don't eat alone

This summer, Blazing Fresh Donuts opened across the street from our house.

They make the donuts to order. They drop the batter when you get to the counter and then you get to choose a glaze and any number of toppings and drizzles. The maple-bacon-pretzel donut is one of my creations, along with the chocolate-graham cracker-marshmallow drizzle. They also have a Boston Creme donut, which is a longtime favorite of mine.

I have taken their presence to be a sign from God, and so part of my Sunday ritual is to walk over there on my way to church to get a coffee (and, sometimes, a donut) and read for awhile before church. This morning I began reading David Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. I jumped around a bit and read “alone,” “confession,” and “giving.” Part of what he said about the latter was

To give is to make an imaginative journey and put ourselves in the body, the mind, and the anticipation of another. . . . looking for the imaginative doorway that says I know you and see you and this is how I give thanks for you.

I carried those words to church with me where Ginger preached on the humility of John the Baptist, which was an imaginative doorway I had not gone through before. She looked at the way he was willing to spend his life pointing to someone other than himself, to prepare the way for someone else. He was not intent on being the hero of his story, or anyone else’s. He opened the imaginative doorway for Jesus to walk through.

After the sermon, the choir sang a Shaker hymn as we passed the offering plates:

love is little love is low
love will make our spirits grow
grow in peace grow in light
love will do the thing that’s right

love is gentle love is small
love will find the best in all
find the peace find the light
love will find the thing that’s right

love is silent love is strong
love will sing a quiet song
sing of peace sing of light
love will do the thing that’s right

The words were printed in the order of service and I kept staring at the first phrase: love is little. It sent me back to words from Annie Dillard that I read a few days ago.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

The quote comes from The Writing Life, and she was talking about how to get words on the page, but her sense that our lives are built by the days we live is another imaginative doorway through which we can enter a life of giving–of putting ourselves in the mind, body, and anticipation of one another. How can we give the little gifts, the daily gifts, whether they are words or hugs or things, that say, “I know you and I see you and this is how I give thanks for you”?

I love that last one: this is how I give thanks for you. How do we give the little bits of love that say that to spouses and siblings, to coworkers, to store clerks and servers? How do we become those who open imaginative doorways that make our spirits grow? I think it matters that Whyte named the doorways as imaginative and not imaginary. Imaginary is just making things up. Imaginative is to infuse small things with significance. To spend our days imaginatively is to create a life of love.

A few weeks ago, during our prayer time, a woman gave thanks for the person behind her in line at the supermarket who bent down and picked up the blueberries she dropped and that scattered across the floor. “Her small act of kindness gave me hope,” she said. Me, too.

Love is little. Love is daily. Love says, “I know you and I see you and I give thanks for you.” Imagine that.

Peace,
Milton

As we finish the first week of Advent, it feels like a good time to offer some music for the journey. All of the songs are covers, that is they are songs recorded by someone other than the songwriter. I hope these songs offer some warmth and light for the journey.

The first is Sara Watkins’ version of “Give Me Jesus.” Her lyrics are different from other versions I have heard, as are the quiet harmonies.

Jimmy LaFave is one of those who left us too soon. He died in 2017 after a battle with cancer. He was a wonderful songwriter as well as one who interpreted others’ songs well. Here is his cover of Pete Townsend’s “Let My Love Open the Door,” which is a wonderful theme for Advent.

when everything feels all over
everybody seems unkind
I’ll give you a four-leaf clover
take all worry out of your mind
let my love open the door
to your heart, to your heart

“Love’s In Need of Love Today” is one of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs and Joan Osborne offers this soulful version.

good morn or evening friends here’s your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to every-body
what I’m about to say could mean the world’s disaster
could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain
it’s that love’s in need of love today . . .

The third verse of Mary Gauthier’s song, “Mercy Now,” says,

my church and my country could use a little mercy now
as they sink into a poisoned pit it’s going to take forever to climb out
they carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down
I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now

And here’s Kathy Mattea singing it.

