don't eat alone

I worked from home today because there wasn’t time to get back from New York and make it to the Maundy Thursday service in Westbrook, where I am interim pastor. I met a friend for coffee and as I was walking home I noticed a crew taking down a dead tree next to the coffee shop across the street. Then I noticed they were also working on two trees that stand between our house and our neighbors. They are–well, were–big trees, probably sixty feet tall. We’ve heard talk for a couple of years that they needed to come down, but nothing happened until today.

As I worked I could hear the hum of the chain saw and the grind of the wood chipper that made me want to quit work and watch Fargo again–except if the guys in Fargo had had this chipper they wouldn’t have been caught. The tree guy was loading limbs that were six or eight inches in diameter and the chipper ate them right up.

Though we are still a ways from really planting, our garden crew is getting things ready. Tom, the one who actually knows what we are doing, is growing seedlings at his house. We are making plans to put up a rabbit-proof fence so we can enjoy the green beans this year, and we have plans this weekend to mark the beds and begin to wake things up a bit. As I watched the chips fly into the back of the big truck, I thought I might as well ask if they would be willing to let us use them for the garden. And they were. By late afternoon, our side yard felt strangely expansive and I had a huge pile of wood chips next to the garden.

On Saturday, we will begin to line the paths between the beds in our garden with the wood chips, but more than that, they will, over time, turn back into soil. We also have plans the spread mushroom spore on the chips so we can harvest even from our pathways. The trees are gone and they live on, even though they will be forgotten, for the most part. We will miss them, and we will get used to the space between our houses, or we will plant new trees that will grow beyond our time here–because we will live on and be forgotten as well.

In the middle of his amazing poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry writes,

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

And then the poem closes with this line:

Practice resurrection

Perhaps to live and die and live again has more to do with wood chips than banking on eternal life. Resurrection isn’t our ticket out, it is a statement of solidarity with all that is, all of creation, all of life. We are stardust. We are compost. We are created in the image of God, resurrection practitioners.

Peace,
Milton

Since I get on the train around 5:30 in the morning, most of us riding into New York use the time to sleep–until the train stops at 125th Street, and then we start to move about. Some get their stuff together but stay seated, and others (like me) stand up near the door just to stretch out legs for the last fifteen minutes of the ride, and to be able to leave the train quickly. As we stand there, almost everyone passes the time by staring at a screen.

No one makes eye contact or dares attempt a conversation.

It has not always been that way (the part about staring at a screen), but it’s hard to remember those days. I say that more as an observation than a criticism; it is hard to remember life before our handheld computers that we continue to call phones. I can remember always having a book in my bag when I rode the subway regularly in Boston. I looked around this morning and no one I could see had a book. Only a screen.

We are being changed by our technology, but that is not a new thing.

When I got to my desk, I pulled out the book I had with me and Ilia Delio had this to say:

Our addiction to technology is causing us to unmake the world at an alarming rate. Perhaps most important, we are losing the capacity to love by way of forgiveness and reconciliation; that is, we are losing the ability to transcend our partial lives by way of love in order to create a new future together. Political, economic, and social unrest continues to spiral, thanks to technology, and we cannot find a means to slow down or turn in a new direction.

Her words made a rather gruesome connection in my brain, taking me back to my classroom at Charlestown High School in Boston and a presentation by folks from Facing History and Ourselves, an amazing group that helps students understand what it means to be a compassionate participant in life. The presenter talked about the Battle of the Somme, a horrendous event in World War I that marked the first use of machine guns by the Germans–a change in technology.

In one day, almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed and 57,000 injured–the worst day in the history of the British Army. Part of the reason they died was they didn’t understand the implications of the technology they faced and they walked right into the bullets.

Since then, how we wage war has become more and more distanced so that now someone operates something akin to a video game somewhere and bombs the hell out of someplace else on the other side of the world and then goes home for dinner. The disconnect belies the impact of their actions.

The same is true, it seems to me, when it comes to hitting send or retweet.

I know that analogy is overstated, but when I think about the escalation in division and rancor in our country, about our struggle to listen with intention or to focus our attention, I wonder if our lack of ability to communicate is tied to the rapid changes in technology that have us living through our devices, or at least allowing the disconnect they bring to belie the impact of our words.

