don't eat alone

One of the things I brought back from our trip to Memphis was my allergic reaction to whatever pollen was floating in the air. I have lived with allergies all of my life, which means I have taken some sort of antihistamine–or multiples of them–for most of my life as well. I have not had luck with shots, so I keep the pharma companies in business.

Thanks to the recommendation of my friend Peter, I went to see a naturopath who used a different approach and a different vocabulary to talk about both my allergies and my treatment, which has given me new hope. The problem, she said, had to do with my gut, not my sinuses. She went on to tell me about the gut microbiome–the community of bacteria that live in our digestive systems–that control the histamines in our bodies, among other things. When we have allergic reactions, it is our bodies overloading on the histamines. Because the bacteria in my gut aren’t healthy, I am overrun with histamines and have been for a very long time.

“The amazing thing is,” she said, “the gut microbiome is not made up of human cells. They are inhabitants in your body.”

I smiled and said, “You mean I am my own solar system?”

Our human bodies are made up of about thirty trillion cells; we have about forty trillion bacterial cells inside us. Most of the cells that live in us are immigrants, we might say. To be healthy requires that we live in community with all that inhabits us.

This afternoon, I met with my gardening buddy Tom. He and I have worked the church garden behind our house together for the last two summers. He actually knows what he’s doing. Through the years now that we have dug in the dirt together we have talked a lot about the theological implications of our sowing and reaping and composting. From the first summer, we talked about wanting more of the church people to participate.

“It will take three years before people start coming,” I said. “We just have to be faithful to the task.”

Last Sunday, during our time to express prayers of joy, Tom gave thanks for the garden and invited people to help. He showed up today with a list of names. We talked about how to build a network among interested folks to make sure the garden as well tended. We also talked about the Poetry Rock, a big piece of granite that we couldn’t move so we turned it into a stage from which we can read poetry and sing hymns to the plants–an idea I got from my friend Tim, in Durham, who reads Walt Whitman to his corn every summer.

When Tom and I are together, we spend at least some time talking about our fascination with the mycorrhizal networks that connect the plants and trees and allow them to communicate and share food. No plant grows alone. Millions of bacteria and fungi swap nutrients with trees and the soil across miles and miles of forests and farms and gardens. We might say it is–wait for it–the Wood Wide Web.

(Thank you very much. I’ll be here all Lent.)

We talked about how to foster the community of those who want to garden together, as well as those we can feed with what we grow, and even the plants themselves. Then we talked about how we can use the garden to speak to the wider church about what it means to be growing here in Guilford together.

It is not lost on me that I have been reminded this week about all the ways we are connected by Peter, Tim, and Tom. The list is longer, but they are the three attached to these stories. We need each other to stay alive. To stay healthy. We are connected to people, to the soil, to the trees, and to the bacteria that live in us and beneath them in ways we cannot comprehend and we cannot ignore, if we are to all stay healthy. Our connectedness is not optional. It is as intricate as micro-cellular make up and as large as the universe. Like Joni Mitchell sang, we are stardust, we are golden.

And it helps to get ourselves back to the garden.

Peace,
Milton

I wouldn’t quote Joni and then not let her sing.

My head and heart are full tonight, so this post is as well.

As the news of Elizabeth Warren ending her presidential bid found me and I realized, as many did, that the election has devolved into Grumpy Old Men 3: Patriarchy and Privilege, I went back to James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which I finished last night.

Cone’s penultimate chapter focused on the essential place of Black women to understand the connection between the cross and the lynching tree.

When we look at a lynched black victim transfigured as the recrucified Black Christ, we might as well be looking at “a colored woman . . . stripped naked and hung in the county courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view!” That was the point made by womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant when she used the experience of poor black women as the lens for interpreting the meaning of Jesus Christ today. “The significance of Christ is not found in his maleness, but his humanity,” writes Grant. “This Chris, found in the experiences of black women,” “the oppressed of the oppressed,” “is a black woman.” Unfortunately, the powerful image of “Christ as a Black Woman” has been left out of our spiritual and intellectual imagination, needing further theological development.

If womanist is not a familiar term to you, here is Alice Walker’s definition:

WOMANIST
1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “you acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious.
2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally a universalist, as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?” Ans. “Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.” Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.
4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

This morning I started a new book, Embracing Hopelessness by Miguel A. De La Torre. In Chapter One , De La Torre mentioned a term in Latinx theology I did not know: lo cotidiano, “the everyday along with all its particularities.”

Humans are an end, not a means. If . . . humans are the supreme subject of history, then I would argue that any construction of the God of History must orient history toward establishing justice by taking sides with the faceless under oppression–the multiple anonymous I’s of history.

