Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon today, I found what I thought would be the opening lines to a poem for my post:
when they ask how you’re doing say something other than tired
The line came to me because of how tired I felt and I wished for the wherewithal to say something beyond the obvious when someone asked how I was doing. Answering, “I’m tired” is akin to saying, “I’m busy.” Both may be true, but they lie at the base of the hierarchy of meaning, when it comes to feelings. (Oh, are you reading this? That last paragraph was mostly talking to myself.)
As the day has drawn to its early close here in Guilford, those two lines came back to mind. I think of them often, actually, because tired is the word I use too often to describe how I feel, and it is still an unsatisfactory answer, even when i’m talking to myself.
But it’s the truth. I am tired. Exhausted. Weary. Lacking. And I know I am not alone. I guess that is part of the reason my favorite carol verse is
and you beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along life’s climbing way
with painful steps and slow . . .
Yes, I know the verse goes on to promise rest and angel choirs, but I find comfort in the acknowledgment of the crushing load even without the angel band. I have a feeling the one who wrote the carol knew they were talking to more than just a couple of people. Life’s climbing way is well populated.
My old post notwithstanding (nor this one from last year), I would like to change my opening lines and offer some new ones to follow.
when they ask how you’re doing
it’s okay to say you’re tired to tell the story of how life wore you out and left you here but don’t stop there
sing a weary melody and invite them to sing the harmony they’ll know the song it’s not an original composition
I think I was working on my Masters in English when I first learned of bell hooks, noticing first that she chose not to use capital letters in her name. The English department at UMass Boston was full of professors who were intent on introducing us to people who changed the way we thought about language and communication. I met Pablo Freire, Toni Morrison, and Jimmy Santiago Baca on the page there as well, among others.
I was taking care of a sick friend and out of the news loop and didn’t find out until the weekend. Though I read a good bit of her stuff in graduate school, it was years later–in the spring of 2015–that I really dug in. I was working on my book This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home and someone pointed me to her book Belonging: Building a Culture of Place, where she tells her story of leaving Stanford to return to rural Kentucky where she grew up to teach at Berea College. I listened as she talked about going back to her roots, to the soil–the ground–that made her. And I realized I that place did not exist for me. And yet, when she talked about home, I understood.
All my life I have searched for a place of belonging, a place that would become home . . . . Home was the place where the me of me mattered. Home was the place I longed for, it was not where I lived.
Even as she talked about the ground that grew her, she offered a bigger sense of what it means to belong.
In my childhood I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream the dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.
Some of the obituaries have painted her as a trailblazer and activist, which she was, but what is missing in many of the tributes is the tenacious love that fueled her activism. Three Christmases or so I was wandering through the Strand Bookstore booth at the Bryant Park Holiday Market and I found her book All About Love: New Visions. Her words made the train ride home go quickly.
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong.
An exercise I learned from Pádraig Ó Tuama’s book In the Shelter is to think of the first sentence of your autobiography. We did the exercise with a group one night and the sentence I came up with was, “He was just trying to find his way home.”
bell hooks was not consumed with only finding her way home. She was convinced we need to all know we belong if we are going to survive this thing called life. She helped me feel like I belong, and helped me learn how to pass that along.
The Long Island Sound faces south
so even though I’m on the East Coast
I can see sunrise and sunset over the water
today they were only nine hours apart
that’s all the daylight we got
come back six months from now
and that stretches to fifteen hours
the days in between rocking back
and forth like a cosmic carnival ride
in the middle of it all we fool ourselves
into thinking we can tell time or mark
time or make time or spend time
while nights come and days go
without regard for chronographs
standard time or smart phones
we would do better to set our hearts
to the rhythm of the syncopated sun
the incremental changes in coming
and going that show life doesn’t live
by a metronome but a heartbeat
some days take longer to complete
and some nights stretch out in comfort
there is more to life than being on time
we are not trains we are travelers
sojourners walking toward the sunset
and then resting for the night
however long that might last
When I last posted on December 8, it was not my intent to wait eleven days before I wrote again. The last couple of weeks have been a symphony of emotions from my sixty-fifth birthday to a health scare for one of our chosen family. I tried to get here, but it seems like I needed the quiet, even though it meant not keeping my Advent promises.