I have many reasons in my life to be thankful for social media, not the least of which is the chance to reconnect with people from all the different addresses of my life. It’s not all bad. It’s just too much too quickly for us to understand how it is changing us.

After the 2016 election, we were shocked that Trump chose to tweet rather than to make speeches. Now that is how world leaders make announcements, and reply to them. Are we starting to think that Twitter is actual communication?

The question is rhetorical.

What I wanted to get to in this post is more than a cautionary tale. As I continued reading Ilia Delio, she asked,

But if love is our truest nature, and technology is changing that nature, how can we renew our deepest reality of love? This is a question for our age and an important one to engage. For the type of love that mends broken hearts is not superficial; it cannot be controlled electronically by the touch of a button. It is a decision to love beyond what is beneficial or satisfying to one’s ego; it is to love by way of sacrifice. . . . It requires our utmost attention, our hearts and our wills; this type of love requires total self-gift.

One of the things I know about myself is I rarely do one things at a time when I am on a screen. Put me in a Zoom meeting and I am answering email and writing texts while I am watching those on camera. It is hard for me to give my utmost attention, which means I am not offering my best. I am not making my best self-gift.

Ilia says there is more riding on that than I thought.

God will not mend our broken hearts without us, but God will continue to be with us, challenging us with the question: What do you want? How we choose to love in a world of distrust will affect our future, a future that we will create together or not at all.

May our hearts break and heal together.

Peace,
Milton

Back when we were youth ministers, my friend Burt had a metaphor about relationships (talking to young people about relating to their parents and vice versa) that I have not forgotten. He said building trust was like a savings account: you have to build it up by making small deposits in the way you deal with everyday interactions. If there comes a time when that trust is tested–when you have to make a withdrawal, so to speak–you have something to withdraw from.

I thought about those days because I read this article from The Atlantic that caught me with its title:

“The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late”

and then the teaser:

The existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in a relationship is often dependent on moments you might write off as petty disagreements.

In the heart of the article, Matthew Fray says,

The reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.

It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations. But it wasn’t the dishes, not really—it was what they represented.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of times, my wife tried to communicate that something was wrong. That something hurt. But that doesn’t make sense, I thought. I’m not trying to hurt her; therefore, she shouldn’t feel hurt.

We didn’t go down in a fiery explosion. We bled out from 10,000 paper cuts. Quietly. Slowly.

His discussion of dishes reminds me of how my mother and father used to joke that what was going to split them up was one rolled the toothpaste up from the end and the other squeezed it out of the middle, but it really was a joke. They cared for each other well.

This post, however, is not about marriage; it’s about how the same principle of paper cuts applies to relationships in general, much like the trust bank wasn’t just about kids and parents.

Fray talks about the longterm impact of having the Same Fight, which I feel like I see happening a great deal in the relationships that make up life in families, marriages, congregations, work places. It’s when we keep doing the same thing, or not doing the same thing, even when we have been told it punches someone else’s buttons.

When we’re having The Same Fight, positive intent, or chalking up any harm caused as accidental, can be just as much of a trust killer as more overtly harmful actions. It doesn’t matter whether we are intentionally refusing to cooperate with our spouse or legitimately unable to understand what’s wrong—the math results are the same. The net result of The Same Fight is more pain. Less trust. Regardless of anyone’s intentions.

In the exhaustion of the ongoing pandemic (it ain’t over yet!), it too often feels like Groundhog Day, and we, in our grief and exhaustion, keep having the Same Fight, maybe because we feel too tired to listen well. Or maybe, pandemic or not pandemic, we too easily fall into mansplaining when someone tries to tell us how they feel and we decide to explain why they shouldn’t feel that way instead of taking them seriously.

But we have to learn to take each other seriously because the only way we survive is together. We have to avoid the paper cuts and make deposits in the trust bank instead–pay attention to the little things and, as Walt Whitman said (and Ted Lasso quoted), be curious and not judgmental.

In that spirit, the closing words of the article are ones I will keep close.

If I had to distill the problems in failed relationships down to one idea, it would be our colossal failure to make the invisible visible, our failure to invest time and effort into developing awareness of what we otherwise might not notice in the busyness of daily life.

If I had known that this drinking-glass situation and similar arguments would actually end my marriage—that the existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in our marriage was dependent on these moments I was writing off as petty disagreements, I would have made different choices.

