I am going to be laying low for a couple of days because I am down to the wire to get my final edits done for my new book, The Color of Together: Mixed Metaphors of Connectedness, which will be published on October 13, 2020 by Light Messages Publishing.
This one has been a long time coming. I am excited we are moving closer to it being an actual book. Since I have a day job, the next couple of nights are going to be devoted to making a few changes and trying to figure out how to talk about these days of quarantine, which weren’t even something I was thinking about when I started writing.
Thanks for your encouragement. Tell all your friends, please. And when we can move around again and hang out together, I would love to come to your town, eat together, and talk about the metaphors that matter most.
Oh–when you click the preorder link, you will notice that the cover is different than the one I am showing here. This is what the book will look like when you get it. The other, as they say, is a placeholder.
I am preaching for our service this week. We recorded it on Thursday standing in front of our church vegetable garden rather than in the sanctuary, so not only do I have a manuscript of the sermon, I have a recording as well.
The text is Exodus 16:9-21–the story of the manna in the wilderness.
When I was in high school I was in a musical ensemble at my church. Ten or twelve of us were chosen out of the youth choir. The director wanted a name with spiritual significance. What we came up with was Manna, I think because we assumed the word meant something like “God will provide.”
Most of the sermons I’ve heard on this story of God raining bread like dew in the morning and quail into the camp at night have been affirmations that God will take care of us. And that is an important truth–the same one Ginger talked about last week–we belong to Emmanuel: God With Us.
We are not alone.
Here’s the thing. The word manna in Hebrew doesn’t mean anything deeply theological. It means, “What is it?” When they woke up in the morning, the ground was covered with something that looked like coriander seed, was white, and tasted sweet, and they said, “Manna?” They were trying to figure out what was going on. Sound familiar?
They were told to only collect what they needed for the day and trust that there would be more tomorrow. If they tried to save it to make sure they had food for the future, the stuff soured and became full of worms. They had to learn to trust God and take each day as it came.
Most of the sermons that I have heard sermons on this story stop right here. And they were good sermons. Their daily exercise in trusting God was the inspiration for lines in one of my favorite hymns, “Great is Thy Faithfulness”—morning by morning, new mercies I see. Jesus underlined the same point when he talked about considering the lilies and not worrying about tomorrow.
But as I looked at the story this week, I kept reading to the end of the and found something I had not seen before. Verse 35 reads:
And the Israelites ate manna for forty years, until the came to a habitable land; they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.
The Israelites had escaped from captivity—from generations of slavery and oppression—only to end up in the wilderness. The desert. Before long, they began complaining and Moses took their complaints to God, who responded with manna. I have this sort of a cosmic image of God handing sandwiches to the kids in the back seat who keep yelling, “Are we there yet?”
“Be quiet and eat.”
“What is it?”
“I said eat.”
I imagine the first few mornings of manna were cause for wonder and even gratitude. Morning by morning, they woke up to food for the day. But then they didn’t get where they were going for forty years. What they expected to change quickly became the way life was. I wonder how long it was before they stopped tasting the thankfulness. Being in the wilderness for forty years meant the ones who had come out of Egypt never knew anything but the wilderness. In fact, most of the people who left Egypt never got to the Promised Land. They woke up every morning in the and said, “What is this?” for the rest of their lives.
Eight weeks in to our lockdown, perhaps we are getting a taste of what they felt. A lot of days I feel like Billy Murray in Groundhog Day, where he is exhausted by having to live the same day over and over and he says, “I’ll give you a weather forecast: it’s gonna be cold and it’s gonna be gray and it’s gonna last the rest of your life.”
What began as something we hoped would be short-term is now something whose ending we can’t predict or control. In my own attempt to begin to understand that we may be in for the long haul, I wrote this poem last week:
maybe it doesn’t get better
you may not want
to read past the title
but hear me out–
we can’t do what we
are doing just because
we think this won’t last
and we can get back
to the way things were
maybe it doesn’t get better
I know–
I already said that
but what if the pandemic
pans out into permanence
or as permanent as
things ever get
what if we what we took
for granted isn’t granted
and we are left with life
and each other
for years, not days
yeah, I’m going to say it again
maybe it doesn’t get better
okay–I’ll say it another way
who knows what will happen
does that help
faith and hope hunger for uncertainty
love knows all you can count on
in life is someone else and let
someone count on you because
maybe it doesn’t get better
then again, maybe it does
The Israelites had to learn how to live in the wilderness as though that was what life was like. Yes, they knew they were supposed to be on their way to the land that God had promised them, but they couldn’t just sit around and wait for the future to come. The truth is the future never gets here for any of us. We cannot live lives that matter if they are based on what we expect to happen next. We can learn from our past and we can prepare for what we think might happen, but we can only live today, whatever the circumstances.