Today, I am here because I preached, so I have something to post. The sermon is from Luke 2:1-7 and is called “An Inconvenient Time.”
I will do my best to get here tomorrow.
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Last weekend, as many of you know, I was away because I was celebrating my sixty-fifth birthday. Ginger, my wife, took me to Durham, North Carolina, where we lived before we moved to Connecticut to spend the weekend surrounded by friends and loved ones. As we were preparing to leave town on Friday, we got word that our friend Jay–who is chosen family–was going into the hospital in Boston because they couldn’t control his heart rate.
When I say he is chosen family, I mean he has spent pretty much every Thanksgiving and Christmas with us for the last thirty years. He had planned to come to Durham as well before his heart began acting up. It felt strange for us to be getting on a plane going south as he was headed to Mass General Hospital.
Saturday night, we had a big dinner party at COPA, one of my favorite restaurants in Durham. I was surrounded by people whom I love deeply. It was such a night of joy. And in the middle of it, my phone rang. Jay was calling to say they we’re going to put him in an induced coma for three or four days. As Jay put it, they needed to quiet his brain so they could quiet his heart. The medical explanation made sense, but the thought of them putting him under sedation on Saturday night and not waking him until Tuesday morning scared me. It scared us all.
There in the middle of the restaurant, I felt love and joy and fear and sadness all at the same time.
But then, life rarely gives us one feeling at a time. Even in the Christmas story. I know the passage I read jumps ahead a bit, as far as Advent is concerned, but these verses about Jesus’ birth coming in the middle of everything else have been meaningful this week.
After we got home from Durham, I drove to Boston on Tuesday night and stayed at Jay’s place, took care of Ollie, his dog, and helped Jay get home from the hospital Friday evening. They were able to quiet both his mind and his heart. The story of what lies ahead has yet to be written, but the crisis has passed, just as the official celebration of my birth has passed as well. Yet, I continue to age daily, and Jay’s heart keeps beating—and everything that is a part of life keeps coming at us, all at once.
The verses for this morning spoke to me because of the picture that Luke paints–the setting he creates for Jesus’ birth. We talked a couple of weeks ago about how Luke introduced John the Baptist by listing all the people in positions of power before he got to the prophet on the edge of town. Luke starts the account of Jesus’ birth in the same way, naming the emperor and the governor, and underlining their power by describing how they could demand for all the world to be registered—to be counted for a census—and make people travel to do it.
It didn’t matter that Mary was days away from delivering her child. It didn’t matter that it was ninety miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. They had to go to Joseph’s ancestral home to be counted, and so they did. Then comes the part of the story we all know well. When they got to town, they couldn’t not find standard lodging, so Mary gave birth to her baby in a barn and used a feed trough for a crib.
No matter how long the journey, or how inconsiderate the demands of those in power, or how inconvenient the circumstances, Love still came into the world.
The world changed because Jesus was born. God poured God’s self into human form. Divine Love became incarnate in the person of Jesus, who grew into a man who lived out that love so fiercely that the same political powers listed at the top of Luke’s first two chapters had him executed. Love is not always welcomed by those who crave control.
The world changed, yes, but most of the circumstances around Jesus did not. Life was just as full of pain and grief and hope and fear and joy as it had been. Mary was ninety miles from home with a baby and a man she had not yet married. But she held the child they named Emmanuel–God with us.
God with us—no matter what is going on.
The big stained-glass word for all of this is Incarnation–made into flesh. It’s the fancy way to say God came in human form. One writer I read said at its root the word means “with meat,” as if to say God wanted to make sure we understood that love was not an idea. For love to be real, you have to have some skin in the game.
As I have carried the story of Mary making her way to the manger this week, I have been mindful of how I have seen love incarnated in my own life. Those gathered around the tables at my birthday gatherings have incarnated God’s love to me in so many ways through job changes, address changes, the deaths of my parents, two knee replacements, as well as countless shared meals and dreams. They didn’t have to come to dinner. They came to show me that they loved me.
My driving up to Boston on Tuesday was the best way Ginger and I knew to incarnate love for Jay as they worked to quiet his heart and his mind. I didn’t have to go, but why would I miss the chance to say I love you?
