don't eat alone

Monday mornings are down time for me.

After two full days at the restaurant and one at church, I lay pretty low here at the house. Ginger was gone on a clergy retreat, so I stopped at Blockbuster on my way home from youth group to pick up a movie for breakfast. The one that caught my eye was The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I love the novel both for the quality of the story and because I feel a strong connection to Thornton Wilder. The movie was watchable because the story is so incredible; the casting choices make the film fall short of what it might have been.

Ten years ago, I enrolled in the summer workshop of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto. I came to a place in my life where I decided it was time to quit talking about wanting to write and do some damn writing. At the workshop, I had a chance to work with Timothy Findley, a wonderful Canadian writer. The workshop led me to sign up for the year-long correspondence course, and Findley mentored me as I wrote a novel in the year that followed. As he shared his insights on writing, he also shared his story. Tiff, as his friends called him, started out as an actor. He was working with Wilder and Ruth Gordon in a production when he wrote his first short story; they both encouraged him to write, thank God, just as Tiff encouraged me. He died in his sleep in 2002.

The ways in which the circumstances of life connected me to these amazing people is not unlike the idea behind the story. Five people were crossing the Bridge of San Luis Rey when it gave way and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. A priest who was about to cross saw the event as a chance to ask one of the ultimate questions: “Do we live by plan and die by plan or do we live by accident and die by accident?”

Separate of the story, Wilder said, “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

The novel is a beautiful tapestry showing both the individual lives and the ways in which they were woven together and connected with the lives around them. The one person who knew all five who died was a nun. She closes the story with these words: “There is a land between the living and the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival. The only meaning.”

The bridge is love — the one bridge, ultimately, that doesn’t give way.

One of those who commented on my “open and affirming” post did so with a great deal of vitriol and violence. His language spoke of God striking me down, of my words bringing God’s judgment such that God would kill “children, mothers’ and grandmothers” because I was willing to participate in equal marriage. As people tried to respond to him, the volume of hatred only ratcheted up.

When the disciples saw a blind man, they asked Jesus, “Whose sin made this guy blind?”

“Nobody’s sin,” Jesus answered. “Look at it a different way: what can the love of God accomplish in this circumstance?” And he healed him.

When judgment is the paradigm, we all end up dead in the ravine.

The bridge is Love. The only survival. The only meaning.

Peace,
Milton

PS — Starting tomorrow, this blog will take a bit of a different shape. About fifteen years ago I began, as my Lenten practice, writing everyday. Before email, I picked one friend and wrote a journal the them. Over the years, my daily entry has been to a growing email list; this year it will happen here. My commitment is to write a thousand words a night chronicling my journey through the Lenten season. This year, our youth ski trip falls such that I will miss writing this Saturday, but other than that there will be an entry everyday. Peace — MB-C

Don Knotts died last Friday.

I heard about it on my way to work at the restaurant on Saturday morning and I began to chuckle and feel sad at the same time. Barney Fife (whose middle name was Milton) is one of the TV characters who has left a deep impression on me. I’m grateful for the life of Don Knotts.

Since I grew up in Africa, I first saw The Andy Griffith Show in reruns, particularly in college. One of the stations played several episodes in a row every afternoon and there were a bunch of us who would watch together almost everyday. We memorized most of the dialogue and it became our way of communicating much of the time. I still carry some of the lines in my muscle memory that talk about sin, heartache, physical ability, and, of course, nippin’ it in the bud.

Marrying into a family from Birmingham, Alabama meant moving to Mayberry in some ways. My mother-in-law is the champion of Andy Griffith trivia, bar none. She could of easily been one of the characters on the show just by being herself: honest, welcoming, hopeful, and hilarious. I’m not sure many days go by without Ginger and I making some sort of Barney reference. The relationship in my life most marked by Barney is my friendship with Burt, who now pastors a church in Waco, Texas.

Burt and I met in the fall of 1976, when he started to Baylor. We have remained fast friends since, and were roommates in seminary. He does the best Barney impersonation I’ve ever seen. On more than one occasion, we’ve gotten on to elevators in office buildings and each moved to a different corner. When the car filled up, we began to sing the Mayberry Union High Fight Song (watch Part One to hear the song), or hum “The Church in the Wildwood” in harmony the way Andy and Barney did sitting on Andy’s front porch in the cool of the evening. No one else really understood, but we cracked ourselves up.

