One of my Facebook friends here in Guilford posted this picture of the sunset blurred by the ash of the fires on the other side of the country.
scattered
the east coast sunset
looks like the west
african haze of the
harmattan but our
sun is not muted
by the desert dust
but by the ashes
of trees and homes
the remnants of
incinerated lives
carried cross country
ashes of remembrance
scattered shadows of
solidarity that say
we are connected
by wind and land
by fire and death
by loss and life
tell me why then
is it that I am
caught
by surprise
I woke up to an e-mail message informing me of a new Bruce Springsteen record–always good news. The introductory single gave me both the title for my post tonight and a lift in my spirits.
‘neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread got down on my knees grabbed my pen and bowed my head tried to summon all that my heart finds true and send it in my letter to you
Summoning all that our hearts find true is no easy work these days. As we move from summer to fall, Robert Earl Keen has letters of his own and honest words about weariness.
my bag is full of letters unopened and unread I’m sure they’d tell the story of worry and of form my heart is beating heavy with all we left unsaid I swear to you I never meant you any harm but sacrifice and compromise could never stand the strain it’s been a long hot summer, not a drop of rain
But weariness is not the last word. I was talking with my spiritual director about all that is swirling around me in these days, focusing mostly on the grief when she said, “It feels like your life is filled with God. Peter Mayer put her words to music in a song I have carried with me for a long time.
when holy water was rare at best it barely wet my fingertips but now I have to hold my breath like I m swimming in a sea of it it used to be a world half there heaven s second rate hand-me-down but I walk it with a reverent air cause everything is holy now everything, everything everything is holy now
I had forgotten about this Warren Zevon gem until it showed up in a playlist the other night. Feels like a COVID anthem to me.
don’t let us get sick don’t let us get old don’t let us get stupid, all right? just make us be brave and make us play nice and let us be together tonight
Jeff Tweedy wrote this song for Mavis Staples to sing, but here he is singing it himself. As we live at a distance, let us sing it to each other.
you’re not alone
I’m with you, I’m lonely too
what’s that song
can’t be sung by two?
a broken home, a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone
I’ve posted this one before, but how could I get to early September and not play “Summer’s End”?
the moon and stars hang out in bars just talking I still love that picture of us walking just like that ol’ house we thought was haunted summer’s end came faster than we wanted come on home come on home no you don’t have to be alone come on home
I’ll close my letter with an old gathering hymn from James Taylor. Sing along, people; we’re all we’ve got.
shower the people you love with love show them the way that you feel things are gonna work out fine if you only will shower the people you love with love show them the way you feel things are gonna be much better if you only will
When I worked at the Roobar restaurant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I learned how to make a marinara sauce from Tim Miller, the executive chef and one of the best people I ever worked for. I learned a lot of things from him.
One summer Saturday after we moved to Durham, North Carolina, I came home from the farmers market with both peaches and tomatoes. I’m not sure what got me to thinking about combinations, but I decided to play with what I had learned from Tim and use them both to make a sauce for a Thursday Night Dinner. As I remember, I poured it over eggplant parmigiana.
It worked.
A couple of weeks after I made up my signature cookies for Cocoa Cinnamon in Durham, I walked into the shop to see them labeled as “Milton’s Famous Cookies.” When I asked my friend and the co-owner about it, he said, “They are famous here.” My sauce has remained a little bit more of a secret, but it’s pretty damn good, so I will settle for
uncle milty’s mildly famous tomato-peach marinara
Like any good sauce, it’s all in how it tastes, so I am not giving specific amounts, other than to say use equal amounts of tomatoes (I prefer paste tomatoes–Romas, San Marzanos) and peaches. Even better if both are fresh, though canned tomatoes will work in a pinch. Don’t use canned peaches. Those are ready for pies. Frozen ones would work, however.
This recipe is designed to make a bunch of sauce, but you can make a small amount as well.
tomatoes, blanched and peeled
peaches, blanched and peeled
garlic
basil, chopped
olive oil
Bring a pot of water to boil. Score the tomatoes and the peaches across the bottom: make an “X” with a knife, that is. Drop the tomatoes in the boiling water for 1-2 minutes and then lift them out on to a sheet pan. Bring the water back to a boil and blanch the peaches for 3-4 minutes and lift them out.
Empty the water out, wipe the pot dry, and return it to the stove. (Or use a different pot; I just like to have less cleanup.) While the tomatoes and peaches are cooling a bit, crush enough garlic to pretty much cover the bottom of the potand then pour enough olive oil over the garlic to cover the cloves about halfway. Put it over medium heat and put a lid on the pot. Stir it occasionally. Cook for 6-8 minutes, or until the garlic begins to brown a bit on the edges.