When Mary climbed on the donkey to make her way to Bethlehem, I imagine her thinking the census could not have come at a more inconvenient time. I imagine they spent their days on the road wondering if the child would be born on the side of the highway. But even if they had stayed in Nazareth, there would have never been a day that was convenient for the baby to be born.
Perhaps we could also say there is never a convenient time to incarnate love.
The first Sunday in Advent, I quoted the mystic Meister Eckhardt, who said:
What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
God is always needing to be born into the mess that is our lives. God is always needing to be born in the midst of inconvenience and struggle, in the middle of our questions and fears and dreams– right where we are. Life is not either-or. I’m not sure it’s even as simple as both-and. If we could go around the room and tell our stories this morning, we would remind ourselves that we carry all our feelings at once; we hold grief and joy and hope and sorrow all together. No matter what the circumstance, no matter what the occasion, God is always needing to be born, which is another way of saying God is calling us to incarnate love to one another: to offer one another something—someone–we can hold on to.
As we prepare to celebrate our second COVID Christmas, the wear and tear of the long road of the pandemic is taking its toll. We are all tired and exhausted. Just when we think that maybe things are getting better, the case numbers go up again, or someone close to us gets the virus. We are also feeling the social and economic impact of two years of distance and difficulty, along with the shared grief of over 800,000 deaths. And COVID is not the whole story. Each one of us carries what is going on in our families, at our jobs, here at our church.
This is the world—our world—where God needs to be born, where Love needs to be incarnated, made flesh by our choices of words and actions. Let us quiet our minds and our hearts in this inconvenient time and do all we can to make sure those around us know that Love is stronger than any circumstance. Amen.
it snowed all day
but nothing stuck
is a good description
of this particular tuesday
afternoon or so I thought
until I realized it was
wednesday and as I
turned to make my way
back home I wondered
why fogelberg could sing
about the snow turning
into rain and make it
worthy of a saxophone
the difference between
a snow globe and a muddy
mess is just a few degrees
tonight the rain turned
back to snow still
without a saxophone
I made dinner out of
what was in the fridge
neither will last
past the morning
(thursday morning
I remind myself)
without needing to
demand any more of
the weather than
what it had to offer
on this particular
wednesday
One of the things I often find is when I become aware of something I begin to notice it everywhere, which leaves me wondering if I see it everywhere because I’m looking for it or if I am just slow to the switch when it comes to catching on to stuff.
The last couple of weeks as Advent has begun, what I have noticed is not new to me. I’ve written about it before. But the pervasiveness of it has been much more apparent this year. I’m talking about the metaphors of light and dark, where light is good and dark is bad or troublesome or something not good. What is also not new to me is that the metaphors are problematic in our day because of the many ways the same metaphor we lean into during Advent has been used to justify racism over many centuries of Western expansion and colonial oppression.
I know. That took a turn, didn’t it?
Once again this year, I have spent some time searching for articles and books that talk about the impact of the metaphor and how to engage the biblical accounts in a way that doesn’t do damage to a large number of our siblings in Christ. Once again, I have found a lot of white people trying hard to deal with the problem, but struggling because they appear to enter the discussion determined to redeem the metaphor rather than beginning by listening to the impact of the words on those who are not light skinned.
Let me go ahead and say right now I am not writing because I found something no one else has thought of. I’m writing because I want to learn more about how to use my words to create solidarity and I figure the best way to do that is talk about it out loud and learn from what I miss in the process.
For me there is more at stake than just the biblical or philosophical metaphor. As one who lives with depression, I have found it there as well. William Styron’s book on his mental illness is called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Matthew Johnstone wrote a book called I Had a Black Dog about his depression. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I liked Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression because he changed the metaphor. My depression mugs me in broad daylight. Nighttime–sleep–has always been an escape, a hiding place. When it comes to my depression, I am grateful for the dark.
“Comparison is the thief of joy” is a quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. It came to mind as I was thinking about this today, alongside of working on a worship service for the Third Sunday of Advent, which is traditionally the Sunday of Joy.