Burt was the first person I heard draw the parallel between Andy and Barney’s friendship and that between Jesus and Peter. Peter, he would say, was the Barney Fife of the gospels: quick to speak, slow to think, running into any situation with his one bullet in his pocket believing he could take care of things, and always getting in over his head. Jesus responded with grace and forgiveness, over and over – as did Andy – sometimes chiding, but never humiliating or belittling his friend. Though Burt does a hell of a Barney impersonation, he has been an Andy kind of friend to me, for I’ve had my share of Barney moments.

Thanks to reruns and DVDs (and even a site that lets you watch online), Barney will live on for a long time, despite Don Knott’s passing. He left a wonderful legacy. I heard an interview clip where Knotts talked about the danger of playing one character too long was you became typecast. You couldn’t get other parts because directors believed the audience could never see you as someone other than that character. Knotts went on to say, even if that were somewhat true, he was glad to be remembered as Barney Fife.

Would we could all find the grace to be such a character: unabashedly ourselves, and full of confidence and hope because we trusted the companionship of a true friend.

Here’s to you, Barn. Give us one last word.

Peace, Milton

I didn’t write yesterday because I used what time I had reading This Is How It Happened on Real Live Preacher. Gordon does a great job describing his pilgrimage to inclusiveness. Then came the comments, which — if you’ve spent anytime on RLP — you know are many. I threw in my two cents and went to work.

As I sat down this morning, I checked in again to find fifty new comments since yesterday. I read them all. As I said there, by the time I finished I was exhausted, encouraged (by some), and deeply saddened by some of the things people will say in Jesus’ name. Comments on a blog do not communicate tone effectively in every case, so I won’t assume to know people’s feelings or motivations, but their words made me sad because they said, on one way or another, gay and lesbian people should not be welcomed unconditionally into the church.

I don’t believe that.

I also don’t believe homosexuality is a sin. It is an orientation — a way of being — not a choice. If I say someone chose to be gay, then I have to articulate when I chose to be heterosexual; I didn’t choose it. I was born this way, as were my gay and lesbian friends. We miss the mark when we let the discussion be about sex. All of us are more than just sexual beings. My parents talk about “the gay lifestyle,” which translated means sexual promiscuity, which is certainly not limited to gays and lesbians. Sex for the sake of sex without regard for the other human being and without the necessary relationship is sinful and damaging, regardless of who is involved; being gay or lesbian, however, is not a sin. I understand there are different ways to interpret the passages, and I’m not claiming everyone has to read it my way. Good scholars are deeply divided on this issue. I am saying I’m not going against the Bible to take the stand I’m taking.

One other thing I believe: rarely does anyone change his or her mind in these discussions. We’ve already decided where we stand and we like to make our points. I’m not trying to pick a fight here, I just want to go on record — again — for who I think God is calling the church to be.

As a minister in the United Church of Christ in Massachusetts, I have the wonderful opportunity to be a part of a denomination who has chosen to welcome everyone, has ordained gay and lesbian ministers since the late seventies (when the American Psychiatric Association still listed homosexuality as mental illness), and — based on each congregation’s decision — can perform marriages between two adults who have committed their lives to one another under God. When same gender marriage became legal in our state, opponents ranted about the threat to “traditional” marriage. I wondered what they meant: anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night? threatening letters? gangs of gay couples intimidating husbands and wives at the mall?

I would like to report, two years on, that Ginger and I have not been threatened in any way. Just the opposite. We have had the chance to attend the weddings of dear friends who have finally been able to feel completely welcome in the church and the faith to which they have committed their lives. One couple got married on their thirtieth anniversary. It was amazing.

The UCC designation for churches who want to be publicly intentional about welcoming everyone is open and affirming. You would think those two adjectives would fit any church. Too often, however, the public face the church puts forward is one of exclusion. Fred Phelps drove from Kansas to stand across the street from a wedding here in our state so he could scream,”God hates fags.”

That’s what Christians do?

I know he’s the lunatic fringe, and I know he’s also part of the “everyone” I think needs to be welcomed, and I know he’s sometimes the only person labeled “Christian” that some people encounter. I’m not trying to beat him up. My point is I can’t find a place where Jesus acted that way, or called us to do so.

When same gender marriage became the law here, our governor leaned into an old law to keep people from out of state from getting married here. The law, passed early in the twentieth century, was written to curb interracial marriage, which in its time was seen as a threat to “real marriage.” In terms of civil rights, his move brought the issue to clarity. The law was wrong then and it is wrong now. This is a matter of treating everyone equally, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes some of us.