While the garlic is cooking, peel the tomatoes and peaches (the blanching makes it easy) and put them in a big bowl. Use your hands to crush everything together. Pour the mixture–carefully–into the pot with the garlic and oil and stir to mix well. Lower the heat a little and then let it come to a simmer. Don’t put a lid on it; you want it to reduce a bit. Cook for at least an hour–longer if can. Low and slow always makes a sauce taste better. Season the sauce–add salt and pepper, or maybe some crushed red pepper flakes–towards the end of the process.
Take the basil leaves off of the stem and chop them. When the sauce is nearly done, add the basil and stir. Then purée the sauce using an immersion blender until it’s smooth. Taste and season again.
If you want to can the sauce, add one tablespoon of lemon juice and 1 teaspoon of salt to the bottom of each pint jar (double for a quart jar), and then fill with sauce, seal, and process in a water bath (more boiling water) for 45 minutes (55 for quarts).
Yes, it’s pasta sauce, but it tastes so good you could eat it like soup.
the word distance
has its roots in discord
and disagreement
another way of
saying something has
come between us
we stand apart
before we masked
and measured ourselves
the strife simmered
under our skins
we want to blame
the virus but our
disease runs deeper
long ago we learned
to live at extremes
makes it easier to be
right even righteous
why give even an inch
to let them too close
is to risk infection
I learned a folk
song as a kid that
wondered where the
flowers had gone
a light apocalyptic
melody that carried
the question when
will they ever learn
when will we
My friend Nathan Brown is a poet. For a living. And he’s good.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he began something called the Fire Pit Sessions on his Facebook page, which grew out of his invitation for people to commission poems about life in these days. He then began to come on every night or two and read some of them and then sing a song—usually a cover, but often an original.
He did his forty-eighth Fire Pit Session last night and they just keep getting better. After he finished his poetry, he cited a few lines G. K. Chesterton’s “The Deluge” from memory
Though giant rains put out the sun, Here stand I for a sign. Though earth be filled with waters dark, My cup is filled with wine. Tell to the trembling priests that here Under the deluge rod, One nameless, tattered, broken man Stood up, and drank to God.
I wanna ask all the questions with answers we’ll never know I wanna find my faith in records from long ago I wanna set fear on fire and give dreaming a fair shot And never give up whether anybody cares or not
and I felt compelled to write a response to my friend, and so I sent him this.
August 3 marks seven years since my father died—on the same day that Gracie, our little goofy Schnauzer, died as well.
the third of august
the thing I never really liked
about august is the way the
heat and humidity ride under
my skin making it all but
impossible to be comfortable
I can move from sweaty to
surly because there is no relief
grief is an endless august in
the weather of the heart
an agitating absence a
hot breath of a breeze that
sends sadness seeping out of
every pore even the soft sun
of the morning is ready to burn
it has been seven augusts since
you died early that morning
and I sat in the parking lot
of the nursing home in Waco
my sweat as heavy as my tears
feeling like a fatherless child
a long long way from my home
one might think I would be used
to august by now but I am not
acceptance is not an arrival
I keep living through augusts
with you still under my skin
I will carry your name and your
memory yet another summer
I preached this week for our church. The passage was Matthew 14:13-24—the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand—which is one of my favorites. Since our sanctuary is not air conditioned, we filmed in Ginger’s office.
One of the songs that was popular when I was in high school that has managed to stick around for almost half a century is a tune by the Scottish band Stealers Wheel called “Stuck in the Middle with You,” which includes the memorable lines
clowns to the left of me jokers to the right here I am stuck in the middle with you
A pandemic anthem well before its time, don’t you think?
I did too, as I worked on my sermon this week—only to be reminded that Ginger had referenced the song in her first virtual sermon back in March. But since March feels like it was years and not months ago, the song bears repeating because we are still stuck—or so it seems.
As August begins, we have gone almost five months since we last worshipped together in our meeting house or chatted at coffee hour. I am way behind on my NHQ–my Necessary Hug Quota. Because of my knee surgery in April of 2019, which sidelined me from cooking for most of the summer, our barn has gone almost a year without people gathered around our table for dinner. How I wish we could be together so we could share what we miss and the griefs—yes, plural—we are all holding. Whatever stories we are telling in these days of protest and pandemic, they are grief stories: stories of being stuck in the middle without resolution—and without each other.
I was grateful to find that the lectionary passage was the story we most commonly know as the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which you may not know is a grief story of its own. Our reading starts in the middle of things, as lectionary passages often do. The first sentence is the giveaway: “And hearing this, Jesus withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place to be by himself.”
“And hearing this . . .” The English teacher in me wants to say, “Your antecedent is unclear. What did he hear?