Perhaps one of the issues in the metaphors of light and dark is that we use them comparatively almost all of the time without stopping to think of what we are leaving out in the process. One of the articles I found today that was new to me was written by someone named Catherine Bird. The site did not give any information about her. From her writing and her use of the word whilst, I gleaned that she was thoughtful and probably British. She said,
Whilst I would not like us to lose light as a positive metaphor, it is important to recognise that it is not universally helpful – light has many harmful and destructive qualities – and if we deny that Darkness can also describe God we are perhaps missing some very important characteristics of God, as well as being rather unfair on darkness. George Orwell said, “uncritical acceptance of existing phrases can shape thinking and hinder new thought.”
Then she offered “A Dark Creed.”
A Dark Creed
I believe in God The creator of darkness, Who conceived of its potential, And allows it to live.
I believe in Jesus Christ, The prince of darkness, Who raises a canopy of grace to shade the startled ones.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, The inner shadow, Who clings to our soul and distorts the shape of our sorrow.
And she offered another thought:
If you find the image of Jesus as ‘the Prince of darkness’ concerning, then I ask you to reflect on the term Lucifer – which actually means ‘bearer of light’ or ‘Morning Star.’
During the Exile of Israelites to Babylonia, there they encountered the King, who was the son of Bel and Ishtar, associated in local mythology with Venus, the Morning star (so called because of its closeness to the sun and appearance in the sky just before sunrise) So, the King of Babylon became known as the ‘Morning Star’ or Lucifer.
As she went on to talk about how Lucifer and Satan ended up as synonymous, it made me think of other words and phrases that live on separated from their dubious history. I had to learn to quit saying “rule of thumb” when I learned it came from a law that allowed a man to beat his wife as long as the stick was not larger than his thumb in circumference. I chose to quit using father as a metaphor for God not only because it assigned gender to a God who transcends it, but also because I know too many people with problematic relationships with their fathers and I didn’t want them to be alienated by my choice of words.
And if I want to tell the story of the birth of Christ in a way that invites everyone to the manger, I need to learn how to do it without comparing light and darkness. Let there be light, yes, but not at the expense of the dark.
My favorite Texas songwriter, Guy Clark, wrote a song called “The Dark.”
In the dark you can sometimes hear your own heart beat Or the heart of the one next to you The house settles down after holding itself up all day Shoulder slumps, gives a big sigh
You hear no one’s foot fall in the hall That drip in the kitchen sink keeps markin’ time June bug on the window screen can’t get in but he keeps on tryin’ One way or another we’re all in the dark
Fireflies, sparks, lightning, stars Campfires, the moon, headlights on cars The Northern Lights and The Milky Way You can’t see that stuff in the day
When the earth turns its back on the sun The stars come out and the planets start to run around Now they call that day is done But really it’s just getting started Some folks take comfort in that
And how dark is it? It’s too dark for goblins And how dark is it? It’s so dark you can smell the moon How dark is it? It’s so dark the wind gets lost How dark is it? It’s so dark the sky’s on fire How dark is it? It’s so dark you can see Ft. Worth from here
I love the song because he’s describing somewhere I want to be. Just as the cycle of our lives takes us from sunset to sunrise and back again, so must our theology and our language make room for the whole spectrum of existence, the shadows and sunshine, the clouds and clear blue, not because they are opposites but because they are partners. Siblings.
John wrote that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not comprehend it. I’m guessing it works both ways: the light doesn’t always understand the dark either. But that does not pit them against one another, that just means they both have some learning to do, as do I. Rather than cling to an old rugged metaphor, I’ll trust that the God who made the dark is larger than light.
