don't eat alone

Over the past several weeks I have been contemplating what life might look like in the days ahead. My recent reading in quantum theology and cosmology has given me a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, and the things happening in my little life in the middle of it have proven it. The main lesson I have continued to relearn is that asking for help is not a sign of weakness but an indicator of trust that those who love you really mean it. So as I say I am starting something new, I want to state clearly what is implicit in all of it: I am not alone in this endeavor.

And for that I am deeply grateful.

I wrote a few days ago about working on some new ideas built around th

e metaphors in our lives. One of those will begin this coming Tuesday. I am launching a newsletter called mixing metaphors. I pan to publish it weekly. As the title suggests, it will have a collection of ideas and links, or perhaps I should say a conversation of ideas since I hope that is what happens, as well as a recipe and links to my blog posts from the previous days. Because it is a newsletter, it only goes to those who have subscribed. If you would like to do so, please click here.

The second thing I have done is to create a membership program for those who would like to support me financially in my new job, if you will. You can click this link to find the different membership options, named after our three Schnauzers. I want to make what I am writing free to whomever wants to read it, so the membership does not give you access to a secret stash and the different tiers do not have graduated perks. All of them offer a chance for connection in a different way.

You can also find buttons for both on the sidebar of the blog. I tried to create a slide-in sign up, but I still have a few bugs to work out on that one.

As I have worked on this in earnest since we got back from Ireland, I have felt my spirit lighten. I am leaning into what feels right for the days ahead. I am grateful to all of you who have offered encouragement and support in many different ways.

Here’s to seeing what comes out of the mix.

Peace,
Milton

I realized again today that I keep an informal list in my head of movie scenes that help my understand the world. I’m sure I am not alone in that practice. Off the top of my head I can think of scenes from Miss Firecracker, Big Night, Moonstruck, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Elephant Man, and Three Amigos, to name a few. Even writing about the list makes me thankful for YouTube.

The scene that came to mind today was from Dead Poets’ Society, a film full of great memories for me.

INT. KEATING’S CLASSROOM – DAY

The students are all back in their normal seats and Keating leaps
up onto his desk.

KEATING
Why do I stand up here? Anybody?

CHARLIE
To feel taller.

KEATING
No!
Keating rings the bell on his desk with his foot

KEATING
Thank you for playing, Mr. Dalton. I
stand upon my desk to remind yourself
that we must constantly look at things
in a different way.

Keating glances around the classroom from atop the desk.

KEATING
You see, the world looks very different
from up here. You don’t believe me? Come
see for yourself. Come on. Come on!

I thought about Keating and the boys standing on the desk because my view of the world was altered by a book that I learned about through a conversation with my friend Sid: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

(Pauses to give people time to order it.)

The title alone is enough to give me things to think about for several weeks. I was in the middle of an afternoon where I was canning the six pounds of jalapeños I picked this week from our church’s Kinship Garden, as we have come to call it–thirteen pint jars filled with peppery goodness to come back to when the garden is asleep. As the peppers were boiling in the canner, I opened the book to see what it was like. I quickly realized I was holding a gift before I finished the introduction. These are among the words that swept me up.

This is not a book about sadness–at least, not in the modern sense of the word. The word sadness originally meant “fullness,” from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness–setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. . . . And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts–if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin. (xii)

The paragraph put me on top of my desk, gave me a view of the world I had not seen, akin to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of growing old as enrichment rather than deterioration that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. From the vantage point of sadness as taking it all in, I could see the courage of sadness, as well as the hope and meaning. Life is not either-or. We don’t live being either happy or sad, good or bad; at least I don’t find that very much of existence breaks into those kind of binaries.

What I saw in Keonig’s words–and what I am still turning over in my mind–is that sadness is not the opposite of joy but can see a wider continuum of emotions and exerpience that include joy but go beyond it. To be sad is to be filled up with life, so much so that it hurts.

Perhaps this would be a good time to say that the book really is a dictionary. It is a dictionary of words for emotions, except that these words have not existed until now. Let me also say, for those of you who remember, what he is doing is way beyond Sniglets. Koenig quotes Wittengenstein:

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

But then Koenig goes on to say,

Words will never do us justice. But we have to try anyway. Luckily, the palette of language is infinitely expandable. (xi)

I’m going to have to stand on his desk for a while with that idea. I have always thought I had new words to learn, but I don’t think I had considered that part of the task–or the hope–of being human is making up words to describe who we are and why we are here.

Madeleine L’Engle observed that vocabularies decrease during wartime. But Koenig is not talking about war, he is talking about sadness–sorrows–as something that fills us up, perhaps sometimes overwhelming us. I think about Johann Hari’s understanding of depression as overwhelming grief or sadness, and it makes consider that one way of looking at depression might be that I am simply overcome by the fulness of existence, crushed under the weight of it all. That helps me somehow.

As I sit and stare at the computer screen, faces are going through my head like the parade of boys getting up on the desk in the movie clip, people I love who live in the fulness of life, stuffed with sadness for a variety of reasons, people who know somehow that joy and sorrow are traveling companions. I have no idea if any of them know the etymology of sadness, but they know well what I am just now seeing, or perhaps I’m better to say what I am just now finding words for.