The first twelve verses of Chapter 14 give us that context. The short version is John the Baptist was murdered by Herod on a drunken whim. His disciples buried him and then came to tell Jesus. And hearing this, Jesus did all he could to get away from everyone and everything to grieve the loss of his cousin, colleague, and friend. But he couldn’t get away. The crowds of people hoping for healing were relentless in both their need and pursuit of him and they followed him out of town into the desert, as did the disciples whom, I imagine, were doing their best to deal with their grief over John’s death as well as Jesus’ sorrow, which was new to them as well.
When Jesus became aware of what was happening, Matthew says, “. . . he was moved inwardly with compassion for them” and instead of continuing to run away Jesus turned back into the mass of people and began to listen to their grief stories, to share their loads, and to offer healing. This went on all day and into the evening. The disciples’ response was a little less compassionate, though I think they thought they were trying to help. “We’re out here in the desert and it’s after supper time; don’t you think we should send them into the villages so they don’t starve?” Part of being a disciple, it seems, meant living with the grief of inadequacy, which was wearisome, I’m sure.
Jesus’ response was direct: “They don’t need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
Their response was also straightforward. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fishes.” In Matthew’s version, they didn’t even have a cute little kid who was offering his sack supper. They just knew they didn’t have enough. The hunger of the crowd was not something they could solve. It didn’t matter what they did, they couldn’t fix the problem.
“Bring them here to me,” Jesus said. Then he turned to the crowd and asked them to recline, as they would if they were going to eat. (For our purposes, let us imagine they were masked and appropriately distanced.) He blessed the food and then gave it to the disciples to distribute. With several thousand people on a hillside, it is hard to grasp the logistics of it all, but the people seemed to know that dinner was being served. They sat down and began to pass the food as it came to them. Everyone ate and there were leftovers.
The willing suspension of disbelief has always come fairly easily for me, so I have never had much of a problem with taking the miracle stories of Jesus at face value, or, as one of my seminary professors used to describe them, as parables in event, which is to say the miracle of this meal is pointing to something other than the amazing set of circumstances.
The state of my life often affects what I see in the story. These months we have spent in quarantine, as many have turned mask-wearing into a violation of their constitutional rights, have helped me to see that the miracle in this story is that a whole mountain of grieving people looking beyond themselves and feeding one another.
I don’t think Jesus knew, necessarily, that it was all going to work out when he started passing out bits of bread and fish. He just knew it was the right thing to do. If you have food and you see hungry people, you feed them. You offer what you have. And then see where it goes.
The lectionary passage stops with the count of how many were fed and, in doing so, leaves the story too quickly. But the next verse, verse 22, says, “Then he insisted that the disciples embark into the boat and precede him to the other side, until he should dismiss the crowds.”
The day had begun for Jesus with an ambush of grief that had sent him searching for self-isolation. It ended with him being not quite ready to leave when dinner was over: “You go on and I’ll catch up. I want to say goodbye to everyone”—and, yes, I realize that is an extrovert’s take on the story. Still, Jesus found some healing there as well. As the disciples walked down to the water, I imagine them hearing Jesus humming,
clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right . . .
And then they went on to the next day, which held new grief of its own, and some old stuff as well.
Jesus didn’t take care of people or tell the disciples to feed the crowd because it made everything better. Healing people didn’t bring John back to life. Handing out fish and bread didn’t eradicate the Roman occupation. But they were the right things to do. The hopeful things.
Vaclav Havel was a playwright who became the president of Czechoslovakia in the late 80s. He told of something that took place just a few weeks before he unexpectedly became a head of state. He was out in the countryside at a dinner party and fell down a sewer pipe. In his words, he almost drowned in that “fundamental mud” but someone had the wherewithal to get a long ladder and saved him. That he was in a sewer and that he became a state official were equally absurd circumstances. In that context, he wrote about hope.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.
We have more days coming that we can imagine when we are not going to know how long this is going to last, or what is going to happen next, or when life will feel recognizable again. The days ahead are also going to leave us feeling like the disciples, more often than not, when it comes to how what we think we have to offer stacks up against the needs around us. Whatever happens, even in life beyond the pandemic and quarantine, life is not going to feel like the life we think we remember. But Jesus, to use Havel’s words, didn’t do what he did because he knew it would all turn out okay, he did it because he was certain it made sense to share what food they had. And then he stayed to talk, and to listen.
One of the verses of our song for today goes
trying to make some sense of it all
and I can see it makes no sense at all
it is cool to go to sleep on the floor
‘cause I don’t think I can take anymore . . .