I wanted to learn more, so I typed lo cotidiano theology into Google and learned about Mujerista theology and the writings of Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, which is the Latinx sibling of Womanist theology. Isasi-Diaz said Mujeristas were those

· Who desire a society and a world where there is no oppression.
· Who struggle for a society in which differences and diversity are valued.
· Who know that our world has limits and that we have to live simply so others can simply live.
· Who understand that material richness is not a limitless right but it carries a “social mortgage” that we have to pay to the poor of the world.
· Who savor the struggle for justice, which, after all, is one of the main reasons for living.
· Who try no matter what to know, maintain, and promote our Latina culture.
· Who know that a “glorified” self-abnegation is many times the source of our oppression.
· Who know women are made in the image of God and, as such, value ourselves.
· Who know we are called to birth new women and men, a strong Latino people.
· Who recognize that we have to be source of hope and of a reconciling love.
· Who love ourselves so we can love God and our neighbor.
MUJERISTAS are those of us who struggle for justice for our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, godmothers, comadres, daughters, granddaughters, nieces, goddaughter, friends, women-partners, and for ourselves.

She wrote,

The main reasons structural changes have not come about or lasted, I wish to suggest, derives from the fact that structural change has not been seen as integrally related to lo cotidiano. To correct this, I insist, it is time we listen to Latinas and other grassroots women around the world and, drawing from their wisdom, that we conceptualize structural change in a different way than has been understood in the past. This does not mean ceasing to work on changing family structures, work- related structures, the economic structures of our societies, political structures, church structures. However, following the insights of grass-roots women, structural change must be rooted in lo cotidiano. Unless the changes we struggle to bring about impact the organization and function of lo cotidiano, structural change will not happen, and, if it happens, it will not last. We want to be clear that it is not a matter of either/or. We certainly must continue to organize, to bring about changes in the way politicians are chosen, how multinational corporations operate, how the churches control what is considered orthodox. Those changes, however cannot be conceived or brought apart from the question, ”What change will this bring to the everyday lives of poor and oppressed women?” Maybe it is time to give up grandiose plans for sweeping changes and to realize that even if those changes were accomplished they will not last unless they bring about change at the level of lo cotidiano.

Tonight, I hear Micah 6:8 in a new way:

What does the Lord require of you?
Do justice
Love kindness
Walk humbly with God

Micah is not talking in abstract terms; he’s describing how to make changes in everyday lives. Structural change must be rooted in lo cotidiano, which means my everyday life needs to be up for change as well, if I am going to help build the beloved community.

I told you my head and heart were full.

Peace,
Milton

First, I want you to watch this short film–which I learned about from my friend, Hugh Hollowell, who has a wonderful newsletter–you can subscribe here–then we’ll talk.

I feel presumptuous even saying anything after such a wonderful picture of love, but I am going to anyway.

If you have followed this blog for any time at all, or if you have been around me much, you have heard me mention Patty Griffin’s song “When It Don’t Come Easy.” When I first began to come to terms with my depression in 2001, the song gave me something to hold on to.

red lights are flashing on the highway
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight
everywhere the waters getting rough
your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight

but if you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
if you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stay by you when it don’t come easy

The chorus described what life felt like everyday: I broke down and Ginger drove out to find me. And she always found me.

I thought about her and those days watching the movie about the dinosaur who was willing to become unraveled to show its love for the fox who needed to be found. Just as powerful, for me, was watching the fox collect the yarn and the stuffing and begin to put the dinosaur back together again. The unraveling was not the last word.

Unraveling is not a bad metaphor for these days; so is feeling like you are drowning and can’t get out of the pool. When we do what it takes to drive out and find each other, we find out–over and over–that love is the last word.

I will let Patty send us out.

Peace,
Milton

As I, like many have mourned the death of James Lipton, who hosted Inside the Actors’ Studio, I learned he wrote a book, An Exaltation of Larks, which is a “lovingly curated ode to the unique collective nouns that adorn our language.” As a way to honor him, and because I, too, love collective nouns–words that describe what it means to be together–here is a list–not all of which are official:

a bloat of hippos (you knew I’d start there)
a crash of rhinos
a leap of leopards
a tuxedo of penguins
a shrewdness of apes
a sleuth of bears
a scurry of chipmunks
a tenacity of schnauzers
a committee of vultures
a knot of toads
an ambush of tigers
a prickle of porcupines
a cupboard of pandas
a romp of otters
a mischief of mice
a horde of hamsters
an aurora of polar bears
a bellowing of bullfinches
a blessing of unicorns
a bob of seals
a yap of chihuahuas
a slide of slugs
a stench of skunks
a pint of mussels
a passel of possums
a delay of sloths
a fan of peacocks
a leash of greyhounds
a scourge of mosquitos
an annoyance of gnats
a hover of trout
a flamboyance of flamingos
a percussion of woodpeckers
a wiggle of worms
a charm of hummingbirds
a business of ferrets
a laugh of hyenas
a tusk of walruses
a bark of dogfish
a shock of eels
a congregation of alligators

Then I thought of a few I would like to see:

an embarrassment of politicians
an assignment of teachers
a chord of musicians
a fret of guitarists
a litany of ministers
a recipe of chefs
an stress of parents
a jubilation of children

Feel free to add your own.

