don't eat alone

At our church here in Guilford, Ginger is one of two pastors who share the responsibility of ministering to our congregation, and part of what that means is they alternate preaching from week to week. Today it was Sarah’s turn. The introduction of her sermon reminded me of what the conductor had said at the beginning of the High School Choir and Orchestra Concert on Friday night. Before he said much of anything else, he quoted Leonard Bernstein:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Both the conductor and Sarah mentioned Bernstein’s remarks came in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I took some time this evening to read this account of that time from Bernstein’s website and learned that he was friends with Kennedy, and found a great supporter of the arts in the President. I also found the paragraph that was the context of the quote:

We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.

I’ve read it through several times this evening and find deep resonance with the first two sentences, even before I get to the quote. The first one has an odd structure, so it took me a minute to realize he is saying “we are numb with sorrow and rage . . . .” At first I wondered how one could be numb with rage (I understand how grief numbs), and then I realized it is exactly what the weight of violence and war has done to us. Yes, we flame up on Facebook and talk about how to respond, yet we are numbed. Perhaps it is less about not feeling anything and more about feeling numb to the possibility that life could be something other than this. Why, for example, spend the energy on contacting our elected officials in Congress (I can’t bring myself to call them leaders) when they have made it clear they aren’t going to do anything? I struggle to feel hope when I think about them.

Bernstein’s response, however, doesn’t begin with thinking of who else he needed to put into action. He speaks for himself, and for other artists:

But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same.

Then comes the most quoted line:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Whatever he expected of others and their response, he knew what he would do, which was to double down on his calling, to let there be no discards. His words helped me remember the story of Vedran Smajlović whose response to the four-year Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s was to climb
into the craters left by the bombs and into the shells of the buildings and play his cello. When he was asked why he was doing it he answered,

You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello?
Why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?

What both men are saying involves more than music. Yes, art has transformational power in our lives and we do well to sing back to the night, and there call is also about being true to who we are in the face of violence and fear and grief. The violence may affect us, but it does not get to define us. Our reply will be to do whatever we do more intensely, more beautifully, and more devotedly than ever before.

And I will let Leonard Cohen sing us out.

Anthem

the birds they sang
at the break of day
start again
I heard them say
don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be
ah the wars they will
be fought again
the holy dove
she will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in

we asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
yeah the widowhood
of every government
signs for all to see

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud
but they’ve summoned
they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in.

you can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
you can strike up the march,
there is no drum
every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in

Peace,
Milton

There times in our new town of Guilford feels as though I live in a postcard or a movie set. The town is quaint and beautiful and steeped in its traditions. Like many places across the country, we had our Tree Lighting tonight, but ours was on the Town Green, bordered by shops and offices with snacks for passersby, a string quintet of eighth grade girls playing in the coffee shop, and luminaria lining the sidewalks. One of the folks standing with us remarked that if felt a bit like the happy version of the crowd gathered in the movie Groundhog Day.

One of the songs we all sang together as we waited for them to illuminate the tree was “Frosty the Snowman.” For the first time it struck me that the song is not as lighthearted as its melody. In the last verse he’s running around trying to get to his Snowman Bucket List before he melts. His days are numbered and his options are shrinking. But don’t you cry . . . .

After the the lights were turned on, many wandered back across the Green to the sanctuary of our church where the high school choirs and orchestra carried on an almost three decade tradition of their holiday concert. When I say choirs and orchestra, I’m talking about over two hundred students filling the horseshoe balcony that wraps all the way around the room and the orchestra stretched across the front. They were well prepared and offered a wonderful almost ninety minute program of everything from “Jingle Bells” to the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

As the students sang and played, you could feel the pride in the room. When it was over, smiling parents and relatives found their favorite students and congratulated them. The way our cultural story goes, these kids are the ones with possibilities. The world, as the saying goes, is their oyster. They know nothing of snowmen.

I came home to an email from a friend who takes time to send his thoughts about life and the things that matter, and he was talking about how his uncle taught him to play chess, and how his uncle told him there were more possible chess moves than there were grains of sand. My friend said he finally went and looked it up.

