don't eat alone

I started a new book today.

I haven’t finished any of the others I am currently reading, but that never stopped me before. The book is Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What is Sacred by Mark Nepo. It was a gift from a church friend who knows about my struggle with my hearing loss. Nepo wrote a book on listening as he realized he was losing his hearing. As he described how his relationship with the world around him had changed, I found deep resonance. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Joan, my spiritual director, last spring when I realized my hearing had changed more dramatically than I expected.

“Here’s the question for you,” she said. “How will you listen when you can no longer hear?”

Nepo works with a similar distinction between hearing and listening and he says, “To start with, we must honor that listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to circle back.” I wrote last night about how our word search came from the Latin circare, which means “to go round.” To listen well we have to circle back to see what we missed, perhaps, or what we failed to take in the first time.

I spend a good bit of time, regardless of who I am talking to, saying, “I didn’t hear what you said . . .” I have worked hard not to let myself act like I heard what I did not, even though it feels embarrassing at times. Often, what I hear is not what was said, so I’m like the man in the joke who says to a friend, “I got new hearing aids.”
“What kind?” asks the fried.
“11:30,” replies the man.

I’ll be here all Lent.

I did get new hearing aids last Saturday. After eighteen months of fighting with the ones I had, I opted for new ones that gave me some more options technologically. The biggest thing is that my phone answers into my hearing aids, which means I can talk on the phone again. After eight years or so wearing these things, I know there is more to it that just putting them in and going on. I have to keep circling back to the audiologist to make adjustments. I have had to learn how to pay attention differently, not only to what I can or cannot hear, but also to as many other details as I can.

My last hearing aids gave me no sense of how loud my voice was, so I talked loudly most all of the time. One day, Ginger and I were having coffee and I asked her to tell me when my voice was a normal level. I kept getting softer and softer until she responded. Then I took note of how my throat felt talking at that volume as opposed to what I thought was my normal volume. I could tell a difference. I have learned how to listen to my voice in a whole different way.

Later on in the book, Nepo makes a distinction that stood out to me.

Two basic forms of awakening and receiving are always near. The mystery of revelation is the awakening through which our habits and frames are expanded by moments of wonder, awe, beauty, and love. And the weathering of erosion is the receiving through which we are broken open into deeper truths.

I remember the first day I put in my hearing aids. We were still living in Durham. My audiologist told me to walk down the hall and see how they felt. I heard all kinds of things for what felt like the first time. I came back to her office, pulling the zipper on my jacket up and down.

“Did you know this made noise?” I asked. Revelation.

These days, I feel more like the extended play version of the blind man who came to Jesus and had to circle back because the first healing didn’t do the trick. Jesus touched him and the man said, “I can see, but the people look like trees.” So Jesus touched him again and things cleared up.

My audiologist is not that efficient. I keep looking for metaphors to describe what is working and what isn’t (“I feel like my head’s in a bucket.”) and he keeps making adjustments. We are wearing away at it, even as I am learning what can’t be helped by the hearing aids, and learning different ways to hear and ask for help. I am being weathered by my hearing loss, I suppose; I am learning to listen a little at a time.

I remember one of my theology professors in seminary talking about the difference in the Christian view of history was that it was linear—moving from Creation to ending up in the presence of God. Most other religions saw history moving in circles, going nowhere. (His words.) I struggled with what he was saying because it didn’t seem to put much value in the present. We were just blowing through this joint on our way to what was next.

If it were not for circling back, I wouldn’t have learned much in this life. The best definition of repentance is a turning: a circling back to make things right, to do things differently, or to find what we missed the first or second or fourteenth time through.

My hearing is not going to get better. The technology will. But more than that, my listening will improve, if I will chose to be weathered into a deeper understanding of how to connect with the world around me.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve known this was coming for weeks.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of my commitment to write every night during Lent. The mark on my forehead is a harbinger of marks on the page. But I wasn’t sure what I had to say, other than I meant to write more often during Epiphany.

On the train home from New York this evening, I was reading A Time to Live: Seven Tasks of Creative Aging by Robert Raines, who just happens to be a member of our church here in Guilford. The book was a gift from my longtime friend Kenny, which makes the book even better. In a chapter titled “Embracing Sorrow” Bob wrote,

There is an underground river that flows deeper than remorse through the bottomlands of our lives into the valley of sorrow, carrying our tears towards the ocean. And some of us are left with wounds unhealed, loves unrequited, understandings not achieved.