I am working on an idea for a retreat/workshop/whatever someone wants to do that I am calling Mixing Metaphors. Each of us has primary metaphors that we live by, whether we can articulate them or not. I would like to spend the day with folks looking at those metaphors and then talking about how we expand our vocabulary to create possibilities. I’ve been working on the idea for a good while, but haven’t spoken about it much. The new perspective of trying to make a living by writing and speaking has made me think more. Reading the first pages of my new dictionary has made me think I am may be on to something.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll even have people stand on the desk.

Peace,
Milton

One of the surprises of our Ireland trip for me was to learn that C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast and grew up there. I realized my knowledge of him was as a professor in England and I had never considered an Irish connection. The City of Belfast created the square, which has a beautiful open area, a whole bunch of trees and other plants, and several metal sculptures of characters from the books, as a part of a wider urban regeneration project designed to help East Belfast, an area that has struggled economically and one that also bore the brunt of a good bit of violence during the Troubles.

As I wandered around the square (and took my picture with Aslan), I couldn’t help but go back to my favorite conversation in the stories–one I wrote about in my book–where Lucy, the youngest of the children, encounters Aslan on a return visit to Narnia. She runs to meet him.

“Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”

The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

“Welcome, child,” he said.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”

“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.

“Not because you are?”

“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

Right before we moved on to our next place, several of us went into the coffee shop that sits on the square and I saw another of my favorite quotes in a tryptic on the wall:

“It’s not as if he were a tame lion.”

One other rather random memory that came back as a stood in CS Lewis Square is from our trip to Turkey for Ginger’s first sabbatical. We were in Istanbul and two Turkish teams were playing football on the television where we were. One of the teams was called Aslan. I asked someone about the name and they told me aslan is the Turkish word for lion. I have always wondered how Lewis made that connection.

This morning, I continued my slow journey through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and was taken back to that morning in Belfast with Aslan by one sentence:

I’ve noticed that once some folks attach a scientific label to a being, they stop exploring who it is. (208)

She was talking about the way scientists think about plants, and the way in which some can become accustomed to taking their presuppositions as truth–as though a name and a label were the same thing. She continued,

Most people don’t know the names of these relatives; in fact, they hardly even see them. Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.

In the margin I wrote, “True of theology.”

One of the terms I have never understood is systematic theology. Kimmerer seemed to be describing those who were captivated by the idea of systematic botany. I don’t think either one works. As Tom my garden buddy says, “Nature doesn’t grow in rows.”

Labels have their value when they are on canned goods and prescription bottles, but they fall apart quickly when it comes to faith and relationship.

Another article I read today talked about how the chapter divisions and headings in our Bibles often keep us from seeing the larger picture. I thought of the parable we call “The Prodigal Son,” which is a story that has so much more going on than the misadventures of a wayward young man. The label tames the story instead of setting it free in our imaginations to see the nuances of family dynamics, the grief that shoots through everything, and the reckless nature of forgiveness.

I think that connection is what sent me back to Belfast. Any account of the Troubles seems to involve labels–Catholics and Protestants, Republicans and Unionists, Nationalists and Loyalists–that were both chosen and inflicted. Any definition of one of the terms is crippled by brevity: a Republican wants a united Ireland; a Unionist wants to stay with Britain, for example.

Labels create the illusion of a name.

We visited the Ulster Museum later in the day and, thanks to the direction of a very helpful docent, were led into an exhibit that showed the seeds of the Troubles going all the way back to ships in the Spanish Armada that sank off the coast of Ireland centuries before there was a Belfast. Towards the end of the exhibit was a blackboard from an episode of Derry Girls where Catholic and Protestant students tried to describe what they had in common. The lesson devolved into a cacophony of differences because they had no idea how to explore beyond their labels.

What is true of Aslan as a metaphor for God is true of us, who are created in God’s image: it’s not as if we are tame. Labels are a way of domesticating one another–please fit in this box and make my life easier; allow me to make you one-dimensional so you will fit in my system of good and evil, or whatever binary I have created to let me think I understand the world.

On an earlier page, Kimmerer said, “We learn from the world how to be human.”

Not to be tamed, but to be human–literally “earthly being,” actually made of stardust, the same material as all of our untamed universe. Instead of systems, we are better off telling stories, like Narnia, or the parables, or the one about why we are friends, or how I feel about my family now that my parents have been dead for years that I didn’t see before.

Good stories are expansive. When we hear them and tell them we grow and everyone–every being–around us gets bigger, like Aslan, which is not always a comforting thought but then, growth is not necessarily comfortable or painless. Aslan was a lion, after all.

I have deleted a couple of sentences because I felt like I was getting preachy and that’s not where I wanted this to go, so I’ll go back to imagining little Jack Lewis playing in the streets of Belfast long before the urban regeneration project was even a dream. I wonder he saw on those streets planted the seeds of Narnia, where he learned the Turkish word for lion, and how he managed to become an adult who could still tell fairy tales, just as I wish I knew more about how Jesus grew up and how he learned to talk in parables, which aren’t that different from fairy tales. They are both untamed stories.

Peace,
Milton

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