Most every Sunday morning during the quarantine, I have come into the meeting house to take the picture of Ginger and Jake as they send out the worship service e-mail. It feels strange to be in the room without anyone else here. I long for us to see each other, to be able to hug each other, to be able to sing together, and to eat too many snacks at coffee hour. That day may be a long time coming.
The decisions about how and when things will begin to open up, when we will be able to gather in person for worship, when we can go out to eat with friends, or quit wearing masks are not ones we get to make directly. We will respond to those circumstances, not create them.
How spend our days–these days, whatever the circumstances—are our decisions to make. We can decide how we will connect, how we will find ways to say we love one another, how we take care of each other, how we treat one another, how we ask for help. We can choose to make sure we all have what we need to get through the day ahead. We can choose not to wait for normal to return, or for things to get better, but to live today in this strange time as though these are the days we have to live.
One of my favorite stories about Jesus happened on the night before he was executed, when he washed the feet of his disciples. In a culture that knew only sandals and dusty roads, it was an act of servitude and compassion. The way John tells the story, he says that Jesus, “knowing he had come from God and was going to God,” knelt down and washed their feet. He wasn’t waiting for something to happen, or someone to rescue him. He took care of his friends.
We, too, have come from God and are going to God. Whoever we are and wherever we are on life’s journey, we are with God and God is with us. We have today to live, to breathe in the breath of God and breathe out the love of God, to take care of one another, to choose morning by morning new mercies to see.
Maybe things will get better. Maybe they won’t. Whatever happens, we have come from God and we are going to God, and we are traveling together. May we choose to do and say everything we can to remind one another of those things. Amen.
I lived–and worked in restaurants–in Durham, North Carolina for five years before I dared to say I knew how to make a good biscuit, and I still know there are those who can make better biscuits than I can. Mike Hacker at Pie Pushers tops the list.
That said, the pandemic pushed me back to a biscuit recipe that is unusual in that it is easy and tasty. It is not an original creation on my part; you can find several versions online. But if you are hungry for a good biscuit and time is short–as in, when your mother-in-law asks when you are going to make biscuits again–these are the biscuits for you.
The other thing I like about them is all you have to have on hand to make them is flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and heavy cream. Start to finish, you can have these on the table, or should I say in your belly, in thirty minutes.
cream biscuits
2 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 i/2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter, melted
Preheat the oven to 425°.
In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar together. Make a well and add the heavy cream. Stir until the mixture is combined and then knead the dough with your hands just until it holds together.
Put a piece of parchment paper or a Silpat on a baking sheet. Put the dough on the sheet and shape into a rectangle about a half an inch thick. Cut into twelve pieces and separate them so there is about a half an inch between them.
Cook for fifteen minutes. When you take them out of the oven, brush with melted butter and then dig in.
One of the benefits of living in Guilford is Bishop’s Orchards has fresh asparagus every May. I had never tasted fresh asparagus–I mean asparagus that was still growing this morning–until we moved here. I now eat asparagus in May and then wait for next year because I know how it really tastes.
Something about asparagus made me want chicken and lemons.
When we lived in Charlestown, Massachusetts we were just a walk across the bridge to the North End, which is the Italian neighborhood of Boston. We ate this chicken dish in a restaurant there one night and I bought the cookbook so I could learn how to make it. I have since lost the cookbook, but I can still get pretty close to how it tasted.
The unusual thing about this recipe is the chicken is dredged in flour and then put in an egg wash before it goes in the sauté pan–without going back into flour or bread crumbs. It has a light a tasty coating.
1-2 lbs boneless chicken cutlets, pounded thin
4 eggs
1 cup flour
6 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 lemons, zested and juiced
salt and pepper
Lay the chicken out on a cutting board and season with salt and pepper. Whisk the eggs well and set a side. Put the flour in a shallow dish.
Heat 4 tablespoons of butter in a skillet over medium high heat. While the butter is getting hot, dredge the chicken in the flour, piece by piece, and then dip each one in the egg wash, and then into the sauté pan.
Cook the chicken about three minutes on each side. If they are pounded thin, this will make sure they are cooked through. (You may have to do this in batches.) Transfer the chicken to a serving platter and keep warm.