That sentence made me catch my breath.

He went on to talk about his mother dying when he was thirteen and how the “incomplete grieving” of his youth played out later in his life. I finished the rest of the chapter and then looked out the window, overcome with a sadness I could not name other than to say the phrase resonated deep in my heart. I thought about the line in the prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer about the “things left undone.” Incomplete. Unfinished.

We had a pretty good snow late Sunday night and it has stayed cold, so the ride along the Connecticut shoreline was particularly beautiful tonight with the snow and the fading light. It felt like the closing scene to something, or perhaps I was reading my sorrow into the grey and amber sunset. I kept looking out the window, wondering what sadness had been stirred up, what work there was still to do. Somewhere in the middle of it, I started thinking about growing up in Africa. Kenya, in particular, which is where I lived in eighth and ninth grade. Bob told about being thirteen when his mom died and coming to terms with his incomplete grief years later.

We lived in a small town called Karen on the outskirts of the city. It was named after Karen Blixen–Isak Dinesen–who wrote Out of Africa. Our house was built on land that had once been a part of her farm. We left Nairobi at the end of my ninth grade year. The plan was to spend a year in Texas on our usual leave and then a year in Accra, Ghana so Dad could work on a special project and then we would be back in Kenya for my senior year in high school at Nairobi International School. When we left for the States we didn’t say goodbye. We thought we were coming back. Six months into our time in Ghana something happened between my parents and the Foreign Mission Board and they resigned. We moved to Houston and Dad was called to pastor at Westbury Baptist Church. I started Westbury High School in January of my junior year not knowing a soul. I did not return to Kenya for another thirty years. And that’s the only time I have been back.

I said goodbye like I knew I wouldn’t be back. Things left undone.

I am aware of how much of my life I have spent trying to find my way home and to create places where people feel at home. I wrote a book about it. It’s underneath why I love to cook for others. I have learned what home feels like in my marriage and in my years in Durham, more than any one place, but the more I think about what feels incomplete it’s less about home than it is in saying goodbye to the person I thought I would become. Growing up in Africa, I imagined I would spend my life somewhere other than America. When we moved to Houston the thought never crossed my mind that I would never live outside of the United States again. That was January 1973. Every address of mine since has had a US zip code, even though I still feel like a third culture kid.

I never said goodbye to the person I thought I would become.

Walt Wilkins sings a song called “Here’s to the Trains I Missed” that offers gratitude for some of what was left undone because of where he ended up.

here’s to the trains I missed, the loves I lost
the bridges I burned the rivers I never crossed
here’s to the call I didn’t hear, the signs I didn’t heed
the roads I couldn’t take the map that I just wouldn’t read

it’s a big ole world but I found my way
from the hell and the hurt that led me straight to this
here’s to the trains I missed

I look around at Ginger and the three Schnauzers and I get what he is saying. I live an amazing life full of people who love me. I’ve gotten to do amazing things. And my grief over leaving Kenya remains incomplete. There is still sadness to break forth and more to learn about how the scar tissue of sorrow has hindered my healing, even as I embrace who I have become.

When we were in Durham with a group from our Guilford church a couple of weeks ago, we took them to eat at The Palace International, a Kenyan restaurant with amazing food. I discovered it when we first moved there because they had a sign out front advertising their “world famous” samosas and the picture looked just like the ones I bought from the street vendors in Nairobi after school. And they tasted just like them, too. Whenever my parents came to Durham, we went to eat there and the chef would cook off the menu just for us. Her name is Karen. After our dinner, she came out to meet our group and said, “Welcome home.” There, in one room, were Karen, Nairobi, Durham, Guilford, and me.

Typing that sentence makes me think about a Karla Bonoff song that begins,

though we never know where life will take us
we know it’s just a ride on the wheel . . .

She was singing about the death of a friend, but the chorus feels like what I want to say to the person I thought I would be.

so goodbye my friend
i know i’ll never see you again
but the time together through all the years
will take away these tears
it’s ok now
goodbye my friend

Peace,
Milton