don't eat alone

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

We have always had a passport drawer.

It is the top drawer of an old Singer spool cabinet that sits on top of a table that used to hold a Singer sewing machine. Both were handed down from my mother’s parents. They have traveled with Ginger and me to every house we have lived in and they have always held the passports.

Since both of us are ENFPs, details and organization are not our strong suits. We have a lot of stacks of things and drawers with stuff in them. The passports were different. We knew we needed to be able to find them.

Yesterday–a week ahead of our trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland for a peace and justice retreat (that we were supposed to do in 2020, but you know the story), I opened the drawer to get the passports, proud of myself for thinking ahead, and they were not there. Well, there were passports in the drawer, but they had expired before the last time we had been out of the country in 2018. The valid documents were somewhere in the house, but not in the drawer–the drawer we had not needed to open for four years.

We began two processes this morning: One was to start looking in every drawer and closet and on every shelf to see if we could find them, and the other was to call the US Passport Office to see if we could get a new one as a result of a “travel emergency.”

I dialed the number around 9 o’clock and followed the instructions, pressing numbers when asked to do so. Well, first I dialed in four times only to be told the call volume was too high and to call back at another time. Then I got a voice that told me to press numbers, which led to another voice that told me to hold on for the next available operator, and then another voice that said, “Your wait time is more than two and a half hours.”

My hearing aids have a bluetooth feature that allows my phone to connect directly, so all of this was happening in my head, including the switch from the voice to classical music–a tune I recognized and got to know even better because it was about a three minute loop and I had been told I was going to wait far longer than that. (I would tell you the name of the piece, but I have since blocked it out.)

The website was clear that we could not walk into the passport office in Stamford without an appointment, but we thought we would drive down there just in case someone answered and we could get in line. The trip down to Stamford took about an hour. I have Apple Car Play in my CRV, so I was able to move the music out of my ears and on to the car speakers, but the music never changed. About the time we got to Stamford, the voice told me the wait time was “more than two hours” and then it dropped to “more than an hour and a half.”

I dropped Ginger off in front of the office and went to park. I had barely gotten out of the car when she sent a text that said, “Don’t hang up! Come back and get me but don’t hang up.”

I did as I was told.

By now it was a little after 11:30. We started driving back and ran into heavy traffic, so we made a signature B-C move in such a situation: we got off the highway and found a diner. The Silver Star Diner in South Norwalk. We had lunch and then went across the street to REI to see if I could find a rain jacket for our trip–a small gesture of hope as the music continued to loop in my ears.

As we checked out, the voice said the wait was down to “more than twenty minutes,” then, as we pulled out of the parking lot, a human voice said, “US Passport Office. How may I help you?” We pulled into the next parking lot so we could pay attention.

We laid out the situation and answered all the questions the way the website had instructed. The person asked for our zip code and then said, “We don’t have anything in the Eastern US. I can get you an appointment in El Paso, Tucson, LA, or Hawaii.”

She was serious and she was kind. She just didn’t have anything else to offer. As hard as our day had been, I tried to imagine theirs. For all the time I had waited, they had been talking to people who needed help. Who needed appointments. People who didn’t live in El Paso or Hawaii. She had nothing to offer, but she still had to keep answering the calls of people asking for what she could not give. I thanked her for trying.

As we hung up, I looked at the length of the call: three hours and fifty-seven minutes. Then I realized I forgot to thank them for making the music stop.

As we drove back, Ginger reached out to a couple of our local officials who are a part of our church and they put us in touch with the office of our state representative, Rosa DeLauro. The folks there are trying hard to get us a shot at making our flight on Monday. They too, have been kind.

Sunday we had a guest preacher at the church where I am bridge pastor–a “neutral pulpit” for a search committee for another church. The preacher followed the lectionary, talking about Jesus’ parable that we call “The Friend at Midnight” in Luke 11. I learned the the word as persistence (“I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”) is better understood as shamelessness, as in the guy knew it was late, but he also knew friends are willing to be taken advantage of, so he asked shamelessly and his friend got up and helped him.

