don't eat alone

A year or more before my father died my parents decided to sell their house in Waco and move into a new apartment complex intended for people over fifty-five. The move felt impulsive to my brother and me because they had never talked about doing something like that. Even the way Dad told the story–that they had gone to dinner with a couple who had just moved into the place and it felt like the right thing–felt like it happened faster that we could take it in. Nevertheless, they moved beyond the impulse of that evening and went through all the steps to make it happen.

Once my dad had his stroke and then died a few weeks later, the move was a gift. They had already gone through most of their stuff and decided what to do with it. We didn’t have to figure out how to sell a house or move my mother. She was set where she was in a place she could take care of and surrounded by people who knew her. By then, the over-fifty-five thing had not worked for the apartment management, so Mom was surrounded by a combination of older folks and graduate students–and she made friends with all of them.

My dad died August 3, 2013; Mom died January 15, 2016. After her funeral, my task was to pack up her apartment and figure out what we would keep and what we would give away. She had given instructions about most of it, particularly her clothes and the big pieces of furniture, but there were drawers full of little things that we had to figure out. When it came to the kitchen–the room where she and I had made so many memories–I had trouble letting go of almost anything. But I did. I worked hard to take only those things that I could put to use. And I am still using them. Each day, I touch things that remind me of her and what I learned from her.

One of those things is a small mesh strainer that fits over the drain in the sink to catch things that don’t need to go down the drain. I remember finding it as we packed up the apartment. I had never seen or used on before. I stared at the little circle of wire mesh molded to fit the drain and wondered why it had never occurred to me to use one, particularly because most of the places we have lived have not had garbage disposals. I wrapped it up and brought it back to Guilford and slid it into place over the drain, where it has stayed until this morning.

As I stood at the sink filling a water glass, I noticed it was gone. Our friend Jay, who is staying with us for a bit, was the only one awake. I asked if he knew what happened to it. He said he saw it was gone as well, but had not moved it. I went back in the kitchen and looked in the trash can. I searched along the countertop. Nothing. All I could feel was that I had lost a piece of her. One more thing was gone.

I knew no one in the house would have thrown it out on purpose, yet I wanted to wake up Ginger and Rachel and ask, “What did you do with the strainer in the sink?” as though they were a part of some conspiracy. I sat down to journal instead and scribbled down my accusations so even I could see how ludicrous they were.

By the time Ginger woke up, I was beyond blaming and just felt sad. I told her what had happened and why it mattered: “It belonged to Mom,” I said. We didn’t have long to talk because I had a funeral at the church where I am the bridge pastor, so I had to leave to help someone else navigate a grief much fresher than mine. As I left, Ginger said, “We’ll find it.”

At the funeral, I stood beside a brother and a sister–both about my age–as they grieved their father. As the daughter spoke about her dad, she talked in details and small stories. And I thought, again, about the sink strainer.

When I got back to Guilford, I went to the hardware store and bought a new one. “It’s a small thing,” I told myself. “It was never going to last forever. Six and a half years is pretty good.” I walked in the house and went straight to the sink, determined to put my purchase in its place and get on with life.

The strainer was back over the drain. Ginger was out of the house, so I had no idea how it got there, but I felt a wash of relief. I put the new strainer in a drawer for use when its time comes and then just stood over the sink and stared and thought about my mother. No, I stood there and missed her.

When Ginger got home, I was waking up from a nap. The first thing I asked was where she had found it. We have a double sink in our kitchen. The left-hand side holds the dish drainer; the right is where we wash the dishes, and where the strainer stays. The people who help us clean the house had put it on the left-hand side and we had consequently filled up the dish rack. Ginger moved it back in place.

That nothing lasts forever is not a new lesson to learn for me or anyone else. Life is a litany of losses. That is not news. Even as I could feel the wound of my grief being opened this morning when I saw the strainer was missing, I also wondered how life could be so fragile that I could get taken out by a three dollar piece of hardware, and then feel healed by its return.

I know nothing lasts forever. Tonight, I am grateful that little strainer will last a little while longer.