“Ring Them Bells” is the first of two Dylan covers that will close out this post.

ring them bells for Saint Catherine from the top of the room
ring them bells from the fortress for the lilies that bloom
oh the lines are long and the fighting is strong
and they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong

Sarah Jarosz is the one singing the song.

The first time I heard “To Make You Feel My Love,” Garth Brooks was singing it—and I think it was about the time the video below was recorded.

when the rain is blowing in your face
and the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
to make you feel my love
when the evening shadows and the stars appear
and there is no one there to dry your tears
oh, I hold you for a million years
o make you feel my love

I hope love is finding you in these days.

Peace,
Milton

I had to go to New York two days in a row this week, which meant the long night was short for me and rode the train both ways in the dark. Winter in the Northeast is so much fun. As I walked the chilly streets to get to my office building, an old Simon and Garfunkel song crossed my mind.

a winter’s day . . .
in a deep and dark December
I am alone . . .

I had some time before our meeting began when I got to the office, so I turned to Brain Pickings to help wake me up and remind me of our shared hope as humans. I hope I get to meet Maria Popova someday so I can say thank you in person. Not only does she make wonderful connections and point to amazing writing, but she ends each article with sign posts to other great things. This post about a children’s book that looks at the shortest day led to this post about another book on the solstice, which led to an article about Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik, which led me to these words:

Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey, and one of the most natural metaphors we make is of winter as a time of abandonment and retreat. The oldest metaphors for winter are all metaphors of loss.

When we took a lunch break from our all-day meeting, I went outside so I could see some daylight and get out of the conference room. My office is on East 34th Street at the opposite end of the block from the Empire State Building and two blocks from Macy’s, which is Shopping Central. The street was packed with people. What I noticed as I walked is how many of them were grouped as they strolled—families, couples, friends—taking pictures, talking and laughing, enjoying the holidays.

I know nothing about the people I passed on the street. When it comes right down to it, I don’t know many details about most of the folks I work with, and they don’t know much about me beyond what happens to come up at work. I don’t mean to imply that we are not collegial, but our days are filled with things other than hanging out.

On the train home tonight, I read through the quotes I had saved from my morning meander, and came back to one by poet David Whyte:

[T]he ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

As long as I’m making Simon and Garfunkel connections, how could I not sing these?

when you’re down and out
when you’re on the street
when evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I’ll take your part, oh, when darkness comes
and pain is all around . . .

The ultimate touchstone is not improvement, but witness.

Those words fill me with gratitude because they have names behind them. Stories. I hope that is what was happening in the lives of those I passed on the street. I hope they were making memories that will come back some other winter night when one turns to the other and says, “I remember that afternoon with you in New York.”

Those words make me hear Jesus differently when he says, “You shall be my witnesses.”

I was taught that meant I was supposed to go tell people things. But what if it means go befriend people: really see them, walk with them, believe in them, accompany them for whatever time you have on this journey we cannot make alone. It’s not about improvement; it’s about bearing witness.

In this deep and dark December, who are your witnesses? And for whom are you bearing witness? Who walks with you and believes in you? Who needs to hear that you see them and believe in them?

Okay—one more from Simon and Garfunkel.

old friends
winter companions
the old men
lost in their overcoats
waiting for the sunset
the sounds of the city
sifting through trees
settle like dust
on the shoulders
of the old friends

The bridge that follows says,

can you imagine us years from today
sharing a park bench quietly?
how terribly strange to be seventy

A week away from my sixty-third birthday, its not so far-fetched. So, tonight, my winter companions, I will rest here, like the old friends lost in their overcoats, grateful to see and to be seen, to know and to be known, bearing witness like a badge of honor rather than a burden.

Peace,
Milton

People who think poetry has no power have a very limited understanding of what power means.–Christian Wiman

If you look up power in the dictionary, the definitions revolve around influence and control, as in the power to make people do what you want. If you look at the way we talk about power these days, it seems almost synonymous with force, as in do unto others before they do unto you, which leads us to things like preemptive strikes and redemptive violence.

