perspective
the daffodils bow their heads
in the early morning rain
without explanation, on
this day after resurrection.
I am left to find resonance in
both reverence of redemption
and the weight of the water.
the raindrops hang like tears
on the window, or tiny jewels,
depending on where I am.
my coffee cup is as empty
as the tomb, telling me it is
time to go out into the rain,
to take my place with the flowers.
life goes on after Easter.
Peace,
Milton
Because I have now lived through the death of both of my parents, I understand more of how the disciples might have felt after Jesus’s death and burial. One of the hardest things has been to mark time without them. The first morning. The first month. The first year, and then the second.
I think about them waking up on the morning after Jesus’s death. They didn’t know what to do. The life they had come to expect and expected to keep living disappeared in an afternoon. They were lost. And then the sun came up Sunday morning, and Mary went to the tomb only to find it empty and have Jesus call her by name.
Over the years, one of the quotes during Advent that holds me out to the love of God comes from Meister Eckhardt who said,
What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God centuries ago and I do not give birth to the child of God in my time and in my culture?
I came back to the quote tonight, thanks to my soundtrack for tonight: another Bob Bennett song called “Still Rolls the Stone.” Sometimes the word still means quiet. Not moving. But in Bob’s words, it means continuing, connected. God is still speaking. Love is still stronger than death.
I tore off my grave clothes
And cried a pool of tears
For the voice of the Living One
Who spoke the stars and spheres
Has called me from my darkness
And led me to this place
Where the dead leap
And the blind see His faceStill rolls the stone, still rolls the stone
Still rolls the stone from the graveHearts aflame with mercy
Like the sun in midnight sky
While the doubter shrugs his shoulders
And the cynic wonders why
But as it is in Heaven
So now we proclaim
The Lord tells us here to do the sameIn the still of a Sunday morning
A grave stands open wide
And a promise kept
While the world slept
Means that no one is inside
(Words & Music: Bob Bennett © 1985 Straightway Music ASCAP)
Christ is risen indeed. May the reality of the resurrection lead us to offer life wherever we can. May we continue to do all that we can to remind one another the stone is still rolling.
Peace,
MIlton
I started a new train book on the way to work this morning: Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi. The book, as the title suggests, uses cartography as an extended metaphor for writing. As the train worked its way to New Haven this morning, Turchi was talking about the importance of blank spaces in maps, and then he moved back to talking about writing.
Even after we mark the page, there are blanks beyond the borders of what we create, and blanks within what we create. Maps are defined by what they include but often more revealing by what they exclude. (29)
The gospel accounts are full of blanks, full of space between the things they map out in Jesus’s life. Even when we look at their recounting of the crucifixion, we can read them aloud in a manner of minutes. What happened while Jesus was on the cross is left blank, except for what we named the Seven Last Words—a map of our own, I suppose. And then the map from Friday to Sunday is nothing but blank.
I worked all day today in New Haven, rode the train home, and then walked to meet Ginger for dinner as she was finishing up with the Good Friday service at our church. The dark walk through our town was my own blank space to fill, and it reminded me of an old poem of mine I rediscovered the other day that speaks of space, of blanks. It was inspired by a favorite book, Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe.
empty chair
what is
the difference
between
open space
and emptiness?
vacancy
and opportunity?
barrenness
and belief?in one of
my favorite stories,
Ian had a chair
in the shape
of a hand
an open hand
a tender hand
God’s hand
to hold himI drive by
furniture stores
yard sales
sometimes
hoping to see
any chair
that might
offer me the
same invitation
Even in these uncharted days, we are held out to love.
Peace,
Milton
My earliest recollections of Communion–or the Lord’s Supper, as we most often called it in Baptist life–was the ritual beginning with the words, “On the night that Jesus was betrayed. . . .” Not on the night he was arrested, or the last night with his disciples, but the night he was betrayed. And the one who betrayed him stayed for dinner.
Yesterday and today have been filled with news stories and accounts from friends in North Carolina about the betrayal perpetrated by the state legislature who passed House Bill 2 (HB2) with the express purpose of invalidating anti-discrimination laws passed at the municipal level. The flash point was an LGBT-supportive ordinance in Charlotte that gave people the right to go to the bathroom. Yes, you heard me correctly. And they did it in a called special session, and passed the legislation in a day. Their actions were deliberate and damaging.
As a straight, white, Christian male, I have no first hand experience with knowing what’s it’s like to be on the receiving end of discrimination and prejudice. I have learned from listening to friends who have had, and continue to have, those experiences. What I have learned from listening is being on the receiving end of the verbiage and the violence is dehumanizing. One of my friends is Kyle, who is a pastoral intern at Pilgrim UCC in Durham, where Ginger was pastor. He wrote an open letter to Governor Pat McCrory, and I asked if I could share it here. Listen, please.