Peace,
Milton

Some nights I sit down to write with a heart full of stuff to say; other nights–like this one–I rummage around through my notes and scroll through pages looking for inspiration. Such is the nature of a practice, I suppose: sometimes it is easier than others.

Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of my parents’ wedding. I learned tonight, as I wandered about, that March 2, 1956 was a Friday. I did not know they got married on a Friday. I would love to have known that story. The cover picture for this post is one of my favorite pictures of my folks. I would love to know the story behind it as well.

Part of the story I do know is by the time they celebrated their second wedding anniversary, we were living in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. By their sixth, we were living in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. And on October 24, 1964–between their eighth anniversary and my eighth birthday, Northern Rhodesia became the independent nation of Zambia.

Kenneth Kaunda was the first president of Zambia and, before that, the civil rights leader who was at the forefront of the struggle to break free of British colonial rule. He is now in his nineties and the last living member of that group of incredible African leaders who dedicated their lives to the freedom of their people. My parents got to know KK, as people called him, and his wife Betty. When they moved into State House, the presidential residence, my folks helped them carry the boxes. That first Christmas, my Cub Scout troop caroled at State House and President Kaunda answered the door and invited us in for tea. While we were sitting in the living room, he said, “You have sung of the birth of the Christ child. Now, I will sing for you of my faith,” and he sat down at the piano and played and sang Psalm 23.

Tonight, as I scrolled, I found this picture on the Facebook page of a Zambian friend: Kenneth Kaunda with Martin Luther King, Jr. when KK visited Atlanta in 1960. When I went looking for the context of the picture, I learned that because of that visit, Kaunda went back to Zambia and began nonviolent actions of civil disobedience that helped the struggle for independence become a reality. For me, just two weeks away from walking in Memphis and standing at the window of the Lorraine Motel, where King was killed before he had a chance to turn 40, the picture brought up deep admiration and appreciation for both men and gratitude that my life got to intersect with one of them.

I don’t have a big finish, other than to say I am grateful for the audacity of parents who dragged me off to Africa when I was a baby, for the first president I remember to be such a person of character and faith, and for the legacy of Dr. King and those still fresh on my heart from Tennessee who, even from the grave, are calling me to a deeper understanding of both my faith and my humanity.

Peace,
Milton

Here are some of the songs that speak to my heart in these days. I offer them to you as traveling companions.

As a part of our Ash Wednesday service, I sang Emmylou Harris’ “Prayer in Open D” (which, parenthetically, makes me think someone needs to do an Emmyloucharist, much as they did a U2charist). The song is a lament that moves my soul any time I sing or hear it.

there’s a valley of sorrow in my soul
where every night I hear the thunder roll
like the sound of a distant gun
over all the damage I have done

and the shadows filling up this land
are the ones I built with my own hand
there is no comfort from the cold
of this valley of sorrow in my soul

I found this clip of Sara Bereilles singing her song, “Someone Who Loves Me,” accompanied by the Milk Carton Kids.

surrender’s just a word
’til you try it out
and see how hard it is to hurt
with someone else around
I’m the worst I’ve ever been
afraid of almost everything
the skies are clear but storms are always comin’
your gift to me
is just to be
bracing for the winds I always summon
my home, my heart
thank God you are
someone who loves me

My friend Darren sang this song at his church for Ash Wednesday. Cindy Morgan and Phil Madeira bring a great gospel groove to “Leaning on You.

Lord, I’m prone to wander
too far from the water
I’ve done too many things
that I can’t undo
I keep meaning to be leaning on you

Josh Radin is a new name for me, but his song, “What Would You Do? (Refugee Song)” asks an enduring question.

what would you do if you saw I was torn,
from the love of my mother’s hands?
what would you do if the clothes I had worn,
were ripped from me where I stand?
what would you do?

what would you do if I washed to your shore,
in need someplace to land?
what would you do, would you promise me more,
and say that you understand?
what would you do?

would you let me come home?
would you let me come home?