I have offered music posts most every Advent that I have been writing, so I thought I would keep up the tradition here in the middle of the season. These are not Christmas songs, or specifically Advent songs, but they are songs that speak to me in these days, songs that offer cold comfort. Most of them are new to me, since I went looking for them rather than counting on old favorites. The one exception is the first one, “That Kind of Love” by Pierce Pettis.
love rejected and ignored held in chains, behind closed doors stuff of legend and of songs and deep down everybody longs for that kind of love oh, that kind of love
some people never know that kind of love though it only takes a child to show that kind of love widows smile and strong men weep, and little ones play at its feet the deaf can hear and the blind can see that kind of love
Most all of these songs talk about what love looks like, or what it takes to love. Any Gullahorn titled his song, “If You Want to Love Someone” and he says,
in every heart there is a hollow locked against the pain if there’s a key the key is sorrow only a trusted hand can hold
if you wanna love someone search their soul for where it’s broken find the cracks and pour your heart in if you wanna love someone
Ilse DeLange is a new name to me. She puts hands and feet to love in “I’ll Hold On,” her way of saying what love looks like.
on and on, I go down the beaten path with all the things I know and all the things I have
I’m walking, always walking back to you, my friend with a song inside and them tears to hide I’m on my way again I’ll hold on I’ll hold on
Glen Hansard has a habit of intertwining hope and heartache in his songs. “Cold Comfort” is a wonderful example; it also supplied the title for this collection.
the streets are quiet but for the sound of birdsong there’s no rush upon us now well, it’s slow going and it’s slower still here but we’ll get through if we pull together now
and it’s little comfort, I know but it’s raining down on everybody now and the worst is over and it’s little comfort, I know but it’s raining all over the world right now and it’s little comfort, I know but the worst will soon be over
Tyrone Wells is going to close out the post with his song “And the Birds Sing,” a song that will worm its way into your heart and your ear, reminding you that love lifts us all.
the poor man and the millionaire both sharing the oak tree shade not stressing over money made
the preacher and the atheist both jumping in the ocean waves today they both feel saved
say what you gonna do when the clouds come you gonna hold your head high say what you gonna do when the storms come keep your eyes to the sky, and I’ll tell you why
cause one day… the sunshine will shine again shine all over the world on every man, woman, boy and girl
These days are still growing shorter and colder, but listen for the birds and remember we’ll get through if we pull together.
For about twenty-five Advent seasons, I opened the services at our church (whichever church that was) with “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell. That tradition didn’t make the move to Guilford, but the song is tattooed on my heart. The scripture passage for my sermon today alludes to Isaiah’s words, and it connected me with my youth in Kenya. (And yes, the video of the song is at the end of the sermon.)
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As I told you last week, I grew up in Africa. Part of that time, I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. I think about living there often, for different reasons. This week my memories were sparked by Luke quoting Isaiah’s words about mountains being leveled and valleys being filled in because one of the great geological sights in Kenya is the Great Rift Valley. Actually, it runs from the Red Sea down into Malawi.
The sides of the valley are steep because it was caused by a fault, so it looks like the whole middle section just dropped hundreds of feet. As I read more about it, I learned the term Great Rift Valley is used to refer to a series of contiguous rifts that connect from Lebanon to Mozambique, one of which includes the Jordan River, which means the valley I saw in Africa was connected to the valley where Isaiah and John the Baptist both stood.
Listen to our passage from Luke 3:1-6.
In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, Philip his brother tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene. In those days, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the Word of God came to John, ben-Zechariah, in the desert. John went through the entire region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as is written in the words of Isaiah, the prophet:
“A herald’s voice in the desert, crying, ‘Make ready the way of our God; clear a straight path. Every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be leveled. The twisted paths will be made straight, and the rough road smooth— and all humankind will see the salvation of God.’”
We read this passage during Advent because it talks about John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. If you know the musical Godspell, you know the musical opens with John the Baptist singing, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” For many years in the churches where my wife served, I sang that song to open our Advent services. But John never says or sings that. In fact, if we look closely at the passage, all Luke says about John is that he was preaching a gospel of repentance and forgiveness. The rest of the verses talk about who was in power at the time and then he quotes Isaiah—well, sort of quotes him.
I spent some time thinking about road work this week and then it struck me that Luke starts off by listing all the people in power, both politically and religiously and ends up focusing on a prophet ranting in the wilderness–a voice on the margins calling people to repentance and forgiveness. He says that John’s presence reminded people of a passage from Isaiah that people were used to hearing at the synagogue.
If we go back to the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah calls people to make a highway for God. The image is one of serious road construction, which often means the topography has to be changed to make the road viable.
