are forcing people into line. You don’t get a merit badge for making people uncomfortable. You go down for that. The blue guitar is part of the reason I sit here late on a Saturday night waiting for Sunday when disobedience wins and we get to believe that justice really can roll down like water.

I wish I could paint my guitar blue for the sunrise service. Our senior high group leads the worship and we do the hymns with guitar. The tradition at Hanover is to close the service with “Lord of the Dance.” It’s a zippy little song that tells the story of the Incarnation in five verses to a variation on the Shaker tune, “Simple Gifts.” The youth group loves the song and find it somewhat amusing because the rather buoyant melody doesn’t let up when the lyric turns somber, so you end up with a rather jaunty Crucifixion verse.

I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black –
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on

We all smile at each other as we sing and, when we finish the song, for some reason we all feel compelled to talk like pirates. for a few minutes. Sydney Cater, who wrote the song, said, “I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality.” Jesus is a dancer. That makes me not so Christ like in this regard, though I do have a coffee mug, thanks to my friend Cherry, with a picture of Jesus in a t-shirt that says, “Trust me I’m a DJ.” As Coffin says, “The only security in life lies in embracing its insecurity. And faith in Jesus Christ, far from diminishing the risks, inspires the courage to take them on – all of them, including the risk of intellectual uncertainty” (Credo 144).

The two guys who got their Eagles today are our speakers at the Sunrise Service in the morning. They are both people whose faith matters deeply to them, and who know how to play on a blue guitar, their Tuesday night scout meetings notwithstanding. They did well today. They chased down a dream and caught it and got a medal for it. I’m proud of them. I’m honored that they asked me to do the benediction. As I spoke, I mentioned my favorite words about Jesus in John’s gospel: “Knowing that he had come from God and was going to God, Jesus took a towel and wrapped it around his waist and bent down to wash the feet of his disciples.” I had to at least plant the seeds of insurrection.

Jesus’ understanding of where he had come from and where he was headed gave him the courage and the compassion to break all the rules in the name of Love. Truly, things as they are are changed when they’re played on a blue guitar.

Peace,
Milton

Some days on the calendar pass by as one in a succession of days. Others draw a line between before and after, leaving an indelible mark. They do not stand alone — even the most cataclysmic of events is a culmination of antecedents, but the event itself causes us to remember one day in particular as The Day. Garrison Keilor’s list of events sent me searching for what today means.

April 14, 1865 was the day John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head at the Ford Theater, five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appamattox. Keillor comments:

“Lincoln had received word of Robert E. Lee’s surrender and the end of the Civil War just a few days before he died. He spent his last week as president arguing with Congress about how to readmit the Southern states to the Union. He believed that there should be as little punishment for the rebels as possible.

“He had a dream that week that he was on a boat moving rapidly toward shore. It was the same dream he’d had just before every positive development since the war started. He believed it was a sign that everything was coming out right. That afternoon, at 3:00, Lincoln took a ride in an open carriage with his wife and he was the happiest she’d ever seen him. He told her, ‘I consider this day, the war, has come to a close.’”

April 14, 1912 – at 11:40 pm – was the day the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg. The “unsinkable ship” sailed on hubris as much as water. Barely two hours into the following morning, the ship had gone down killing over fifteen hundred people.

April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, was the worst of the dust storms to hit Texas and Oklahoma, which was known as the Dust Bowl. At one point, that region was the most fertile in the country, but was over cultivated to the point of exhaustion. “The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face,” Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. “People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk… We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real.”

April 14, 2006 – today — is the day my cousin Ryan turns 13, which doesn’t carry the slightest hint of tragedy. His thirteen years on the planet stack up as good news. I’m grateful he’s alive and well. Today he officially becomes a teenager, a particularly significant American rite of passage.

This year, today is Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death, which matters to some more than others. Last night, after Maundy Thursday services at our respective churches, Ginger and I planned to meet for dinner. The place we picked had, unknown to us, gone out of business, so we ended up at Bull’s Run, a pub in our neighborhood. In a matter of about a half an hour, we went from the solemn darkness of our Tenebrae services to someone doing a horrible karaoke rendition of “Hotel California.” The bar was packed; my guess is we were the only ones in the room who had come from church.

My schedule is a bit different from most Fridays because the owner of the restaurant decided to stop serving lunch, so instead of going in at nine I’m going in at four. I had already tried to mentally prepare myself for making burgers between noon and three; now I will get to spend it quietly. I’m grateful for the gift, even if I do lose some hours. I want to take time to notice, to pay attention.

When I was in Dallas a few weeks back, my friend Lynn and I were talking about grief. She told about their dog dying and the way her three sons reacted to losing their lifelong friend. They were in the car one day when one of the boys said, “Mom, how can all these people just keep going on with their lives? Don’t they know what happened?”
No, they don’t. They have too much other stuff coming at them, without much help in how to make sense of it at all. So says Robert Phillips:

Headlines

War Dims Hope for Peace.
Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told.
Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead.

Miners Refuse to Work after Death.
Include Your Children When Baking Cookies.
War Dims Hope for Peace.

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Experts Say
Prostitutes Appeal to Pope.
Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead.

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half.
Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide.
& War Dims Hope for Peace.

Stolen Painting Found by Tree.
Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over.
& Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead.

Iraqi Head Seeks Arms.
Police Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers.
War Dims Hope for Peace.
Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead

How do I mark today? Though the coincidences are interesting, there must be more than the irony of a president’s death, a vicious storm, and an archetypal maritime tragedy all happening on Crucifixion Day. There has to be more to the soundtrack than Daniel Powter singing, “You’ve had a bad day.” Try as I might, I will not be able to create the despair and hopelessness of the disciples as they saw Jesus die and then ran to hide from whatever might be coming next. I know Sunday’s coming; we’ve already printed the orders of service.

Jesus’ death wasn’t big news on the day it happened, outside of his circle of friends, anymore than those who will die today in the Congo or Darfur or Baghdad or Boston. On this side of the Resurrection, his death is big news because it offers us the chance to move through despair to hope, to find some meaning in death beyond grief. And to give some meaning to life beyond making ourselves comfortable. Ginger chooses the language of “Jesus gave his life for us” rather than “Jesus died for us,” saying that all of Jesus’ earthly existence was part of the act, not just the death on the cross. He was about more than the Big Finish.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel posted a wonderful tribute to William Sloane Coffin in which she writes, “A few years ago, James Carroll wrote of Coffin’s gospel, ‘…What a gospel it was. The world he described was upside-down; the church on the side of the poor; the powerful at risk for losing everything; the disenfranchised as sole custodians of moral legitimacy. Coffin, in his passionate sermon that day, was perhaps the first person from which you heard that defining question: Whose side are you on?’”

Though it’s tempting to flee like the first disciples, or act like it’s just another day, may we be disciples who stay and give our lives, everyday.

Peace,
Milton