don't eat alone

As Ginger and I traveled home from my father’s funeral, we tried to imagine what life would be like for my mother who had lost her traveling companion of almost sixty years. They loved being together. It was their favorite thing. Then we tried to imagine what we would do without each other. It was more than I could imagine, but I said, “I think one of the hardest things would be not having someone who cared about the details of my day.”

So I made up my mind to do my best to call my mother everyday and ask about the details.

This morning, I was reading a post from my friend Kenny and he reminded me of a scene from the movie Shall We Dance. It was the story of John Clark (Richard Gere), an estate lawyer with a charming wife and loving family. Nevertheless, John felt something missing in his life. One evening on his commute home, John impulsively got off the train and signed up for weekly dance lessons. He didn’t tell his wife Beverly (Susan Sarandon) about his new interest in ballroom dancing, which raised her suspicions to the point that she hired a private investigator. At one meeting, they had a discussion about marriage.

“All these promises that we make and we break, why is it that you think people get married?” Beverly asks.

“Passion,” says Devine.

“No,” she says.

“It’s interesting, bccause I would have taken you for a romantic. Why, then?”

“Because we need a witness to our lives.” Beverly replies. “There are a billion people on this planet. I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything: the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things—all of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed, because I will be your witness.”

A witness. As someone who grew up Southern Baptist, the word witness had different connotations. Witnessing meant telling people about Jesus, rather than listening to them. Yet, it seems, when I look at the life of Jesus, he spent his time witnessing in the same way Beverly talked about: caring about everything happening in the lives of those around him. Honoring the details.

In the early days of the camcorder, before there were smartphones and Youtube, Peter Gabriel and Amnesty International started the Witness, working to help people tell their stories of struggle and oppression and asking those of us who live in privilege to promise their lives would not go unnoticed—to bear witness, the same way we bear a burden, I suppose. To learn, as U2 sang in a song I posted a couple of days ago, “to carry each other.”

One of the things that has crossed my path recently is a song from a Broadway show I have not seen called Dear Evan Hansen. I don’t know much more about it than the title and the song called “You Will Be Found.” The song makes me want to see the show. I found a video of a virtual choir singing the song that made it even more powerful. The opening verses say,

have you ever felt like nobody was there
have you felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere
have you ever felt like you could disappear
like you could fall and no one would hear

well, let that lonely feeling wash away
maybe there’s a reason to believe you’ll be okay
‘cause when you don’t feel strong enough to stand
you can reach, reach out your hand

and oh, someone will come running
and I know they’ll take you home
even when the dark comes crashing through
when you need a friend to carry you
and when you’re broken on the ground
you will be found

You will be found. Your life will not go unnoticed. I will notice it. Let us say those words to the people we love most. Then let us think of ways to say it to those we don’t know quite as well: to the people who pour our coffee, or take in our dry cleaning; to the checkers and servers and people we pass in grocery stores who look lost in the cereal aisle; to the people who sit nearby every Sunday in church, yet whose names we still do not know. Let us be witnesses to one another. Finders, and keepers.

What better way to spend our days than to honor the details of one another’s lives—witnesses to what matters most.

Peace,
Milton

Watching the footage of student protests in response to the deaths in Florida set me to thinking about protest songs and the underlying protest that fuels our Lenten journey. Jesus went to the cross because he spoke truth to power—because he protested against oppression and the marginalization of people. When we stand up and stand together, we are walking in the footsteps of the one who calls us in love to live out that love every chance we get. I offer, then, a soundtrack that is by no means exhaustive, but is full of hope and heart.

Last Sunday, we worshipped at the First African Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. It was Children’s Sunday, and the youth choir sang “Glory” from the Selma soundtrack. I will let that be our opening hymn.

The next song came to mind as I read about schools that are preemptively forbidding their students to protest. The first words that came to mind were, “Stop—hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

Tracy Chapman reminds us perhaps we are talking about more than protest . . .

Paul Simon wrote “American Tune” in 1974, including these prophetic words:
but it’s all right, it’s all right
we’ve lived so well so long
still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong

Old Crow Medicine Show covered a David Rawlings tune that is one of my favorites.