An Open Letter to Governor Pat McCrory
I am a twenty-one year old honors student at North Carolina State University and a ministerial intern at Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Durham. I am looking forward to a career in the ministry as I feel my life experiences have led me to feel called into continuously striving to care for those on the peripherals of society as Jesus commanded of his followers. I feel so strongly drawn to this work because I know what it feels like to be the outcast and the HB2 is a perfect example of why.
You see, I am also transgender. I was raised as a girl in a Southern Baptist household, but never stopped fighting for myself. I put myself at risk of being utterly cut off from my family, being thrown out on the streets, or any number of the consequences that comes from when a transgender child comes out to their parents. A child doesn’t take these incredible risks if it wasn’t more of a risk to stay silent. To stay silent and to continue to live a life based on what is expected of us instead of who God intentionally crafted us to be can be utterly suffocating. Within the small yet significant transgender community, 41 percent of us have attempted suicide in our lifetimes, and that is the direct result of the constant rhetoric that transgender people either do not truly exist or that we just don’t deserve the same rights and protections as other human beings.
I am here to tell you, Governor, that transgender people do exist and that we are people just like everyone else. To deny the right of the people of North Carolina to use PUBLIC facilities is atrocious. Growing up, I never used public restrooms, but the result of that was me not using the restroom for 8-10 hours a day. That’s not healthy, it leaves one open to all sorts of infections. HB2 is therefore introducing a health concern into a portion of the population on top of the violence that will come as legal protections are stripped from transgender people. As much anxiety as this bill gives me as a trans man, I know that my trans sisters will only feel it 10x worse. Your comment about men in women’s bathroom directly speaks to that. Yet a simple search of “transgender violence” and the results are overwhelmingly hate crimes against transgender people as opposed to transgender people in any way presenting a real threat to anyone, including women in restrooms. We just want to use the bathroom. I’m even not sure why the government is so concerned with my right to use the bathroom anyway. I promise you that if I am going into the men’s room, which are usually pretty disgusting, its just because I REALLY have to pee. You’d think more serious issues like unemployment might have caught your attention too much to concern yourself with such trivial matters as to which room I use a stall in to relieve myself.
I may be different than you, but my life has no less value. My experience as a transgender individual has given me a unique perspective on life and has opened my eyes and heart in ways I could have never imagined. There are many things my experience has taught me that I would be happy to share with you over a face-to-face meeting so that you might see the humanity within being transgender. I am transgender, I am a citizen of this country, a resident of this state, and most importantly I am a human being. I deserve my rights. The transgender community deserves our rights, and this is entire letter hasn’t even begun to cover the other discriminatory measures based on sexual orientation or race that this bill has pushed through.
Governor McCrory, when you were sworn into office, your job became to represent the people of North Carolina. Yet the resounding response to this bill is #wearenotthis. Your job was to protect and serve the people of North Carolina, and yet this bill has alienated significant portions of the population. In conclusion, Governor, the one thing I am asking of you is to actually do the job you were elected for. Let’s overturn HB2 and get you and the legislators to work on something more important like unemployment or our school systems. Thanks.
The first time I met Kyle, he preached at our church and told his story. He and Ginger did a masterful job of weaving his story in with scripture, and breaking it into chapters, if you will, so we had some space to let his story soak in, since hearing firsthand from a trans person was new for many of us. Kyle gave his testimony of life and faith with grace and compassion. And then Ginger read from Galatians 3:
You are all God’s children through faith in Christ Jesus. All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
As Jesus washed their feet on the night he was betrayed, he called them to love one another. As he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane moments before his arrest, he prayed for their unity, because he knew their fear could be abated by their togetherness, their courage fostered by their committed community.
On this night when our siblings in Christ have been betrayed, let us have the courage and compassion to listen to the voices of those who long for the day when they can be fully themselves without fear or reprisals or rejection; let us be the answer to Jesus’s prayer.
Peace,
Milton
under the alleluias
I once heard a comedian
say the only way to get to
the jokes that mattered was
to push through the easy stuff,
the sophomoric double entendres,
the terrible puns, and get past
the low-hanging fruit of the
obvious and only then can you
begin to discover great comedy.
I don’t think I’m stretching the
analogy too far to say that
Lent does the same thing for faith:
we have laid aside our alleluias
for these forty days and pushed
past the familiar words of praise,
as we sang our songs of sorrow,
told our stories of grief, without
moving to what comes easily.
we have listened to the birds
who are not singing, and talked
to those who no longer answer,
waited for things that didn’t come,
and remembered Love is stronger
than sunshine, that hope is not
happiness: to get to the gallows
humor of the gospel, and the belly
laugh of the empty tomb at sunrise.