A nation based on power cannibalizes itself, intimately, because power, when construed as force or violence, destroys. It is never a solution. Violence breeds more violence. Brazen power is not a path to peace. Just because I can force you to sit down and shut up doesn’t mean I have made the world more peaceful. I have only planted the seeds of revolution.

But there’s another way to plant–that’s the power the poets know.

If you look up poet in the dictionary, it says, “a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.” I love the word imagination because it is family to image, as in image of God, which is us. We are created in the image of God; we were birthed out of the imagination of God. Talk about special powers.

I am going to let the poet Tara Sophia Mohr say it in her words.

Your Other Name

If your life doesn’t often make you feel
like a cauldron of swirling light —

If you are not often enough a woman standing above a mysterious fire,
lifting her head to the sky —

You are doing too much, and listening too little.

Read poems. Walk in the woods. Make slow art.
Tie a rope around your heart, be led by it off the plank,
happy prisoner.

You are no animal. You are galaxy with skin.
Home to blue and yellow lightshots,
making speed-of-light curves and racecar turns,
bouncing in ricochet –

Don’t slow down the light and turn it into matter
with feeble preoccupations.

Don’t forget your true name:
Presiding one. Home for the gleaming. Strong cauldron for the feast of light.

Strong cauldron for the feast of light:
I am speaking to you.
I beg you not to forget.

I’ve got more words, some I’ve read and some I’ve written, but let’s rest here and keep begging each other not to forget who we are:

Home for the gleaming. Feast of light. Image of God.

Peace,
Milton

One of the songs sure to show up over the next few weeks is “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” In our congregation, we sing it to the HYFRODOL tune, which is warm and familiar to me. As long as I have heard the story of Jesus’ birth, it has had expectations attached to it: the people in his time expected a certain messiah; we have expectations of our own as we move toward Christmas, even and we sing about love and hope and forgiveness.

The expectations didn’t stop with his birth. One of the ways to read the temptations he faced in the wilderness is as a trio of expectations: feed everyone, impress everyone, take control. We might even say we killed Jesus because he didn’t meet our expectations.

The word expect has some waiting built into it, at least etymologically–we are waiting for something to happen. Too often, however, it is colored by judgment. Whoever we are and wherever we are on life’s journey, it’s hard to live up to expectations. Most of us do not become what others (or at least some of them) are waiting for us to become.

But that’s not the hard part–at least, not for me. The hard part is when the equation gets flipped around and I realize I am the expector, not the expectee. (I’m not sure either of those are real words, but what did you expect?) I want the grace for me to fall short, but I want others to measure up. So when I came across this sentence in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace it felt worth sharing:

[People] owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

The first time I read that sentence, I thought about my father saying in a sermon, “In life you have to learn the difference between a problem and a predicament. A problem is something you can solve; a predicament is something you have to learn to live with. I used to think my eldest son was a problem; now, I understand that he is a predicament.”

I learned the same thing about him. Our relationship grew when I learned not to expect what he was unable to give. I had to learn how to find it from someone else. He did, too.

I watch the kids in our town try to negotiate middle and high school and I wonder if I could have measured up had the expectations been the same. I never thought about my “resumé” when I was applying to Baylor. I just went to school and church and my after-school job and sent in my stuff. I never took an honors or AP course. I was a good student, but based on today’s expectations, I would be an also-ran.

I think Jesus would suffer much the same fate, based on the metrics we use to measure success in church life. The man wandered around that tiny little country with a handful of friends and followers, without much of a schedule or a plan. And he only lasted three years. He wouldn’t make it out of the first round with most search committees in big steeple churches.

My anachronistic comparison is not particularly original, and I am not as cynical as it sounds when it comes to church. My point is to raise this question: how do we forgive Jesus of the burden of our expectations?

For many years, one of the quotes that gives me hope in this season is from Meister Eckhart:

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace?

To be full of grace means, perhaps, to be mostly empty of expectations–at least the ones that come with weights of judgment attached to them. Charles Wesley wrote,

come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee

May we all rest in the Love that gave birth to us, even as we prepare to give birth to Love once again.