After each player has moved once there are 400 possible moves.
After two moves there are 70,000 possible moves.
After three moves more than 9,000,000 possible moves.
After four moves 288+ billion moves.
The average number of moves in a game is 40. 

I figured the opposite would be true. That you have the greatest number of possibilities before you move anything; and the longer you play, the fewer the possibilities.

This is true of faith and future, too. The more Christ-moves you make, the greater the number of possible moves God can make. Maybe that’s why Jesus told us not to worry. Watch. 

This has changed my understanding of “watch” in Advent. It has always seemed more like a warning. “Brace yourself!” “Sleep with one eye open.” But what if “watch” means: Look at this! You think a baby in a manger was something? You ain’t seen nothing yet! Watch the Lord of the Dance bust a move!

My point is less about how short life is and that we need to make the best of our days than it is about how we choose to look at the day we have in front of us. Are we counting down, or opening up new possibilities. Are we waiting or watching? I overhead two men talking in the grocery store this afternoon. One asked the other how things were going and he answered, “I’m just counting down the days until I can retire?”
“How long do you have left?” asked the other.
“Two and a half years,” he said.

As she neared eighty, my mother decided she wanted to learn something new, so she took up piano lessons. I’ll ask again: are we waiting or watching?

Part of the reason I enjoyed the concert tonight was it connected me with my days in the chorus at Westbury High School in Houston. Our teacher was Ms. Smith who was hard and a bit moody and absolutely amazing. I was dropped into that high school the middle of my junior year and choir was one of the things that helped me find my place there and be able to begin to think of what the next move might be. Forty-one years later, life has more layers than it did then. It’s more interesting and more challenging.

If the baby in Bethlehem was the whole story, we wouldn’t be lighting lights and singing carols. We mark the birth because of who the baby became, because of the dance he taught us, because of who he calls us to be.This life we’re living is not a dirge, but a dance. Girls, hit your hallelujah.

Here is your closing hymn.

Peace,
Milton

One of the things that helped me today was a blog post by a woman named Katherine that made the rounds on a couple of Facebook feeds that I follow offering ways to respond to the mess of a world we live in these days. Here are some of the suggestions that stuck out to me.

3. Google a small-business florist near the site of any recent tragedy. Call and explain that you’d like to pay for flowers to be sent to, say, the staff of the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (3480 Centennial Boulevard, Colorado Springs, CO 80907), or to Hope Church (5740 Academy Blvd N, Colorado Springs, CO 80918), where slain police officer Garrett Swasey and his family were members. When you leave a note, don’t make it about you, or your political or religious beliefs. Leave it anonymous, or simply say, “From a stranger who thought you might be sad today.”

5. There are several Dunkin’ Donuts within the general area of Sullivan House High School, the alternative school in Chicago’s South Side where Laquan MacDonald was enrolled. It’s probably a tough week for teachers and students both. Buy an e-gift card. Send the link to the faculty. Tell them a stranger bought them coffee.

6. Leave a copy of your favorite book in a public place. Trust that the right person will find it. 

8. Here’s a link to Amazon, where you can buy a ten-pack of socks for $9.99. Click the link. When you are asked for your shipping address, find the address of a homeless shelter in your community. If you don’t have a homeless shelter in your community, here’s mine. 

12. Go to a diner. Order a milkshake. Tip ten dollars.

13. Get a pile of index cards and a sharpie. Write down, “You are Important,” or “Breathe.”  Carry them with you as you go about your day, leaving them in waiting room magazines, on car windshields, in elevators, in bathroom stalls. Keep one for yourself. We all need the reminder sometimes, too.

What I love about the list is how handmade it is, how incarnational. Words made flesh. Here’s what kindness and compassion and even justice look like with skin on: flowers, socks, coffee, affirmation, and extravagant tips. And it is what takes me to Bethlehem every year, and then on into the stories of how Jesus interacted with people, fleshing out love and joy and hope and compassion and forgiveness with his words and his hands. He never held a national convention, developed a global marketing strategy, lobbied for his position, or hired consultants. He thought he could change the world with a meal, a touch, and a kind word. Even when he talked about things in a more eternal sense it came down to

I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. (Matt. 25:34-36, Common Bible)

Jesus noticed people others had chosen to allow to become invisible. He noticed things in people others missed. He saw beyond anger and responded to the woundedness that lay behind it. He chose belonging over blaming at every turn, and acceptance over accusation.