One time Ginger and I were in the car together and we survived the slow snake of trafficcaused by highway construction. When we saw the “End Road Work” sign that set us free I remarked, “I think that ought to be a protest sign.”
We all want better highways and bridges, but if you have ever been stuck on I-95 because they are working on it, you know that any improvements in our infrastructure will come at a cost. Building and rebuilding are time consuming and inconvenient. Often to build means first something has to be torn down or torn out to prepare for what is to come, and then, as I said, it takes time to build the new thing.
The visual Isaiah created makes it sound like the world God wants looks a lot like West Texas, which is not appealing to me. West Texas looks like land that inspired people to build things like tables and countertops. It is flat and flat and endless and flat. The stars at night look big and bright because there is nothing else to see. Can you tell it’s not my favorite place.
But Luke isn’t just quoting Isaiah, he is paraphrasing him. Where the ancient prophet talked about a highway, Luke talked about a path when he said John was embodying Isaiah’s words. But I don’t think Luke intended for his readers to get caught up in trying to picture the epic landscaping project Isaiah proclaims. John wasn’t quoting Isaiah either. Isaiah is mentioned because Luke wanted us to get a picture of what it felt like when people living in Palestine under the mountain of oppression brought on by the names listed wandered to the outskirts of town and found John the Baptist in all his strangeness.
Luke says, when they saw John they thought, “Hey, this is like that verse about a voice crying in the wilderness.” They heard the passage often in the synagogue, but they had not imagined the live action version of it–except John wasn’t saying anything about mountains or valleys. He was preaching was repentance and forgiveness. If what prophets were supposed to talk about was the mountains coming down and the valleys being filled in, John was calling people to do it with a shovel, not large earth moving equipment.
Hold that thought and let’s go back to the Great Rift Valley because sometimes words build bridges that help us get from one place to another. As I was reading about it, I came across this sentence:
“While the name continues in some usages, it is rarely used in geology as it is considered an imprecise merging of separate though related rift and fault systems.”
Rifts and faults—words we use to talk about broken relationships. And the brought me back to the one sentence Luke says about John:
John went through the entire region of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins . . .
In a world where those in power used their privilege to oppress others, in a world where prophets had been crying out for centuries for people to trust that God could change the landscape if they would listen, in a world where people were just trying to figure out how to get through a day, John wandered the country preaching about repentance and forgiveness.
The word we translate as repentance has a stronger meaning, more along the lines of conversion–a turning, a new direction. It is deeper than changing our minds or feeling regret over something we have done. It is choosing to go in a new direction, to do things differently, to tear down what is there and build something new.
The Greek word we translate as forgiveness can also mean being freed from bondage, which is interesting to me when I think about the power of both asking for and offering forgiveness.
Both words call us to profound change. Perhaps knocking down a mountain is not a bad metaphor, and it’s an even better when we are willing to consider the rifts and faults in our own hearts. We can profoundly alter the landscape of our lives if we are willing to risk repentance and forgiveness. The straightest path from one heart to another, from one person to another, is the most direct one.
When we choose to trust one another with difficult conversations rather than gossip or talk around one another, we prepare the way of the Lord. When we choose to assume positive intent when someone does something that angers or hurts us rather than reacting without offering room for conversation, we prepare the way of the Lord. When we choose to forgive rather than allow resentment to build a mountain in our hearts, we prepare the way of the Lord.
Isaiah had been dead a long time when John showed up. His transformative words had become familiar things that you heard in synagogue. John the Baptist has been dead a long time, too, and we mostly think about him during Advent as we talk about preparing for the birth of Jesus. Their words, however, are more than decorations. They show us how to love one another.
Prepare the way of the Lord. John may not have ever said those words, but it is exactly what he called us to do. Amen.
Stephen Sondheim died last week, as you probably know.
His death last week affected me in several ways, not the least of which was taking me back to an afternoon in the Spring of 1988 when my friend Billy Crockett and I wandered up to the TKTS booth in Times Square and scored two half-price tickets to Into the Woods. I will confess I knew very little about Sondheim and nothing about that particular show. Billy was the one who suggested it. I can out of the theater changed by that one evening. From there, I began to learn more about Sondheim and his amazing body of work.