Faith, however, is not about civil rights; it’s more than that. We are called to love the world — everyone not because it’s the legal thing, or even the moral thing, but because it is the truest thing we can do. There is a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, says the hymn. From the beach at the end of my street, the sea is endless.

When it comes right down to it, all I know to say is this: when I stand before God to account for my life, if God says, “Why did you let so many people in?” I’ll take the hit. I can live with that. If God were to say, “Why did you keep closing the door when I intended there to be room for everyone?” I couldn’t take it.

And I can’t, for a minute, imagine God would ever say that.

Peace,
Milton

Ginger and I had time to meet for a cup of coffee in the middle of the day — unusual for a Thursday. When we sat down at Dunkin’ Donuts she asked, “So what do you get out of writing your blog?”

She’s never one for superficial questions, even during coffee break.

A couple of things came to mind.

First, I’m writing at least five days a week. This blog will be two months old on Monday and I will be sneaking up on fifty posts by then. I love to write, I want to write, I feel called to write and, for many years, I have let other things take the time I dreamed of using to put words together in a way that was meaningful to me. I feel like I’m making a good offering of my gifts. Writing regularly has also had a diminishing effect on my depression. This blog has made for an easier winter.

Second, I’m making significant connections. Some writers are loners: they go off by themselves, never sharing ideas, and stay alone until they give birth to whatever they are trying to get out of themselves. Not me. I do my best writing in the context of interactions: I throw out an idea, see what gets tossed back, and then make something new out of all of it. I’m deeply fed as a writer and a person by a sense of belonging. This blog has led me to some old friends and several new ones. Each week, my list of “stuff I like to read” grows because someone leaves a comment that leads me back to their blog and I try to pass what they are doing along to others.

I realize that either one of those answers is not unique to me as one of millions out here in the blogosphere, but they both bring me back here day after day to see what will flow from my fingers to the screen.

Peace,
Milton

I’m sitting at my desk looking at the sunset over the marsh through the window in my office, which is unusual for me on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m usually at the restaurant. Life for me, right now, divides into three nights at church and three nights at the Red Lion Inn, and some of all seven days doing one or the other. I’m home tonight because this cold has gotten the best of me and I’m out of gas. I’ve been sick more this winter than I have in several years, which I take as a signal that something in this schedule I’m keeping needs to change. Knowing that it is most important to make a move toward something rather than just away from something, I’m waiting and praying about what comes next. But, for these days, this is what life looks like.

When I got to the restaurant on Friday, Robert, the chef, told me to come up with a new soup since we sold out of the chili. Still in a bit of a southwestern vibe, I found some black beans in the storeroom and decided to see what I could do with them. What I came up with was a Tequila and Lime Black Bean Soup; I wish I thought then to call it Soup From Stock, but then again puns are mostly lost on pubsters. It turned out to taste pretty good. I thought it was a little bitter at first, thanks to the lime, so I added some chopped chorizo and the meat balanced it out nicely.

It strikes me, as I try to figure out what happens next in my life, that I’m working on much the same kind of recipe. I’ve got to figure out what to make of what I have.

For some reason – and I think it’s the sunset tonight – my mind went to the last page of The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite novels:

And I I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come along way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter. . . . And one fine morning —-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I was reading Gatsby with my tenth graders at Winchester High the June we moved into our house here in Marshfield, which would qualify as part of the vast obscurity beyond the city. After a day of unpacking boxes, Ginger and I walked the 600 feet to the end of our street to stand on the beach and look eastward across Cape Cod Bay. As we stood there, I saw a blinking light – a green light –out in the ocean.

“Look,” I said, “it’s Daisy’s house.”

We moved to Marshfield chasing dreams: Ginger wanted to be a senior pastor; I wanted to write. By September, I was sinking deep into my depression and couldn’t do much of anything but walk down the beach. I started picking up pieces of sea glass – broken glass, smoothed and polished by the water that washes up with the tide. “Tiny bits of nevermind” I called them in a poem I wrote. As the pile of colored pieces grew, I taught myself how to make earrings out of them and made jewelry for Ginger.

One of my persistent ideas as I walked down the beach was what I saw as I walked was determined by the line I chose to follow. If I stayed up close to the sea wall, I would see certain rocks and shells; if I walked closer to the water, I would see other things. When I decided where I was going to walk, I was also deciding where I was not going to walk. There was no way to see it all. Being a person who has never liked to feel as though I was missing something, that realization was quite humbling.