I know I’m not saying anything new, but then again, there’s nothing new to say, so I’m going to go back over the old, old stories and remind myself that kindness and love and forgiveness and hope are older than violence and death. I’m going back to remember the way I have felt love has been hand to hand and face to face far more than any grand gestures. I may not be able to do much for anyone in Syria or San Bernardino tonight, but I can do something for the homeless people on the New Haven Green as I walk to work from the train station, and to make sure the kindness I wish to show the world pours out first within the walls of our home and covers those closest to me. The Kindness that Became Flesh in Bethlehem calls me to do the same with every motion, every word.

My friend Bob Bennett wrote a song some time ago called “Hand of Kindness,” which you can find on this great collection, A Very Blue Rock Christmas. It feels like a good closing hymn tonight.

I have no need to be reminded of all my failures and my sins
or I can write my own indictment of who I am and who I’ve been
I know that grace by definition is something I can never earn
but for all the things that I may have missed
there’s a lesson I believe that I have learned

there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

forgiveness comes in just a moment
sometimes the consequences last
and it’s hard to walk inside that mercy
when the present is so tied up to the past
and this crucible of cause and effect
I walk the wire without a net
and I wonder if I’ll ever fall too far
that day has not happened yet

‘cause there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

and in the raven dark
shines a distant light
it seems to point at me
it burns away the night
familiar figure on the horizon
moving closer now I see
his heart is shining like the sun
he’s reaching out for me

there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

Peace,
Milton

Perhaps it was the mention of constellations in the quote from Sarah Lewis last night, and the mention of W. S, Merwin’s poem that got me thinking about the dark, which features prominently in both. Perhaps it was a friend who wrote, “I have been to the heart of darkness and found it groundless.” Whatever it was set me thinking again about darkness and stars and poems, all of which have circled around and through each other for centuries.

Darkness is an interesting word. We use it to describe several different things that carry some sense of mystery and unknowing, and often some sense of pain. We are scared of the dark. We get lost in the dark. Darkness is a metaphor for depression, for sin, for the undiscovered, for the hidden, for the mysterious. We listen to the dark. We wait until dark. I went back through old notes and bookmarks to find some of my favorite quotes and poems about darkness. Here is a small sampling.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.”
― Robert Frost, West-Running Brook

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. ― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

“Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.” ― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

My favorite, however, is the lyric to Guy Clark’s song entitled, “The Dark.”

in the dark you can sometimes hear your own heart beat
or the heart of the one next to you
the house settles down after holding itself up all day
shoulder slumps, gives a big sigh
you hear no one’s foot fall in the hall
that drip in the kitchen sink marking time
june bug on the window screen can’t get in but he keeps on trying
one way or another we’re all in the dark

fireflies, sparks, lightning, stars
campfires, the moon, headlights on cars
the Northern Lights and The Milky Way
you can’t see that stuff in the day
when the earth turns its back on the sun
the stars come out and the planets start to run around
now they call that day is done
but really it’s just getting started
some folks take comfort in that

and how dark is it
it’s too dark for goblins
and how dark is it
it’s so dark you can smell the moon
how dark is it
it’s so dark the wind gets lost
how dark is it
it’s so dark the sky’s on fire
how dark is it
it’s so dark you can see Fort Worth from here

I love the images in the song about the house that has held itself up all day and that one way or another we’re all in the dark, but I think the tune hung with me today because it asks another question: how dark is it?