Peace,
Milton

When we left for Ireland, I had visions of journaling everyday and keeping track of all the details, as well as writing every night to provide a travelogue of the trip. Obviously, that didn’t happen–mostly because I filled the time doing things and being with people rather than taking notes, though Ginger and I have done our best to go back and write down as much as we can remember. She actually did a better job of tracking details along the way.

My lack of notes reminds me of one of a story I heard on NPR many years ago. The journalist asked several professional photographers to describe “the best picture they chose not to take.” All of the photographers interviewed were able to answer almost immediately. Each one described a situation where, when the time came to snap the photo, they were overcome by the sacredness of the moment and chose to take a mental picture instead. Each one could describe what they had seen in vivid detail; they had not forgotten the moment. Somehow it lived more vividly as a mental image rather than a visual one.

I suppose most all of us have mental scrapbooks of places and people, some of which contain pictures we never took but can still see. Some of those people and places are significant even if they aren’t famous or well-known because they have helped to shape us into who we are.

As a part of our Ireland Retreat, we spent four days in the coastal town of Kilkeel in northern Ireland, about halfway between Belfast and Dublin. After being in Belfast for four days of walks and talks and meetings, we moved to the more rural setting for a time of reflection and renewal. As we prepared for our day, Gareth Higgins said, “This afternoon I want to take you to my favorite place in all of Ireland.”

We boarded the bus and drove about a half an hour into the Mourne Mountains to the Silent Valley Mountain Park, which is home to the Silent Valley Reservoir that is the water supply for both County Down and the city of Belfast. The land is uninhabited. The vegetation is sparse. The mountains are mostly rock, which means the water that runs down them moves quickly into the rivers that were dammed beginning a century ago. Over the course of time, they built walking paths so people could enjoy the mountains. At the entrance are a couple of buildings that house a small cafe and a gift shop. There is a small pond there where you can feed ducks. But, for the most part, the attraction of the park is the three-mile path that runs from the entrance to the base of the Ben Crom Dam. From there, you. can walk up a staircase that switches back and forth until you get to the top of the dam, but most people seemed to be content to sit at the base and rest before beginning the three-mile walk back to the entrance.

About two-thirds of our group made the trip. As we walked, we looked like a human accordion, spreading out and then coming back together as our differing walking rhythms played alongside each other. Most of the walk was a gentle slope along the reservoir until we got near the dam. The last quarter mile was a climb.

The walk felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, mostly because the whole point was to walk. Though the dam was our destination, we weren’t really going to see it. We were walking through the Silent Valley because Gareth wanted us to see his favorite place. When we got to the bottom of the dam, most of us rested on the benches while others trekked to the top. I couldn’t help but ask the question:

Why is this your favorite place in all of Ireland?

I guess part of me wondered because it was not the most beautiful part of Ireland we had seen. Don’t get me wrong–it was beautiful, but it was understated. There were no breath-taking vistas or castles or any significant historical markers, save one for a tunnel that had been dug through one of the mountains to connect two rivers. But I was not asking because I was unimpressed. I asked because I wanted to know why this place mattered to my friend.

Gareth thought for a moment, not because he didn’t have an answer as much as he was contemplating how to convey why the Silent Valley spoke to him so profoundly. “I have been coming here since I was a child,” he said. “At all different times of year. We used to come up here on New Year’s Eve.” He went on telling stories for several minutes and, as he did, the place grew more and more beautiful.

A few days later, Ginger and I stood at the top of the Cliffs of Moher on the other side of Ireland. The scale and spectacle of the dramatic way the land drops into the sea is stunning. The walking paths were much fuller than those along the reservoir, and the visitor’s center and gift shop much larger. I love that I got to see them, and that they were one of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites we got to see on our trip, along with the Giant’s Causeway. But if I had to pick one, I’d go back to the Silent Valley because of the stories. At the Cliffs and the Causeway we read plaques and read histories, but I didn’t find anyone to ask,

Why is this your favorite place in all of Ireland?

I am grateful that it mattered to Gareth to share his favorite place for no other reason than it was his favorite place. As I walked back, I tried to picture him as a young boy and then as a teenager walking that same path. Based on his story, he grew up on that road, in a way, and then invited us to walk it with him. What a gift to follow in his footsteps and hear what the Silent Valley had to say.