Add the remaining butter to the sauté pan and increase the heat. With a wooden spoon or spatula, loosen the particles from the bottom of the pan. Add the lemon juice and the lemon zest. Let the sauce reduce a bit; it will brown also. Pour it over the chicken and serve.
For the record, I spread the asparagus on a baking sheet and drizzled it with some olive oil and some salt. I put it in a 425° oven for about seven minutes. I also made some mashed potatoes. From start to finish, the whole thing took less than an hour before we sat down to eat.
The last two weeks, as Spring has finally come to Connecticut to stay, the lengthening light of the days has been matched by the growing weight of my depression. This time, thanks to the pandemic, it isn’t all to do with my mental illness but circumstances as well.
I find that I crave being outside. I take my computer out on the patio to write in the morning. When my mind shuts down in the afternoon, I dig in our flower beds or out in the church garden behind the barn. On the weekends there are four of five of us spread out across our 50 x 30 plot, talking through our masks, and working to raise food for whoever needs it.
This afternoon late I went out and moved some dirt for an expansion bed that we are getting ready for next year. As I went back and forth with the wheelbarrow, I started singing a song I learned as a kid but really came home to me one night at Club Passim in Boston. I was the volunteer running the sound board one night when Dave Mallett was performing. He wrote the song and I got to hear him sing it.
inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow all it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow someone warm them from below, ’til the rain comes tumbling down
In New England we are a week or so away from even being able to plant our tomatoes, much less harvest them. Tomatoes in these parts are a late summer, early fall pleasure. Nonetheless, it’s never too early to sing along with Guy Clark.
homegrown tomatoes home grown tomatoes wha’d life be without homegrown tomatoes only two things money can’t buy that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes
The Indigo Girls’ song “All That We Let In” isn’t so much about gardening or farming, but about everything we digest in life. Digging out in the garden for me is therapeutic in part, I think, because I’ve got my hands in the stuff I’m made of. I’m breathing in life in all kinds of ways. And even though I am the one who cooks dinner when I come in, I know how this verse feels.
I pass the cemetery, walk my dog down there I read the names in stone and say a silent prayer when I get home, you’re cooking supper on the stove and the greatest gift of life is to know love
Lyle Lovett sings about leaving home and worrying that the one he is leaving behind will have significant culinary experiences without him. It’s not about growing food, but it sure is about who you eat with–“Pantry.”
don’t cheat on me with cornbread, don’t cheat on me with beans and don’t cheat on me with bacon, cooked up with collard greens don’t cheat on me with biscuits with jelly sweet and blue keep it in that place where you know you will be true keep it in your pantry . . .
One of my favorite John Denver songs tells the story of his uncle who lived with them on a farm in Oklahoma. “Matthew” is full of joy and family.
yes, and joy was just the thing that he was raised on love is just the way to live and die gold is just a windy Kansas wheat-field and blue is just a Kansas summer sky
Rich Mullins’ “First Family” is another song about a family on a farm and paints a wonderful picture of how all that is ordinary is full of wonder.
talk about your miracles talk about your faith my dad he could make things grow out of Indiana clay Mom could make a gourmet meal out of just cornbread and beans and they worked to give faith hands and feet and somehow gave it wings
I’ll finish tonight’s playlist with “Trouble in the Fields,” a song Nanci Griffith wrote about her relatives who were farmers during the Great Depression. Though I am far from working a full farm, something about digging in the dirt during these days finds resonance in her words.
and all this trouble in our fields if this rain can fall, these wounds can heal they’ll never take our native soil but if we sell that new John Deere and then we’ll work these crops with sweat and tears you’ll be the mule I’ll be the plow come harvest time we’ll work it out there’s still a lot of love, here in these troubled fields
Take care, my friends. We will keep digging and singing together.
in new england
we have to be gentle
with our tomatoes
let the air warm then the soil
plant on memorial day
while people down south
are already making BLTs
today Tom pointed to a
little green plant
“tomato” he said
then “volunteer”
from the latin:
acting by free will
choosing to show up
the seed fell last
autumn hunkered down
for the winter and
chose to show up
will it live long
enough to share
the taste of intention
the pandemic has gone
on long enough to get to
“clean up the barn”
and I unpacked the
museum in a box
waiting to be curated
pictures from my
father’s ordination
wrapped in plastic
since Mom’s funeral
what do I do with
a memory
that’s not mine
no one has missed
it for years
do museums ever
use trash cans
in another box
my eye catches a
card in Dad’s hand
thank you for making
time to come see me
it was after his heart
surgery I came in late
he was in recovery
and he remembered
I remember too
permanence
can’t be collected
we will all go
out of print
still I hate to
be the one who
clears the room
for the next exhibit
One of the things that has surprised me about myself during these days of quiet isolation is growing disdain for Zoom. Part of it, I’m sure, is that I have to use Go to Meeting for work, which is its own special brand of hell, but there’s more to it than just that. I think it has to do with the disembodied nature of the whole experience: even when it’s in real time, it’s not live.