The sun was up for less than nine and a half hours here in the Shoreline, as this region is called, and it was cloudy and rainy to boot. The days will continue to shrink for another three weeks. The darkness is not yet at high tide. I got up in the dark and rode the train home in the dark—at 4:30. Though I quickly find the romance of now being able to stand in our backyard and see a sky full of stars at night, thanks to the dark, I also know its weight and seemingly unending depth when the darkness stands for depression. I. too, have been one acquainted with the night. And on this night, I found a Mary Oliver poem in the dark that was new to me:

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

The last line of the song unwraps a gift for me: it’s so dark you can see Fort Worth from here. When I look backwards through my life, I can see the seedlings of my depression beginning to grow when I lived there. I didn’t know what it was then. I recognize it now, the way you see foreshadowing in a novel you’re reading for the second or third time. Even so, my memories of Fort Worth are infused with the joy that came from those days as Youth Minister at University Baptist Church, for the young people who taught me how to be a part of a group, and we all learned how to love one another.

Tonight, it’s also dark enough to see Charlestown and Winchester and Marshfield, too; and it’s dark enough to see Durham as well. How dark is it? It’s dark enough to be reminded of the love of friends scattered across the country—even the world, of the hope that continues to catch me by surprise, of the gifts of grief and gratitude and grace.

How dark is it? Dark enough to be thankful.

Peace,
Milton

One of the things the move from Durham to Guilford precipitated is my transferring from the computer store there to the one in New Haven. With the transfer also came a change in role because the position I held in Durham was not open here, which also meant a couple of weeks of training to learn my new job, which is dealing with people whose phones are broken and shattered, for the most part. They come into the store in some stage of questioning or crisis and I am charged with helping them sort it out.

We spent a good deal of time in the training talking about “stop words”—those words that stop a conversation or end the search for options: no, I can’t, I won’t, unfortunately . . . . What I realize in practice is my search for vocabulary that keeps the conversation going and presents the possibility of something other than the worse case scenario is more than semantics or retail strategy. It is humanizing, even healing, and it carries beyond my shift at work. I can stop myself with words as well.

In our new world, I ride the train from Guilford to New Haven most days, which means I have time to read rather than watch the road. My recent bound companion is The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis. The book takes on a few stop words of its own, including failure and fear. In the closing pages she writes,

The moment we designate the used or maligned as a state with generative capacity, our reality expands. President John F. Kennedy once mentioned an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Failure is an orphan until we give it a narrative. Then it is palatable because it comes in the context of story, as stars within a beloved constellation. (198)

One of the ways her words hit me is to say we become family to one another in our stories. Failure in an orphan until there is a narrative, the connective tissue of words that bind us to one another. When I tell you my story and you tell me yours we see more than the pieces of dreams that lay on the floor around us. We see that we are not alone, that failure is not the last word.

When I opened my journal to write down the quote, I found things I had jotted down from an old TED Radio Hour episode on being grateful that focused on a Benedictine monk named David Steindl-Rast. As I read through it again I realized he even takes the stop out of the word stop. Listen.

How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful . . . . It’s a very simple method. It’s so simple that it’s actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. Stop, look, go. That’s all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don’t stop. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to stop, we have to get quiet and we have to build stop signs into our lives. When we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is what ever life offers to you in that present moment. Mostly, it’s the opportunity in joy.

If you take this opportunity, go with it and that little stop, look, go is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world because we are, at the present moment, in the middle of a change of consciousness. There’s a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware of how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful. And if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not from a sense of scarcity, and you’re willing to share.

I am moved by both Lewis and Steindl-Rast because they take the words failure and fear seriously, but not ultimately because they also take the words hope and gratitude seriously. The former will not be the last words. Steindl-Rast’s progression haunts me in the best way: if we are grateful, we are not fearful; if we are not fearful, we are not violent. Violence, at its root, is fear incarnate, not power. Though the powerful may wield the weapons, they attack out of fear. Terrorists act out of fear as much as they try to foment it in others. As we know from the stories of folks like Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Aun San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela true power, even authority, lies in those who know responding to violence with violence doesn’t solve or change anything; it only deepens the wounds and feeds the fear. Their call to us is to say yes, to live in gratitude, open our hearts to one another, and incarnate hope. (Insert favorite W. S. Merwin poem here.)