Peace,
Milton

We’ve seen a lot of stones in Ireland.

Much of the land is made of giant rocks masquerading as mountains, enormous pieces of ancient earth rising upwards. Somehow, the land feels older here.

I learned about stone walls when we moved to New England. I had not seen them before, other than in pictures or movies. When we lived in Boston, Ginger and I used to drive up to Robert Frost’s farm in southern New Hampshire and follow the path marked by signs telling us which poem to read at a particular spot. Near one stone fence we read “The Mending Wall”—

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . .

Yet I have always found a beauty in them, in part, I think, because I learned that they grew out of a practical need. As farmers cleared the land, they encountered lots of rocks. It was easier to use them as fences than to try and haul them off somewhere. The real beauty of them, however, is in their construction. They are stacked without mortar, placed in such a way that gravity becomes the glue. They fall into to each other, which strengthens the whole wall. They don’t fall apart easily.

Our time in Ireland has helped me realize those first New Englanders did not invent anything, they simply continued practices they learned from those who had come before them. This is a country of stacked stones, walls designed to contain sheep and cows, to control grazing, to divide property, and, I trust, to tell stories.

One of the reasons I notice stacked stones is because of a story from scripture that holds enduring meaning for me. It comes from the book of Joshua. After the Hebrew people had crossed the Jordan River,

Joshua called for the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one man per tribe. Joshua said to them, “Cross over into the middle of the Jordan, up to the Lord your God’s chest. Each of you, lift up a stone on his shoulder to match the number of the tribes of the Israelites. This will be a symbol among you. In the future your children may ask, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’ Then you will tell them that the water of the Jordan was cut off before the Lord’s covenant chest. When it crossed over the Jordan, the water of the Jordan was cut off. These stones will be an enduring memorial for the Israelites.” (Common English Bible)

I rarely see a stack of stones without thinking of the question: What do these stones mean to you?

Making a stone wall is no easy feat, and lifting the stones may be the easiest part. To create the kind of support needed for the wall to endure, each stone has to be placed with intention. Some of them have to have their edges knocked off so they fit just right. None of the walls stand because all of the stones are uniformly cut; they stand because they fall into each other rather than away. They are stacked to stay together.

Not all the stones in the field were stacked into walls. Some were thrown as weapons, intended to do damage or create fear. Some were built into fortresses in response, as dividers and protectors. What our stones mean comes from how we use them.

We spent our afternoon yesterday in the town of Downpatrick, in County Down, learning about St. Patrick, which was another lesson in stacking stones. We went first to the St. Patrick Centre, which says they are the only permanent exhibition about him in the world. The exhibit was a meandering multimedia path through early Irish history, but it began with a guide undoing what we thought we knew:

Patrick didn’t chase the snakes out of Ireland–there were never any snakes in Ireland.
Patrick never wore priestly robes.
Patrick never used a shamrock to explain the Trinity.
Patrick was never officially canonized as a saint.
Patrick didn’t wear green.
Patrick didn’t bring Christianity to Ireland; it was already here.
Patrick was not Irish.

I think it is also fair to assume Patrick never intended to be remembered by copious amounts of alcohol to celebrate the day of his death.

The exhibit inside the center also made it clear that we don’t know a lot about him for sure. Only a couple of documents have survived, one being his Confession and the other a letter to a general. How we have stacked the stones says more about who we want him to be rather than who he is, perhaps. But such is the nature of remembering. We stack up our stones so when the children or anyone else asks, “What do these stones mean to you?” we can tell them.

One of the things I learned about Patrick was that he was kidnapped and brought to Ireland as an enslaved person when he was a teenager. He was probably from Wales. He escaped and returned to Britain and then came back to Ireland. Much of the exhibit stacked the stones of his story in a way to show how he shaped the nation of Ireland and its faith. It was told as a hero myth, if you will, a story of valor and conquest and conflict, both external and internal. He grew Christianity by trying to drive the “pagans” off the island.