That’s how I have felt today: shameless. Yes, I wish we had kept up with the passports, but as exhausting as the day has been, I am grateful that Ginger and I have not blamed each other or ourselves, have worked hard to turn the house over looking for the passports (and ended up throwing a bunch of stuff out–bonus!), and we have called and waited and driven and asked and then turned to people we trust to see what they can do. And they got up and are trying to help.

I am mindful tonight of the gift of people in our lives of whom we can ask shamelessly. I am humbled, hopeful, and grateful.

Peace,
Milton

I am a couple of days away from marking ten months since my second knee replacement and three years and three months since my first. As you can see, I have the scars to prove it.

Though they got me up hours after I came out of recovery to start walking and had me climbing stairs the next day, the recovery from the surgery is hard work and takes a long time. Everyone who had knowledge about the surgery gave me the same advice: go to physical therapy and do everything they tell you to do. I did and it both helped and hurt. I had a new understanding of Jesus’ question to the man who had sat beside the pool at Bethsaida waiting to be healed–“Do you want to get well?”

Healing, often, is not for the faint of heart.

And, sometimes, healing happens when you don’t know it.

The first week of July I went to Youth Camp with the folks from Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, a group of folks I love and who love me. Camp is one of my happy places, and Wilshire’s camp has been my home for something like twenty summers. We were at a campground in Arkansas, a little west of Little Rock, and it was hot and humid despite the rolling hills and tall trees.

Last summer at camp, I was two months away from the surgery and had a fair amount of consistent pain. My room was in a building about a quarter of a mile from the meeting room, and up hill; I struggled to get back and forth. This year, retracing those steps gave me a visceral understanding of how the surgery had helped because it didn’t hurt to walk.

After my first surgery, my doctor told me to expect to make good progress, but to understand that it would take a year before I forgot I had had the surgery. He was right almost to the day. My second knee seemed to respond more quickly, but it still stiffened up when I sat or stood too long, and bending my knees to reach something on the floor or a low shelf remained challenging.

Because the afternoons at camp were so hot, I stayed at the pool, as did a fair number of the kids and adults. I also spent a good deal of time just sitting in the water talking with those around me. The second afternoon I realized I was crouched down in the water, which was about four feet deep, almost sitting on my haunches and I felt no pain. The next afternoon, I made a point of doing deep knee bends and squatting down some more.

What I remembered was that being in the water was a kind of no-gravity situation; I could bend my knees without resistance. I had waded into healing waters without knowing that was what I was doing. I was just looking for relief from the heat.

When I got the invitation to go to camp I had already given my notice at work. My last day was on a Thursday and by Sunday night I was in Arkansas. The timing felt providential. I went not only hoping to offer something to the kids there but also hoping for healing since camp is mostly about reminding ourselves that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. I knew I needed the message as much as they did. Maybe more.

I also gained a greater range of movement.

In the story of the man at the pool, the whole set up is that everyone gathered around the water waiting for an angel to “stir up the water” and then whoever hit the pool first was healed. The man Jesus encountered had been there for thirty-eight years and had never managed to get in first.

I don’t know how many people were there on a daily basis, but I am struck by the fact that they were together but all alone. No one was helping anyone else, they were caught up in pushing their way to the front. Imagine if they had had the wherewithal to say, “Let’s line up and we will help each other in, one at a time, day after day.” Yes, some would have had to wait longer than others, but no one would have waited thirty-eight years. And, as they worked together, they might have been surprised at the other things in their lives that were healed.

This summer marks the first summer I have been able to work in the garden and get up and down without groaning loudly. Most every time I bend my knee is an exercise in gratitude, for my surgeon, for Ginger, for my physical therapists, for others who cared me, and for those who sat and talked to me in the pool at camp where we disturbed the waters and was healed by surprise.

Peace,
Milton