And live matters.
I was in the room at the Tarrant County Convention Center the night BB King came out for the encore and played “When Love Came to Town” with U2. When it was over, Bono turned to Edge and said, “For a minute I felt like a musician.” I saw BW Stevenson play at The Hop in Fort Worth on a night when only about ten people showed up. During the break, I went up to him and said, “i’ve been following you since college.”
“So you’re the guy,” he answered.
I’ve sat in seven or eight venues to hear Springsteen and wait for the change to sing “Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty, but, hey, you’re alright” and then cheered when he shouted, “You guys are gonna put me out of a job!”
My friend Ken and I heard Michael Martin Murphy play at East Dallas Community College in an auditorium that held about five hundred people and was so acoustically vibrant that he sang “Geronimo’s Cadillac” without amplification. (Oh, Lord, take me back . . .) Then there was the night, early in our dating life, when I took Ginger to see Linda Ronstadt and as Linda was belting out a song Ginger leaned over and said, “Is that all she’s going to do? She doesn’t dance?”
On our first date I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth. We have seen him every year since. He sings the same songs and the evening is always fresh and new because none of us is the same person we were the last time we were together.
I heard Beth Wood play at Blue Rock in Wimberely, Texas and Nathan Brown play in the barn behind our house; I sat on the back row at Reunion Arena in Dallas with my friend Patty to see Fleetwood Mac and on the tenth row to watch Dan Fogelberg’s solo acoustic tour. And I have sat in more rooms that I can count for open mics or to hear bands I knew nothing about because it was live. The music became flesh and dwelt among us, within us, between us.
I understand why so many musicians are live-streaming. I am grateful that they are. I have heard some amazing performances. But it is not the same thing as being in the room. Watching James Taylor sing “You Can Close Your Eyes” on Fallon the other night was beautiful, but not the same as sitting in the bleachers at Fenway when he sang it with Bonnie Raitt.
Last night I was talking with my friend Kenny and he said, “You really miss worship, don’t you?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. He went on. “You love live music so much. Live anything. And that’s what you love about worship: being in the room when it happens.”
It’s good to have friends who know you.
I miss being in the room to hear the prayer requests, the celebrations, the moments when kids drop stuffed animals out of the balcony or someone misses a cue, the point in the sermon where I know Ginger has gone “off book” from the manuscript I read the night before and is speaking to what she feels in the moment, in the room. I miss leaning over to Chuck, whom I usually sit next to, and making side comments. I miss hugging the little kids who are unabashedly friendly.
Dave Grohl, the lead singer of the Foo Fighters among other things, has a great article in The Atlantic about not being able to play live and he closes it by saying,
In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing, it’s hard to imagine sharing experiences like these ever again. I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone. That we are understood. That we are imperfect. And, most important, that we need each other. I have shared my music, my words, my life with the people who come to our shows. And they have shared their voices with me. Without that audience—that screaming, sweating audience—my songs would only be sound. But together, we are instruments in a sonic cathedral, one that we build together night after night. And one that we will surely build again.
Some promoters are predicting it will be September 2021 before live concerts happen again. Others are saying that congregational singing will be one of the last things churches are able to do as they gather again in person. Till then, I suppose, we will continue to be creative about the ways we find to communicate our affection and connectedness, which matters but it does not measure up to what it means to be live–to be in the room together.
And I am not handling that well. Zoom leaves me feeling more alienated than hopeful, more isolated than included. I don’t completely understand why, I just know that is how it feels. The prospect that it may be the primary way we communicate for a long time is despairing for me.
I know. This should be the part of the post where I start to make the turn towards home and say something hopeful, but I am not hopeful right now. My depression has moved in with a vengeance over the past week and is not remote at all. I am working hard to be creative about my sleep habits and work schedule and how much I walk, trying to make sure I can still do my job and can do more than curl up in a ball in the middle of the bed. As always, I am grateful that the kitchen remains a depression-free zone. At least I can cook and find some relief. Ginger is live here with me, which is the best news I know.
I know I am not alone in my depression. I know I am loved and I am doing all I can to find ways to let people know I love them. But to not be in the room together means we are missing the best part of the show. And I am missing it. Badly.