Peace,
Milton
Like most Americans, I suppose, I woke this morning to news of the attacks in Brussels. I’ve only seen a couple of pictures, but I could see it in my mind, as much as I can imagine such a thing. As the day went on, the public conversation went two ways. One was to draw connections with the injured and wounded and grieving. People wrote about when they had been in Belgium, or talked about connections with New York and Paris—though not many mentioned Syria or South Sudan or Beirut or Nairobi or Baghdad. Still, we worked hard to feel together in the face of tragedy.
The second direction, which came more from the political rhetoric, was to move towards isolation, to distance ourselves from the attackers and label them as not us, and then to foment an appetite of retaliation.
Ginger and I talked about it briefly as she drove me to the train station, and then she went on to her day and I stood on the platform with eight or ten other folks waiting, just like those folks in Brussels. Madeleine L’Engle was my companion, since I had just one more chapter to finish up our Lenten conversation, and it was titled, “Echthroi and Angels.” Echthroi, she explained was Greek word meaning “the enemy” that she used in A Wrinkle in Time and the books that followed, to identify those people and things that cause dis-aster—separation from the stars. She described a meeting with a film production company who wanted to turn one of her novels into a movie.
“Did Joshua have to die,” I was asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what happened,” I said firmly.
“But Joshua was good.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“But doesn’t good imply protection?”
“No,” I said. No. And then it came to me that the only one who ever offered protection was Satan. (212)
She was referring to the promises the Tempter made to Jesus in the wilderness that no harm would come to him if he would only change his allegiances. Then she asked and sort of answered another question.
But does the God of love not offer that kind of protection? Again I’m caught between paradox and contradiction. (212)
In the spring of 2002 I went to the NCAA Final Four with my father and my brother, which was barely six months after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. We had received word to go early to the arena because security was going to be extreme and everyone would be searched. When we got there, thousands of people were crowded around each doorway, and we were out there for an hour or more. At some point, I turned to my dad and said, “This is an illusion of safety. While they are protesting the inside, what would keep someone from bombing this crowd while we’re waiting?” There was no way not to be vulnerable, which was just as true as I stood on the train platform, or as I walked across the New Haven Green to get to work, as it was that night on an Atlanta sidewalk.
Vulnerable. The dictionary says it means “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm.” It’s not a call to arms, but a call to humanity.
One of the enduring images from my years teaching at Winchester High School in Massachusetts is the big pile of book bags that grew every morning outside of my room. Rather than stuffing the bags in their lockers, the students just piled them up. I never heard of anything being stolen or destroyed. It was a spontaneous sculpture that spoke to how safe the students felt in their own school. When the attack happened at Columbine High School, one of the first responses from our administration was to ban the book bags because they said they were a threat. Their fear caused them to misread what was a symbol of our vulnerability and confidence in one another.
Vulnerable. There’s no way around it. To be human is to be vulnerable, fundamentally unprotected, capable of carrying profound pain. Once we have been wounded—and we will be wounded—we have a choice to make (0ver and over): how will we respond to the violence done to us?
For once, the years of French my parents made me take pay off a bit. The French word for to wound is blesser, which looks like it could just as easily mean to bless. So I will ask the question another way: as we face and respond to the violence in the world, do we wound or do we bless? Will we give in to the temptation of protection and fortify ourselves, or will we offer blessing out of our woundedness? The question is the same on both the grand scale and the small. Madeleine says our part is
. . . simply to bless, no matter how ungraciously. We being with blessing the easily identifiable echthroi: disease, terrorists, rapists, power mongers. Then keep coming in closer. Hold out to the love of God those who have hurt us. Those who have let us down. Who, for one reason or another, slap out at us, put us down, reject us. Those whose forgiveness we must accept when we have done any of those things ourselves. Those we encounter in our daily lives, family, friends, people we pass on the street. (225)
Hold out to the love of God—I love that phrasing. We’re not holding on, but holding out, extending, trusting that the presence of God is something more profound than protection.
As I was walking home from the train this afternoon, I stopped at the Marketplace, a coffee shop on the Guilford Green, to read and write for a bit. I took a window seat and watched the late afternoon parade of kids and dogs and parents. Three boys, probably eight or nine, rode up on their bicycles and dropped them outside on the sidewalk to come into the store without a thought of locking anything. They came inside, got a snack, and then went back to their bikes to head home for dinner. As they stood their talking before the rode off, I smiled and thought, “They’re sitting ducks.” And then I hoped they never learned to be anything different, as I held them out to the love of God.
What can separate us from that?
Peace,
Milton
Anger has never come easy for me. My father grew up in an angry household, for reasons that would take several posts to explain. His take away from those days was to decide the family he helped to create would not live that way. He didn’t yell or lose his temper, and neither did my mother. What I learned—not necessarily what they were trying to teach—was we were not supposed to get angry. There was something wrong with it. So I socked it away and kept it to myself. As I dealt with the stories of Jesus over those years, his cleansing of the Temple and cursing the fig tree have been problematic because I felt like his was angry—visibly and tangibly so. Didn’t he know the rules about getting mad?