After we came out of the exhibit, I walked a few blocks in downtown Downpatrick, which seems to be a place that is struggling. Many shops were permanently closed. I saw two or three thrift stores and two bookmakers–betting venues, that is. It felt like a place that needed some attention.

From there, we drove out a bit, down roads lined with stone walls, to Saul Church, one of the landmarks in Patrick’s story. We had time to walk through the small church and cemetery, take in the view of the surrounding farms, and hear from Gareth Higgins who offered a different way to stack up the stones.

For him, the power of the story was simple: Patrick was brought to the island as an enslaved person. He escaped and went home and then he chose to come back to Ireland to share the love of God. He didn’t come back for revenge or retribution. He came back for love.

When I asked him how that matched with the story we heard at the Centre, he said, (and I am not using quotes because I don’t remember exactly) That story is there if you want it. I am choosing to find a story of redemption.

So much rides on how we chose to stack up the stones.

What do the stones mean to you?

Peace,
Milton

We are one day past the midpoint of our time on the island of Ireland. The morning here is cool (59°) and clear. The cottages where we are staying on the outskirts of the coastal village of Kitkeel are surrounded by green fields marked by stone walls that were stacked by hand. It is quiet and, for the most part, it will stay that way, other than the sounds of daily life of both humans and animals.

Even in our time in Dublin it seems that people are not clamoring to make the day begin, for the most part. We were hard pressed to find a breakfast place that opened before eight while we were in the city. The pace of the retreat has also offered a gentle waking each morning. I have woken up to a conversation rather than a to do list.

It is a gift.

In our time at Corymeela, Paul Hutchinson started with a question: What’s the score? From there he intentionally meandered through all kinds of wonderful things, mostly by telling stories and asking more questions. Corymeela is a community of peacemakers. The community is not static; people come and go, for different lengths of time. We were there for the better part of a day to hear their stories and to learn, I thought, about peacemaking in northern Ireland. Paul did those things, but in a way I had not expected.

Somewhere in the meanderings, he talked about rest by asking a question: At the end of the seventh day, was God tired?

The question made me realize that most of the ways I have heard the idea of sabbath discussed implicitly assumes that the initial acts of creation exhausted God. Maybe we don’t say it that way, but when we talk about finding sabbath for ourselves–finding rest–we often speak of it as compensation for our own exhaustion and use God’s rest at the end of a busy week as our example. Then, of course, we have the biblical description of God as one who “never slumbers or sleeps,” which too often shapes our work ethic, or at least our schedules.

In the Genesis account, the rest comes on the seventh day, but in the Christian tradition we attach sabbath to Sunday, which we think of as the first day of the week since it was the day of Jesus’ resurrection. The significance of that stands out to me when I take it alongside of the root meaning of rest.

The word comes from German roots through Old English, where it meant “rest; a bed or couch; intermission of labor; mental peace, state of quiet or repose.” But the older German word had a sense of measurement to it, a sense of specific distance after which it was time to rest, like our Sunday. That sense of measurement came from nomadic people who were always moving. They measured their movement by the distance between resting places.

Though most of us are not moving from place to place, we are moving, almost constantly it seems. What would change if we measured life from rest to rest, rather than from project to project, or obligation to obligation?

I remember first reading Frederick Buchner’s description of the day as something sandwiched between two nights and being caught by surprise. I had always thought the day came first and it brought a freshness to life to see the night as the reference point. That also helped me move from thinking of life in linear terms and to see things as more circular and cyclical. Though we are born and we die, life is less about progressing to a specific finish line as it is moving from place to place, and then to another place after that. Whether that movement is physical or metaphorical, how we see what we are moving from and going to seems to matter.

I’ll ask it again. What would change if we measured life from rest to rest, rather than exhaustion to exhaustion, or problem to problem, or even opportunity to opportunity?

As I write, I am conscious that I am thinking in big chunks of time: week to week, year to year. How far till the weekend? When is our next vacation? I know the Genesis account lays out seven days, but maybe we need a smaller scale. What are the rests we move to and from in our daily life? How do I live my day moving from rest to rest, from awareness to awareness, from love to love, from breath to breath, from refreshment to refreshment?

What if we thought of one another as rest rather than responsibilities?