And for our benediction, U2 and Mary J. Blige: we’ve got to carry each other . . .

Peace,
Milton

I missed writing last night because we were traveling back from Richmond. I am still figuring out what to say about what I saw in heard in our days there. I keep coming back to the image of layers that I used in a different context a week ago as I began this year’s version of my Lenten journal. As we traveled, we got word of Billy Graham’s death. As I said on Facebook, I met Billy Graham when he came to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, where we lived, in 1960. That visit started a friendship with my parents that lasted the rest of their lives. The better story has to do with my mother. She was a student at Baylor when Billy Graham came to speak at a campus revival, somewhere in 1948 or 1949. He was still new to the scene, as it were.

My mother was walking across campus when a car pulled up with four young men inside and asked directions to one of the buildings on campus. She answered their question and then invited them to the revival. When they sort of snickered, she asked if they knew Jesus as their savior. Again, they kind of laughed, and so she shared her faith with them—a hallmark of my mother’s life at any age.

That night, when she got to the service and the introduced Graham to the crowd, she realized who she had witnessed to. And then Billy told the story to those who were gathered. The guy sitting next to my mother said, “What kind of crazy person would witness to Billy Graham?”

“I know,” my mother said.

Before we left Richmond yesterday we visited the Maggie Walker house. I did not know anything about her before I got to Richmond. Now I wonder why she is not a nationally known figure. She became the first African American woman to own a bank in the 1920s—in Richmond. She also owned a department store and a newspaper. She was an early leader in the NAACP. She suffered great personal pain even as she became a commercial, political, and even spiritual force in Richmond. “Have faith, have courage, have hope, and carry on,” she said.

Walker’s faith was more grounded in helping people find jobs and homes and education than telling them the buses would wait, yet both she and Graham were living out the call they heard from God. I find more resonance with her expression of faith than I do with Graham’s altar calls, but as I have read those who have been quick to offer a critique of what he did, I find myself reticent to pile on—and not just because his death is so recent.

I came to the place long ago where I ceased to believe that Hell was a place. I think Love is the last word, not just for this life but for eternity. However things go in the dimension that lies beyond this life, I think God is calling, “Olly olly oxen free.” That goes for Billy Graham. He doesn’t have to agree with me for God to love him.

I will let the Lost Dogs sing our benediction: breathe deep the breath of God.

The busses will wait.

Peace,
Milton

Our trip to Richmond has given me more than I can begin to unpack right now. Those stories will come in the days ahead. Tonight, I offer another poem.

no joke

I once heard a comedian say
the only way to get to the good jokes
was to push past the easy ones: say all
the double entendres, the terrible
puns, and the sex—and then you find
punch lines more profound than predictable.

Perhaps I’m stretching the analogy, but
couldn’t we say that when we set aside
the alleluias for Lent we acknowledge
that praise can sometimes turn to platitude:
get up and do it again. Amen. Say it again . . .

Listen to the birds who are not singing.
Wait for the trains that are not coming.
Dance to music that no one is playing.
Set places for those who have yet to show up.
Rolling the same stones is no preparation
for the belly laugh of the resurrection.

Peace,
Milton

I am writing tonight from Richmond, Virginia where Ginger is leading a group from First Congregational Church of Guilford UCC on our second annual Civil Rights Tour. The inaugural trip went to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama. This year we are here along the James River in the town that was once the capital of the Confederacy.

This afternoon, we toured The Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia that was filled with stories of those who stood up for their humanity in a number of different ways. One of the staff members told us the story of Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved man in Richmond who got a friend of his to put him in a wooden packing crate that was three feet long by two feet eight inches deep by two feet wide and send him north to Philadelphia. The trip took twenty-seven hours, but he shipped his way to freedom.

Tonight, we went to the Pine Camp Arts and Community Center, which is run by the city of Richmond, to see the play Free Man of Color by Charles Smith that told the story of John Howard Templeton, the fourth African American man to graduate from the University of Ohio in 1828. The college president, Robert Wilson, is grooming Templeton to go and lead the nation of Liberia. What becomes apparent is Wilson doesn’t want Templeton to stay in America as an equal. Templeton completed his education, but never went to Africa. Instead he started schools in Ohio, Virginia, and Pittsburgh. The play was excellent and the performances were wonderful.