What I learned this morning, thanks to this article in the New York Times, was that for all of his composing and lyric writing, he spent a great deal of time encouraging: showing up for other people’s shows, and then writing notes of support afterwards. Laura Collins-Hughes writes,
To a legion of fans Sondheim was and is the be-all and end-all. But his own horizons as a theatergoer were significantly broader than that. In an art form that is so much about being present for the unrepeatable moment, he not only showed up, but he also often did so to experience work that was offbeat and obscure, challenging conventions just as his own work did.
The phrase in the middle of the paragraph is what caught my eye:
In an art form that is so much about being present for the unrepeatable moment . . .
She was talking about theater, but I read her words and thought, “That’s life: being present for the unrepeatable moment,” because we live days filled with them, rolling by one after another. Much like an actor who must inhabit a character to be convincing, we are called to be awake and aware in our existence because so much of it is made up of you-had-to-be-there moments. Even the things we repeat day after day are not the same from one day to the next. Perhaps the biggest difference between a life and a theatrical production is that life offers no chance to rehearse. We can remember, regret, redo, or even repent, but there is no practice life; this is it.
If we are not intentional, all that I just said can lead us to think the point is our performance. We are better at life when we remember that’s not the only point. Back to Sondheim:
It was part of Sondheim’s gift to understand not only the encompassing job description of great artist but also his singular effect on his colleagues—how even a few words of appreciation, or moments of attention, could prove enduring sustenance over the long slog of a career in an often pitiless field.
It was unglamorous work, and Sondheim did it exquisitely.
My father carried a story with him from his days as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. After one of the conventions, he received a letter from a young pastor who said he had tried to engage Dad after one of the sessions and really needed to talk to him, but just as he got my father’s attention someone Dad knew better came up and my father turned away and never turned back to the man. “I needed your help that day,” the man wrote, “and you turned away because someone you knew better or who mattered more got your attention. I am writing in hopes that my letter will help you do differently next time.”
What the young pastor didn’t know about my father was that they shared an inferiority complex. For all of the things my father did, he never felt worthy. He thought he had to prove himself everyday–mostly to himself. The letter stung him. He didn’t forget. I can’t say he never was distracted by attention again, but the story stayed fresh, and he encouraged a lot of people.
Beyond the importance of backing one another up, as I wrote last night, and being aware of unexpected opportunities to affirm one another, as my father learned, what I see in Sondheim is someone who intentionally inserted himself to put himself in a position to encourage and affirm. He didn’t wait for people to come to him.
One of the people Sondheim touched with his encouragement was Jonathan Larson, the man who created RENT. The new Netflix movie Tic Tic Boom tells the story of Larson finding his way in New York, and Sondheim plays a critical role, simply because he reaches out and offers support.
One of my favorite poems, Zen of Tipping by Jan Beatty comes to mind:
My friend Lou used to walk up to strangers and tip them—no, really— he’d cruise the South Side, pick out the businessman on his way to lunch, the slacker hanging by the Beehive, the young girl walking her dog, and he’d go up, pull out a dollar and say, Here’s a tip for you. I think you’re doing a really good job today. Then Lou would walk away as the tipee stood in mystified silence. Sometimes he would cut it short with, Keep up the fine work. People thought Lou was weird, but he wasn’t. He didn’t have much, worked as a waiter. I don’t know why he did it. But I know it wasn’t about the magnanimous gesture, an easy way to feel important, it wasn’t interrupting the impenetrable edge of the individual—you’d have to ask Lou—maybe it was about being awake, hand-to-hand sweetness, a chain of kindnesses, or fun—the tenderness we forget in each other.
Because I love to cook and I’m pretty good at it, people are sometimes afraid to cook for me, as though I will come to the table as a critic rather than a guest. But eating other people’s food is also one of my favorite things. I know what it takes to prepare a meal, I am happy to honor the offering. I also know what it feels like to have people love your food; I am happy to share that feeling as well.
Life may be a team sport, but it is not a competition. No one wins when we get our affirmation at the expense of someone else. Life is hard. May we remember what Sondheim knew well–that a few words of appreciation or moments of attention can be enduring sustenance to those around us.
We will all be remembered more for our affections and affirmations than our accomplishments.