That last question leads me to wonder how we become havens of rest for one another, how we learn to offer respite and restoration in our daily encounters. I am also conscious, after yesterday’s post, of how many re- words are in the last couple of paragraphs.

Paul Hutchinson talked about Rowan William’s idea of taking “a vow of incompleteness,” so that we could appreciate and live in “the open texture of every moment.” Perhaps, then, to move from rest to rest is to move from incompleteness to incompleteness. God didn’t rest when it was all done. It is never all done, even for God. We do what we can as we move from rest to rest, allowing ourselves to be defined, in a way, by our incompleteness rather than our accomplishments.

We move from grace to grace, from forgiveness to forgiveness, from hope to hope, or we can say we move from demand to demand, from grief to grief, from crisis to crisis.

To say life is full of all of those things is to state the obvious. At the core of the oldest definitions of the word, it is clear that life is not all rest. We have problems and crises and responsibilities.

And we move from rest to rest, if we are willing to see it that way.

Peace,
Milton

Ireland is a lovely and complicated place, which, of course, means it shares much in common with the rest of the world though its story has often gotten more publicity over the years. A number of years ago, Gareth Higgins and Brian Ammons began doing Ireland Retreats from this vantage point:

The story we tell shapes the world we live in. The story of Ireland, north and south, is full of light and shadow, mystery and earthiness, sacred and profane collaborating to create a land of charm, beauty and inspiration. We invite you to take time out to experience the landscape, art, people and story that has captivated so many.

I am in the middle of one of the retreats. We have moved from four days in and around Belfast to a small coastal village between Belfast and Dublin called Kilkeel. The rhythm of our time has moved from long walks through urban neighborhoods to compelling stories from a variety of speakers to quiet time along the shore or in the middle of sheep pastures. We are here to listen, learn, and connect so that we might have a better sense of how we can make peace in our world, however big or small that world may be.

Gareth is in his late forties and grew up in Belfast. His life has been shaped by what people here call The Troubles. As we talked in one of the early sessions, he described the current situation in northern Ireland by saying the conflict has been “solved, but not resolved.”

The relation between the two words jumped out at me: solve and re-solve, as in to solve again. Perhaps, I scribbled in my notes, life is not an Agatha Christie mystery to be solved so we can move to the next case but a returning to keep resolving–coming back to the story over and over–to see what else we can learn.

The oldest roots of the word solve run all over the place, going back to the fourteenth century: to loosen, dissolve; untie, release, detach; depart; unlock; scatter; dismiss; accomplish, fulfill; explain; remove, It took a hundred years for us to begin to use the word to mean explain or answer, and then a couple hundred more before we thought about solving mathematical problems.

When I think of solving a mystery, the image in my mind is of wrapping things up rather than releasing or unlocking. I hear an expansiveness in the root of the word I had not thought of. When we think of solving a problem, it means we are done with it and can move on. We wrap it up, so to speak, when what the roots of the word tell is is that we actually set things free.

What, then, does it mean to resolve?

From some of our earliest language classes we learned that the prefix re- means to do again. It shows up, I would venture, as much as anything in our language, perhaps because life is mostly about doing things over and over.

Back to Gareth’s description of the situation in northern Ireland–it is solved, but not resolved–and the notion that to solve is to release (there’s that re- again), to resolve might mean to unlock or untie over and over, not as a means of wrapping things up or moving on, but as an understanding that resolving as daily practice is elemental to what it means to be fully human with and to one another.

To resolve means to scatter my presuppositions, my assumptions, my biases, so that I can free myself to find a deeper understanding of the world of which I am a small part. To be soluble means to be able to be dissolved, taken in, might we say included. To be a peacemaker, perhaps, is to be resoluble, or at least an agent of resolution, committed to connection and belonging.

Resolve, as a noun, means determination or focus, even as another meaning of the verb is to reduce to essential components. I have said before that life has a centrifugal force that flings us to the edges. We have to resolve ourselves: to pull ourselves together with determination and a sense that our connectedness matters most.

Solutions come together because the component parts belong together; resolutions are statements of communal intent, statements of communal identity. We are built for belonging, even as we often seem determined to live dividedly.