So many of the stories today we heard had notes of triumph, but they came in the middle of a melody of sadness and struggle, as well as hope and tenacity. Small stories that loom large, even though many have never heard them. But to see them as only inspirational is to sell them short. Henry “Box” Brown survived an amazing ordeal, but I couldn’t hear the story without thinking of those who have died in packing containers trying to get across the border. John Howard Templeton was highly educated and yet his degree and mastery of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek did not translate into equality. Today I heard the stories of America. Of humanity.

I feel both hope and heartache after hearing the stories I heard today. How can we be so far into human history and not have learned how to treat each other? How can we be almost two hundred and fifty years into our history as a nation and still be so unwilling to offer liberty and justice for all? Why is it so threatening to those of us born into privilege to think of sharing what we have?

One of the ways to think about Lent is to see it as a march to the Cross. I am not the first to say that one of the ways to look at the Cross is to see it as a lynching. Jesus was killed because he was unabashedly for the poor and marginalized. He knew the privileged lived in a house of cards that God would blow down. The hope of Easter is that the lynching was not the last word.

I believe with all of my heart that it will not be the last word in America either. Sam Cooke was right. A change gonna come.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. Here’s Sam.

I earned how to read the funny papers from my Dad. That’s what he called the comics. One of the characters who lived in black and white in those days was Dagwood Bumstead, husband of Blondie, and lover of the biggest sandwich you ever saw—everything stacked high, one layer on top of the other.

I thought about that sandwich as Ginger and I were driving from Tarrytown, New York to Richmond, Virginia and I realized I was not going to be able to write my Ash Wednesday post to begin another year of my Lenten Journal, which has been my practice for who knows how many years. I thought of the sandwich because I was thinking of how life right now feels stacked, one thing on top of the other. Yesterday was Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day and my regular day to go into New York for work and the day we needed to get to Richmond to prepare for those from our church in Guilford who are coming south for a Civil Rights history tour. I got up at four and packed, caught the five-thirty train to New York, worked, caught a late afternoon train to Tarrytown where Ginger picked up me up, ate a Valentine’s dinner at a cute restaurant on the Hudson River, and then drove as far as we could so we could get up this morning and get to Richmond and prepare for the others. A Dagwood of a day—and it feels like there have been a number of those in a row.

I missed getting to write last night because I find great meaning in my lenten discipline. Over the years it has helped me find focus, distill my thoughts and feelings, and connect with those who read it. And I started my discipline by not doing it. The car was quiet for the last hour or so last night. Ginger had gotten sleepy. The road was not crowded. As I thought about writing, the phrase that hit me is the title of this post: just get here.

The phrase hit play in my mental juke box and I could hear Oleta Adams singing,

you can reach me by railway
you can reach me by trail way
you can reach me on an airplane
you can reach me with your mind
you can reach me by caravan
cross the desert like an Arab man
I don’t care how you get here—just get here if you can

The lyrics landed like grace.

The layers of life are stacking up heavily on far more than me these days. It is hard not to feel sandwiched between pain and pain, over and over again. Our postcard town in Connecticut is still reeling from the accidental death of one of our teenagers. I drove last night as Ginger read news of the shooting in Florida. I could spend the rest of the night writing if all I tried to list even a fraction of all those who are hurting in our world.

In his poem, “The Layers,” Stanley Kunitz asks,

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

A few lines later, he offers,

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Richmond, a town, like many, that is struggling to come to terms with its layers, getting ready to see what both the layers and the struggle has to say to me and about me and what the conversation might demand of me. Tonight, we got to eat dinner with an old friend and former roommate who lives here—a serendipitous trip back through some layers of my life for which I am deeply grateful. We could have spent the evening talking about the number of years between then and now that we were not in touch. Instead, we told some stories and then dove into the lives we live now, finding new connections and tightening the ties that bind. What mattered most was that we got here.

Lent has begun and I’m a day late—and, even a day late, pushing it to the last hour to get this posted. But I got here. And I will do my best to keep showing up to talk about how things are stacking up.

Peace,
Milton

PS—Take some time to hear her sing . . .