I could have communicated my love and respect for her by not leaving tiny reminders for her each day that she wasn’t considered. That she wasn’t remembered. That she wasn’t respected. I could have carefully avoided leaving evidence that I would always choose my feelings and my preferences over hers.

Grief and exhaustion are inflationary, which means it costs more to live these days, which means those trust bank deposits–the pocket-change gestures that add up–are crucial to our survival together. Listen hard. Pay attention. Ask good questions. Let folks around you know you see them and it matters right now–not when it’s too late. No one wants to die by paper cuts.

Peace,
Milton

Some days I can deal with the world and some days I struggle.

Tonight is a struggle. Today I read stories about how many states are pushing legislation similar to Florida’s homophobic (in this case, I think we need to redefine homocidal) “don’t say gay” law and another story about Russian troops carrying mobile crematoria into eastern Ukraine to burn evidence of their war crimes before human rights activists can document anything. But the president of France made an angry phone call and most every other Western country keeps trying to figure out how to make sure standing up against Russia doesn’t derail their economies, which means we are doing nothing. Oh, sorry–the US said we would take 100,000 refugees.

And we said it with a straight face.

Years ago, David LaMotte wrote a children’s book called White Flour that told the true story of a group in Knoxville, Tennessee who were trying to figure out how to respond to a Klux Klux Klan march in the city. They dressed as clowns and when the marchers yelled, “White power,” the clowns said, “Oh, we get it! White flour!” and they pulled out bags of flour, ripped them open, and threw them in the air. The Seussian poem goes on with the marchers continuing to yell and the clowns responding with imagination: white flowers, tight showers, wife power until . . .

The men in robes were sullen, they knew they’d been defeated
They yelled a few more times and then they finally retreated
And when they’d gone a kind policeman turned to all the clowns
And offered them an escort through the center of the town

The day was bright and sunny as most May days tend to be
In the hills of Appalachia down in Knoxville, Tennessee
People joined the new parade, the crowd stretched out for miles
The clowns passed out more flowers and made everybody smile

David wrote the book as a way to teach children about ways to respond to violence other than to be violent in return. The last verse says,

And what would be the lesson of that shiny southern day?
Can we understand the message that the clowns sought to convey?
Seems that when you’re fighting hatred, hatred’s not the thing to use!
So here’s to those who march on in their big red floppy shoes

War destroys imagination. Well, first it shrinks our vocabulary and then it destroys our imagination, until we end up sitting in front of a computer, as I am, writing about feeling helpless. The next sentence that comes to mind as I read what I just wrote is:

HELL, NO.

Not necessarily expansive vocabulary, but you get my point. What will it take to think imaginatively about what is happening in our world? Perhaps a better way to ask that question is, who is thinking imaginatively about our world and how can I get in touch with them? How can we all connect?

Ilia Delio says, “If we want a different world, we must be different people.”

One way to read that sentence is to say we must change. The other is to decide to be odd-balls, as in the Southern understanding of the word: well, he’s different.”

I wondered aloud to Ginger tonight what would happen if, instead of refugees fleeing Ukraine, everyone in the bordering countries or whoever could get there would flood the place, inhabit the war zones, and make the Russians kill them too if they were so intent on genocide. I know it’s a long shot, but it seems like it would feel a lot like the clowns in Knoxville, doing something that was an invitation to humanization for everyone involved.

We can’t take the high road as a nation when it comes to war crimes. Pick a war and we have aimed our guns and bombs at civilians. We may not have carried crematoria, but to take a sanctimonious posture at this point is not imaginative. Neither are the sanctions, since too many of the countries involved are still buying Russian fuel. And the financial channels that run through banks and multinational corporations will make sure that the money gets to where it needs to be so everyone can still get richer. Greed doesn’t have much imagination either.

If we want a different world, we must be different people.

My ranting aside (since anger is easier than despair), this post is much less a manifesto than it is a question: How can we imagine a different world? How can we be different in a way that will matter to Ukraine? (Which is not the only place in the world where such atrocities are taking place.)

Seems that when you’re fighting hatred, hatred’s not the thing to use!
So here’s to those who march on in their big red floppy shoes

Where do we find our big red floppy shoes?

Leave your answers in the comments, he said with a smile.