When I was in seminary, I took a French class while visions of doctoral work danced in my head. I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember one Beatitude in particular:

Heureux ceux qui répandent autour d’eux la paix,
car Dieu les reconnaîtra pour ses fils.

Blessed are those who spread peace around them,
for God will recognize them as God’s children.

May we daily resolve our lives–bring things together over and over, spread peace around us, so that we all might know we are wonderfully created in the image of God and worthy to be loved and to belong.

Peace,
Milton

I have been working my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants for several weeks now, moving slowly on purpose because it feels like I need to let each chapter take root before I love on. It feels like the rhythm of my reading is keeping time with the rhythm of her writing.

In one chapter, she talks about a pond on her land that had been taken over by algae such that it was not a place her daughters could play, so she decided to clear the algae and restore the pond. She describes the issue this way:

Like many an old farm pond, mine was the victim of eutrophication, the natural process of nutrient enrichment that comers with age. Generations of algae and lily pads and fallen leaves and autumn’s apples falling into the pond built up the sediments, layering the once clean gravel at the bottom in a sheet of muck. All the nutrients fueled the growth of new plants, which fueled the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds–the bottom generally fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss. (86)

My etymological dictionary says the root of the word old means “to grow, nourish.” Whether you’re a pond or a person, to age is to be enriched rather than to be diminished. In both cases, the point of the enrichment is not to stay the same, but to grow and change. Perhaps that is why we say we grow old.

Many languages make a distinction between old vs. young and old vs. new. English is not one of those languages, which may explain why we struggle with aging. New and young are seen as the pinnacles of culture and consumerism. Old things are passed away. But Kimmerer’s pond tells us that is not how life–in the largest sense of that word–works. Life is growth: birth and death and rebirth, feeding and sharing and changing.

I love the way she talks about the way in which many ponds age to become a marsh and then a meadow and then a forest. I had never thought about enrichment as transformation in such terms. To grow old is not simply to become an antique version of ourselves but to mature into a more complex being. The pond of my childhood has become a forest of a life. Then again, perhaps the metaphor works better when it is less individual. In the same way that a forest is not a collection of singular trees but a diverse being of many trees who belong to one another, growing old means growing together.

As rich as the metaphor is, it does not hold much sway in the way we as Americans think about aging. Too often, the reality is more along the lines of John Prine’s “Hello in There.”

you know that old trees just grow stronger
and old rivers grow wilder every day
old people just grow lonesome
waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”

But my reason for writing tonight is not to lament all that is lost in this country because we look at aging as progressive loss. I started writing because Kimmerer made the connection between ponds and people, offering the reality of aging as progressive enrichment.

There are a lot of things that are not fun about growing old. I don’t know that it would serve much purpose to provide even a partial list here, though as I type I realize that there are a lot of things that are not fun about being young. I have no need to romanticize growing older as a means of self-assurance. I also don’t want to lower my expectations on what I have to offer or what life has to offer me just because I can’t do all of the things I used to do. Then there is the temptation to claim age as some sort of superiority, as though seniority automatically translates into wisdom. Looking at life that way breeds condescension.

It strikes me that Kimmerer never draws an analogy between the pond and a person. She says, “Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment. . . .” It may be self-congratulatory to think I am a pond in the metaphor. Perhaps, I am a nutrient, or one of the plants fed by the flow of minerals into the mud.

The choice I have is how I want to grow. I can grow lonesome, or I can grow into connectedness.

Ginger had a meeting today with a ninety-five year old parishioner who wanted to talk about what to do with the rest of his life. Norman Lear wrote an opinion essay for the New York Times yesterday to mark his one hundredth birthday and spoke of his “next century.” Last weekend, Joni Mitchell sang her first full set in twenty years at the Newport Folk Festival.

The forest is already well-established. None of us is the first tree to grow or the first pond to age. All of us are made of mud–the sacred, soggy stardust made to grow older and richer. John Lennon may not have had all of that in mind when he wrote “Grow Old with Me,” but his words add their own enrichment:

grow old along with me
the best is yet to be
when our time has come
we will be as one
God bless our love
God bless our love

Peace,
Milton