Gretchen Peters paints poignant pictures in “Say Grace” and invites us all to find ourselves in them.

we are gathered here together to praise his holy name
in a shelter by the Greyhound station down on 5th and Main
and as to who we’re praying to there run two schools of thought
a benevolent provider or an unforgiving god

say grace
say grace
forgive yourself for all of your mistakes
you might find salvation in your neighbor’s face
come inside and set yourself a place
and say grace

Carry on . . .

Peace,
Milton

Congress passed a bill yesterday making lynching a hate crime–a hundred and fifty years late.

As the bill states, “At least 4,742 people, predominantly African Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968,” and so, in the election year 2020, Congress finally said lynching was a hate crime. Emmett Till was tortured and killed about a year and a half before I was born. I am now sixty-three and yesterday Congress had the audacity to name their bill after him. Four members voted against it saying it should be a matter for the states, which sounds to me like saying we should let husbands decide what domestic violence looks like.

You can read the bill here. It is fairly self-congratulatory, pointing to the various ceremonial gestures Congress has made over the years without actually doing anything to stop the ritualized killing of African Americans. Maybe they need to read Cone’s book:

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” . . . white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.”

As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists–the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community.

A law that protects people from terrorism should not be a hundred years in the making. When the Towers fell on 9/11, Congress could write the Homeland Security Act fast enough. I suppose it is easier to pass legislation when you’re not the ones responsible for the terrorism. The apology in the bill should not be that we let lynching happen, but that the white government, church, and society intentionally participated to make sure African Americans got the message.

The bitter irony that a president who has a long record of racist words and actions will be the one to sign the bill into law ought to call into question how seriously it will be prosecuted. Perhaps it should have an asterisk at the end: *for ceremonial use only.

The phrase, “They’ve got a lot of damn gall,” comes to mind.

The water is still toxic in Flint, Michigan. Our prisons are disproportionately filled with black men. We do not hold our police accountable when they shoot and kill an African American. Our education and health systems are designed to be inequitable. But, hey–Congress passed a bill making lynching a hate crime.

They will get to the other stuff next century.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve been thinking all day of how to meet you here, as my Lenten Journal begins for another year. Tonight I was looking through some notes and found this quote from James Baldwin in an article in Brainpickings.

Once people know what they know, they make the unconscious assumption that they were born knowing what they know, and forget that they had to learn everything they know.

His words reminded me of my favorite passage from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Merlin is speaking to Arthur:

The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

The oldest roots of the word learn mean “to follow the track.” Learning, at its heart, is less about amassing information or proving a point and more about seeing where things will take you. If we only go looking for things that will support what we think we have nailed down, we won’t learn a thing.

Lent, like any of the seasons of the liturgical year, I suppose, can be a journey around a familiar track. We all know we are on the road to the Cross. We all know there’s an empty tomb at the end of the story. The path is so familiar we don’t even have to say, “Spoiler alert.” We know Judas sells Jesus out. We know Peter denies him. We know the disciples lock themselves in the Upper Room out of fear. We know that up from the grave he arose.

But what if we don’t know?

What if there is more to learn? What would it take to listen as though we weren’t the ones who knew what it was all about?

Last week, I was in Memphis with a group from our church on a Civil Rights History Tour, which is an annual event Ginger leads to a different city to help us understand our place in changing the narrative of racism that is at the heart of so much of American history. We saw the story lived out in Memphis in both the churches and the blues–and we got a good taste of both.

This morning I began the first of my books for Lent, The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone. He talks about the role of both the blues and the church in the struggle for civil rights.

The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle. The blues sent people traveling, roaming, looking for a woman or a man to soothe one’s aching heart. But it was Jesus’ cross that sent people protesting in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression.

Cone said a couple of other things in the chapter I read that made me want to learn this Lent.

The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered. . . . Just as Jesus did not deserve to suffer, they knew they did not deserve it; yet faith was the one thing that white people could not control or take away. . . .

Because of their experience of arbitrary violence, the cross was and is a redeeming and comforting image for many black Christians. If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history. . . . The final word about black life is not death on a lynching tree but redemption in the cross–a miraculously transformed life found in the God of the gallows. . . . The cross places God in the middle of crucified people.”

I listened to someone talk recently about what the Church had to say to America about racism. They seemed to assume that those not in church were waiting on a word, or expecting us to lead. I began to think about when the Church has offered a prophetic voice and, as I thought about the Civil Rights Movement or liberation theology, it seemed to me that the prophetic voices come mostly from the margins, not from the halls of power and the rooms filled with The People Who Know. Those who speak truth to power are the prophets, and they are the ones still on the receiving end of most of the suffering.

They are walking the track I want to follow this Lenten season. I have a lot to learn.

Peace,
Milton