Peace,
Milton

On my train ride to Grand Central Station, the penultimate stop is Harlem/125th Street. Once the doors close, it takes about fifteen minutes to go the last eighty blocks to the terminal on 42nd Street. The closer we get, the slower the train goes. Passengers get up, put on coats, and line up in front of the doors so they are ready when we finally arrive, but it feels like it takes forever. All we can do is wait.

Advent feels like that ride to me: the slow train to Bethlehem. It takes a long time for Jesus to be born again.

Wait shares a common root with the word wake. Both hold a sense of watchfulness and awareness, as in we are waiting for something. Or someone. Even the lectionary passage this morning was a call to stay awake. Pay attention. Don’t fall asleep at the switch. Waiting can carry a sense of expectancy, as it does in Advent, or a sense of dread, as it might in a doctor’s waiting room or worrying about a thieves in the night like the verses from Matthew, and a variety of graduations in between.

Even as we wait for, we can also wait on—as servers do in restaurants. To wait means to pay attention to someone else’s needs, which also carries a sense of awareness. Those empty water glasses aren’t going to fill themselves.

Over the past year, wait has taken on another connotation for me—as an acronym—WAIT: Why Am I Talking. I learned it in the context of discussions around white privilege, or should I say white-cisgender-male privilege, and our tendency to explain the world on our terms. If I really want to know how someone else understands the world, I need to learn to WAIT, which is a kinder way of saying, “Shut the hell up and listen.”

Our ride on the slow train to Bethlehem calls us to wait in all three ways. We wait for Christ to be born again in our time and in our cultures; we wait on one another, paying attention to what those around us need to get on board; and we WAIT so that we can among those who in silent stillness lay to hear the angels sing.

That sentence makes it sound so easy, doesn’t it?

It’s not—at least, not for me.

Throughout the history of my depression, sleep has been an escape. When the shadows are the deepest, I close my eyes. I don’t want to be awake because it hurts too much, so I sleep. Staying awake is hard work. The cost of paying attention feels prohibitive. Sleeping is easier than swimming in molasses. I am exhausted by my daily commute, if you will.

Many years ago, my friends Billy and Kenny wrote a song that asked

why does love come like a thief in the night
warning no one like a thief in the night

Good questions. Why is it so hard to stay awake for love: to wait for, to wait on, to WAIT, to listen for the sound of the whistle in the distance? I don’t know all the answers, other than to say it just is.

As I have been writing, the first significant snowfall of the season has been falling. At times, the flakes have been the size of silver dollars and they have fallen just like the carol: how silently, how silently. The temperature is not cold enough for the lovely covering to last long, but for this afternoon our town is at its snow-globe best. Night is falling along with the snow. Currier and Ives could not have imagined it more beautifully. It does feel like we should all go stand in a circle on the Green and sing.

The storm warnings yesterday caused one of our annual town traditions to be postponed. It is a service of remembrance for children who have died. Parents who have lost their kids—of any age—come together to wait on one another, in a way, as they face another holiday season without their sons and daughters. The service was put off so more people could come. We will gather next Sunday. My part in the service is to sing “I Wish You Peace,” a song written by Bernie Leadon and Patti Davis and recorded by the Eagles. The chorus says

I wish you peace when times are hard
the light to guide you through the dark
and when storms are high and your, your dreams are low
I wish you the strength to let love grow on
I wish you the strength to let love flow

Our first candle today represented Peace, which, I think, is not the official order but it was a candle worth lighting in these days of endless war and shouting. Hope, Peace, Love, Joy: they all need to be lighted; the order does not matter so much other than to those who ordered the candles to begin with. I came home and turned on all the electric candles in our windows that will burn through Advent and Christmastide and Epiphany and as long as winter stays. On Sundays, we let them burn all night.

I am not waiting for Christ to be born because I think his birth makes things better magically somehow. The power of love to change the world is its own slow train. As we tell the story each year, I wait for the angel to say to Joseph, “You should call him Emmanuel”—God with us. We are not alone in our waiting, our waking, and even in our sleeping.

God is along for the ride.

Peace,
Milton