So much of life right now doesn’t make sense, from the virus to the vitriol of our national discourse. Truly, there are clowns to the left and jokers to the right. The world feels full of naysayers, nutjobs, and ne’er-do-wells in every direction. It doesn’t make sense to keep screaming at each other. It doesn’t make sense to just wish that life would go back to normal—whatever that was. It doesn’t make sense to just hunker down and take care of ourselves and let everyone else fend for themselves.
What does make sense is to do all we can to let those stuck in the middle with us know that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. What does make sense is to see these days as open space that offers us the chance to change, how we treat one another on both personal and societal levels. We are stuck in the middle together. What makes sense is to offer all that we have to a hungry world. To feed one another any way we can—even the clowns and the jokers. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
P.S.—Seems only fitting for this to be our postlude.
my baseball career consisted
of afternoon tosses with my father
and my brother in the backyard
of several houses in several cities
being a missionary kid meant
I moved like a mediocre minor
leaguer hoping for a big break
those afternoons of overthrows
and near misses taught me to
love the game from the bench
and the bleacher sharpening my
skills of solidarity and sharing
in someone else’s moment and
the treasure of a broken heart
this year opening day comes
ten days before we mark
the day we closed the casket
and said goodbye to my father
a week gone into extra innings
my heart is a long fly ball hit
deep into an empty stadium
When my parents married, they knew they were moving to Africa less than a year later. My father did not have much when it came to family. His mother died a month after he was born and his father was an itinerant minister and church planter, so his grandmother, Ma, raised him. His father remarried when my dad was about ten to the woman I knew as “Grandma C,” but my dad still never had much of a sense of home. His father died before my parents were married.
My mother asked him if there were any recipes from his childhood that he wanted her to learn. The only one was Ma’s strawberry shortcake. When Mom asked for the recipe, Ma gave it as a list of ingredients without quantities. My mother had to figure those out over the years. And she did. Our house in Nairobi was around the corner from a strawberry farmer. When it was berry season, Mom made the biscuits big and the shortcake was all we had for dinner.
I know very little about my ancestry other than what I have written here. A couple of weeks ago, I ended up in an ancestry.com wormhole and was amazed what I found. I now know that my grandfather, Milton I, is buried in Austin and my dad’s birth mother, Bertha, is in San Antonio. I also learned my grandfather had siblings and the names of his parents, Howard and Mary. Howard was murdered one Christmas Eve when he inadvertently surprised some cattle rustlers; my grandfather was a child. It seems all three Miltons in my family have struggled to know what family feels like.
Though I have not had much genealogical information, I do have recipes from my mother and her mother, in particular. Over the years, the strawberry shortcake has become our July 4 food for our chosen family who have gathered at our various houses. As I learned more about cooking, I adapted the recipe. My main contributions has been to add fresh basil to the shortcakes and to macerate the fruit in balsamic vinegar and sugar.
Ma and I got to meet each other before we moved to Africa. I was an infant, so I don’t remember the encounter. She died before we came back on leave when I was four. I am grateful that some sixty years later her recipe gives me a deep and flavorful connection to a family I never really knew. A taste of family.
strawberry shortcake
1 pint strawberries, hulled and sliced
(you can also add blueberries or other fruit)
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons sugar
a big handful of basil
1/2 cup butter, cold and cubed
3/4 cup milk
1 pint heavy whipping cream
1/4 t cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon confectioner’s sugar
For the fruit: In a medium-sized bowl, combine the strawberries, vinegar, sugar, and lemon juice. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside. The more time you give it, the better, so try to do this an hour or so before you actually want to serve the shortcakes.
For the shortcakes: Preheat the oven to 450°.
In a food processor, combine flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and basil. Pulse until basil is completely mixed in. Add butter and pulse until the mixture looks like coarse sand, then turn on the processor and stream in the milk until it is all combined.
Dump it out on a floured surface and fold it over on itself until it takes a fairly firm shape. Roll it out into a rectangle about 1/2 inch thick. I cut it into twelve square biscuits, but you can make them larger or smaller. Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat and bake for 12-15 minutes. Biscuits will still feel a little soft, but will be browned around the edges and a little on top. Place the baking sheet on a cooling rack and let them biscuits cool.
For the whipped cream: Combine the last four ingredients in a stand mixer or a deep mixing bowl where you can use a hand mixer. If you are using a stand mixer, you will need to wrap the top with plastic wrap so you don’s spray cream all over your kitchen. Whip until it looks like whipped cream.
To serve, cut the shortcake in half. Put a small dollop of whipped cream on the plate and place the bottom half of the biscuit on the plate. (The whipped cream just keeps it from sliding around. Put a generous spoonful of the fruit and its juices on the biscuit and then top with a dollop of whipped cream. Take the top of the biscuit and place it cut side up on top of your work-in-progress. Add more strawberries and more cream.
I hope whoever is gathered at your table for this meal has a family food story to tell of their own.