I realize, sitting here at the window, that many nights have passed since I last saw the green light. I haven’t even looked for sea glass in a long time; my walks on the beach have been spent watching schnauzers bounce like bunnies as they run believing they really can catch the sea gulls. The line I’ve taken in my life has left me more aware of feeling beaten by the currents than captured by the possibilities. It’s not so much needing new ingredients as it is having the imagination to come up with a different recipe.

It’s getting dark now, at least at street level. The sky above is azure blue, a sheltering sky that will soon give way to starlight, as Orion and his friends begin their nighty sojourn over our house. And soon, the green light will start shining on the bay.

I know, even though I can’t see it from here.

I’m hanging out at the house today because I have a cold and I feel terrible. I have a couple of committee meetings to go to at church tonight, so I’m saving my strength. Our church is a part of something called The Timothy Project, a visioning emphasis of the Mass. Conference of the UCC to help thriving churches do even better, and our Timothy Team is gathering to talk about what happens next. My other meeting is our Stewardship Committee. Other Tuesdays of the month I meet with the Youth Team, the Diaconate, and the Christian Education Committee — and that’s not all of them. As I’m getting ready for those meetings, I can’t get the gathering I saw in the ice cream parlor Sunday afternoon. I’ve stumped myself trying to think of the last committee meeting I went to at church that was focused on something other than perpetuating the institution or taking care of our own.

I can’t remember one.

My friend Gordon, over at Real Live Preacher, just posted a great article on church marketing where he talks about the words we choose to describe ourselves. He starts by talking about church signs. When I was in high school in Houston, the church where my dad pastored had one of those signs where the slogan changed every week. I never knew who put the slogans up, but they were all cutesy and full of bad puns. The week it said, “It is no sin to cheat the devil” I came home and told my father I was going to change churches if he didn’t make the sign guy get a grip. I’ve never met anyone who said, “I joined this church because I love the little sayings on the sign outside.”

Jesus doesn’t fit in a sound bite.

I’m struggling to see how Jesus fits in a committee meeting where we only talk about ourselves. I don’t want to come across too judgmental because the folks in these meetings mean well and we have some important work to do, I just don’t think we are ever allowed the luxury of working on only one side of the equation of faith. When we talk about how we are going to challenge one another to give more to meet our budget deficit, we need to talk about how we are going to give away more at the same time. How could any church gather in the next day or two and not spend time talking and praying about the miners in Mexico and the victims of the mudslides in the Philippines?

I don’t understand enough about prayer to grasp how praying for faraway people in pain helps them, but I do know it changes me. If we make a point of having those kind of prayerful conversations each time we gather, it will change us as a church as well.

We have two slogans that show up in words, both printed and spoken:

“A growing church for a growing community.”
“No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”

I think we put them out there with good intentions and we work to mean what we say. The challenge comes when life calls us to parse the phrases more closely than we had anticipated. We, like many churches, mostly think about how to get you through our doors, not so much how to knock on yours.

If you’ve read this blog much at all, you’ll understand when I say my problem is how to go into these meetings and not sound like Johnny-One-Note. I come loaded with thoughts on chocolate, free trade, being Open and Affirming, mission trips — and I’m grow quickly weary of the ease with which we spend money on windows and pew cushions. I struggle to find the balance between speaking a prophetic word and sounding like a pompous ass. I’m not the only one in the world — or in my church — who is worried about the people trapped in the mines and the mud. I’m nowhere close to having the corner on compassion. I’m afraid I get so busy looking around the world I don’t always notice the people in the room, people who have spent their lives in our church with great faith, love, and intention.

More than one time in my life I’ve been called back to the movie Mass Appeal, a story about a young seminarian working in a church with an older priest who has allowed himself to settle for comfort over faith. The seminarian is determined to change the congregation, but tries to do so with a flamethrower, rather than a pastoral word. He learns the folks in the pew, which he sees only as rich and clueless, are hurting and searching as much as he is — they just talk about it differently and have found different ways to cope with the pain.

You’d think, twenty-five years out of seminary, I would have finally learned that lesson.

The church needs my voice, but as part of the chorus of voices, not as the paid soloist. And I will only sing well if I’m listening hard to those around me. Then we have the chance for harmony. Without taking the choir analogy too far, one more thing: every choir that sings well rehearses a great deal, working on both the big picture and how things go measure by measure.

(The last paragraph was aimed mostly at me; take what you need.)

Peace,
Milton