The tenor of what passes for discourse in our country will not be changed by someone shouting louder or expressing more extreme ideas of hatred and bigotry. The level of violence in the world will not be lowered by someone dropping a bigger bomb. (Wow—talk about a paragraph full of stop words.) Blessed are the peacemakers—remember? Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the orphans. And the refugees. And the grateful.

As I wrote last night, I landed on a question. I appear to have done the same tonight, though I don’t know that means a new question every night on the road to Bethlehem. But for this night, I ask another: what’s stopping us?

Peace,
Milton

Somewhere in one of The Boxes Yet To Be Unpacked is my copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, which is the book that first taught me how the church marks time by the liturgical calendar. It starts and ends with essays on Advent, beginning with the words from Romans, “The night is far gone; the day is at hand.” (Romans 13:12) For all but four days of this season, the days will be growing shorter. Here in our new home in Connecticut we are far enough north that the sun sets before 4:30; a cloudy day means we never turn the lights off. Though I’m not sure the early Christians were thinking about the short days when the repurposed the Roman celebration of Saturnalia to tell their Core Story, as the church moved into Europe and the bleak midwinters the promise that it would not always keep getting darker became a central metaphor, it seems.

So we light candles and we wait.

Sitting in church this morning, it struck me that not all waiting is the same. Waiting for a diagnosis from a biopsy is not the same as my waiting for the train in the morning to go to New Haven. Waiting for a pizza is different from waiting for the world to change. Somewhere in the course of the afternoon I remembered a blog post from six years ago when I was cooking in the restaurant at Duke and I wrote about learning the Spanish word for wait—espera—because our dishwasher, whom I was training to cook, didn’t speak very much English. And I wrote:

If I can go back to the kitchen for a minute, when the ticket prints, telling me someone wants the chicken for dinner, I make a choice. I can choose to let my sense of time be controlled by the little piece of paper saying they want dinner NOW, which leads me to rush the dish; or I can see the ticket as an invitation to take the time I need to prepare the dish well: taking a minute or two to get the pan hot, and more time for the oil to warm, and more time for the chicken to brown, and the sauce to reduce, until the dish that goes to the table does so with, well, timefulness.

As much as the latter choice seems the obvious one, I’m well aware of how hard it is for me to live timefully. Espera doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s the dinner rush or some other self-imposed deadline, I can quickly become consumed with The Task at Hand, and push time and everyone else around with the pugnacious impatience of a conductor determined for the train to leave on time at all costs. I know what needs to happen and I want it to happen now.

Time too easily becomes a force, rather than a friend.

The ways languages work sometimes fascinates me. The sounds of words make things possible regardless of their meaning. In English, we get to rhyme heart and art, for example. Not everyone gets that poetic possibility. In Spanish, espera and esperanza sound like relatives—wait and hope—that give us a vocabulary for Advent: here in the dark we wait and hope the day is at hand.

Searching for the blog post led me to another one with this quote from Annie Dillard:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. (Teaching a Stone to Talk)

There is something beautiful about the circling seasons of our faith and the reenactment of the Incarnation again and again, connecting us with our brothers and sisters in Christ down all the days, and we come back to the Manger year after year and we could also say not much has changed. We begin this season in the gathering dark as refugees from Syria struggle to find shelter, as the tenor of our political discourse has degenerated into the screaming of playground bullies, as fear has become the primary currency or our country begging the question: what are we waiting for?

One of the quotes I come back to most every year is from Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth century monk, who wrote: “What good is it for me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago and I don’t give birth to God’s son in my person and my culture and my times?” What would it look like for us to be waiting to go into labor, for us to wait to be the carriers of God’s love rather than just the recipients? We are not waiting for Christ to come to us, but for Christ to come through us. Crash helmets, indeed.

Though this post feels as disjointed as these days we are living, the talk of labor pains makes me think of one of the synonyms we use for pregnancy: expecting—another way of saying hope. In these days of noise and confusion, we wait, we hope, we hurt, and we expect. We trust that the trajectory of existence is not destined for darkness, nor the curve of life pointed toward cynicism. We wait, we hope, we hurt, and we are expecting to give birth to the Love of God in our time and in our culture.

Come, let us wait together. The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

Peace,
Milton