Peace,
Milton

One of the stories I have repeated often (and I have a lot of stories I have repeated) is that when my father died one of the first things that crossed my mind was to call those I knew whose fathers had died before mine and say, “I’m sorry. I meant well in what I said to you, but I had no idea how this really felt.” I began to make a distinction between learning and discovering that has stayed with me. This is part of what I wrote in The Color of Together:

Though what I was feeling was unfamiliar, the books I read and the conversations I had made me realize I was walking well-travelled roads, which was both comforting and disquieting. I had landed on populated shores. I had not discovered anything new.

Like many of us, as a kid I was told that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. He may have made the voyage, and even found a land that was not on his map, but the verb is wrong. He did not find a place that no one else had seen; he landed on a populated shore. He landed in the middle of someone else’s story. He set foot where people had lived for generations, where cultures and kingdoms had already come and gone. He learned. He found, perhaps. He became aware of, he explored. He condescended. But he didn’t discover a thing.

Neither have I, other than to say in the course of my life I have discovered some things about myself, though most of those were already apparent to people around me, so even here my choice of verb is tenuous. More often than not, I feel like Mark, Ray Kinsella’s brother-in-law in the movie Field of Dreams, who was fiercely opposed to Ray’s plowing under his corn to build the baseball diamond on his farm until he saw Doc Graham step off the field to save his niece’s life. All of a sudden, where he had once seen nothing but an empty ball field, he saw a diamond teeming with players.

In researching the book, I even came across a song written by a teacher named Nancy Schimmel who rewrote the 1492 I learned in school to drive the point home:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
He didn’t know what he thought he knew
And someone was already here.

Columbus knew the world was round
So he looked for the East while westward bound,
But he didn’t find what he thought he found
And someone was already here.

The Inuit and Cherokee,
The Aztec and Menominee,
The Onondaga and the Cree;
Columbus sailed across the sea,
But someone was already here.

It isn’t like it was empty space,
Tainos met him face to face.
Could anyone discover the place
When someone was already here?

So tell me, who discovered what?
He thought he was in a different spot.
Columbus was lost, the Tainos were not;
They were already here.

The word discover has been on my mind over the past few weeks as I have been reading books on the new cosmology and quantum theology, mostly because of how little it is used. Scientists talk more about what they have learned, rather than what they have discovered because they know they are finding things that have been there all along.

Tonight, I looked it up in the etymological dictionary and here’s what I learned:

discover (v.)
c. 1300, discoveren, “divulge, reveal, disclose, expose, lay open to view, betray (someone’s secrets),” senses now obsolete, from stem of Old French descovrir “uncover, unroof, unveil, reveal, betray,” from Medieval Latin discooperire, from Latin dis- “opposite of” (see dis-) + cooperire “to cover up, cover over, overwhelm, bury” (see cover (v.)).

At first with a sense of betrayal or malicious exposure (discoverer originally meant “informant”). Also in Middle English used in literal senses, such as “to remove” (one’s hat, the roof from a building). The meaning “to obtain the first knowledge or sight of what was before not known,” the main modern sense, is by 1550s.

The “main modern sense of the word” came about during the age of European colonization. Perhaps the etymological dictionary is wrong to say the sense of the word that is more nefarious is now obsolete. Columbus claim of discovering the Caribbean rests on his dehumanizing choice to not see the people who were standing right in front of him, just as other colonists did in Africa, India, and South America. Discover carried a sense of ownership: finders keepers. The losers were the ones who had been there all along.

I get that “to obtain the first knowledge or sight of what was before not known” does not necessarily mean the person doing it has an evil intent, but I do think it is an invitation to arrogance, which leads to a sense of ownership, and that heads down a damaging road.

To say it more simply, just because it is new to me does not mean it’s new.

On the other hand, to say I learned something implies relationship, because I had to be taught. Even an awareness that comes when I am sitting alone in my office or riding in my car or taking my morning shower (please–someone create a waterproof note board so I can write down the ideas that come when I have soap in my eyes) was planted by something I read or saw or heard.

I’m not sure why I landed on this when I sat down to write, other than–because of my reading–these have been days rich with connections and understandings that are new to me even though they are not new. And as scientists come to fresh understandings about the universe, they have learned that what they have been able to verify was already at the heart of indigenous spirituality going back for centuries.

Once again, someone was already there, but this time they are not invisible.

in twenty-two hundred and twenty two
when milty read physics and cosmology too
he learned from thinkers and questioners who
knew that someone was already there

Peace,
Milton