I read the accounts now and I see to say he was mad, or even angry, lacks in appropriate vocabulary. I need a better word. When I turn to the written accounts, the gospels are sparse and lacking for detail. All four tell of the cleansing, but not in the same way. I charted it out.
Matthew 21: triumphal entry, cleansing, healing
Mark 11: triumphal entry, cursing of fig tree, cleansing
Luke 19: triumphal entry, cleansing, teaching
John 2: wedding, cleansing (with whips), musings
The Monday before Jesus died (or whatever day of the week Jesus knew it to be), Jesus entered the Temple and turned over the tables on the moneychangers. The only gospel that gives much detail at all is John, who also places the event early in Jesus’s ministry, rather than during the days before his crucifixion. None of the gospel writers says a word about anger, they just describe the scene. We can certainly infer it, with the turned tables, scattered change, and escaping doves—John even puts a whip in his hand—but Jesus’s feelings are not named. We can say he was feeling compassion for the oppressed, or frustration with the system, or that he was hoping to incite a riot or a revolution, but we have to read that into the story.
Jesus had been going to the Temple for years. Why this year? I know, in terms of the gospel timeline, it was all building to the Big Finish. Was it a sudden impulse, or a planned response? Had he been thinking about it for years and decided he had finally had enough? Did he see someone get swindled one time to many? Had the ride into town heightened his sensibilities?
The Passover rituals that were a part of Jesus’s life were nothing new. I wonder how long it was after the Temple was built that the money changers started showing up. You can see how it would happen. People need to make sacrifices, or make donations to beggars, and they get to the Temple after a long trip without change, so someone sets up a change booth and, of course, charges a small fee for the transaction. The next Passover, they have doves and other animals so people who come from a long way off don’t have to travel with them—at a price, of course, and the prices always went up during Passover. Once those transactions became ensconced in the institutional memory (do you think that free range dove seller will be there again this year?) it was hard to change. Then Jesus started turning tables.
There’s a certain snowball effect to the life of any institution. They have a way of hanging on to things, of taking an exception or a margin note and incorporating it into the main agenda. Much of the energy of those who belong is used up perpetuating the institution rather than furthering the dream for which it was created. Maybe Passover had become as much about the transactions in the Court of the Gentiles than it was about telling the story of their deliverance from Egypt. I can hear my father saying if Jesus had come to the church instead of the Temple, he would have started by disbanding all committees rather than turing over tables.
Now I hear Tracy Chapman singing in my head:
don’t you know you better run run run . . .
yes, finally the tables are starting to turn
talkin’ bout a revolution
But it’s the opening lines of the song that get me:
don’t you know
talking about a revolution sounds
like a whisper . . .
In our world of giant churches and media exposure, we think the big play is what matters, the grand gesture, the spectacular event. Yet when I think of both Jesus’s entry into the city on what we call Palm Sunday and his table turning on Monday, I can’t help think they were probably small events in the scope of things—a big deal to his followers, but nothing that brought Jerusalem to a standstill. What started as a whisper turned into a resounding chord of love around the world, but it started as a whisper. Elijah heard God in the silence—the still, small voice. Jesus rode in alone on a borrowed donkey. It was no parade. And the next day he turned over a couple of tables in the Temple.
Yes. Like a whisper.
Peace,
Milton
I sang in church this morning.
One of the folks I have met since moving to Guilford is a guy named Geoff and he and I sang “The Touch of the Master’s Hand” in worship. Most people know the song because of Wayne Watson, but I had the privilege of learning it while I was in college from John Kramp, the guy who wrote the melody and adapted the lyric from an old poem. The song tells the story of an old violin that is destined to be auctioned off for next to nothing until an old man picks it up and plays it, and the price shoots up—all because of the touch of the master’s hand, even as God’s touch on our lives can change everything.
I learned the song forty years ago.
We rehearsed early, so I had time to walk across the town green to get a cup of coffee and read for a bit. I was looking back through old notes on my phone (since I didn’t have a book with me) and found a quote I had jotted down soon after my mother went into hospice care. When she first made the choice, she was actually feeling pretty good, but we all knew things could not be made right. Though she had peace about her decision, it was still quite emotional. Her primary care physician, who had walked with her through most everything, came by to see her. She explained her thought process, her prayer process, and her decision, and he said, “You have made a decision of courage and hope and not of despair.”
I looked across the green and I could see a few people making preparations for the ecumenical gathering to bless the palms before we went to our separate worship services, and I wondered—again—about Jesus’s courageous decision to enter Jerusalem, knowing most everyone didn’t get it. I thought of Phillipians 2:5-6.
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. (NASB)
I love Paul’s wording that Jesus didn’t see equality with God as something to be grasped—something to be held on to at all costs. He knew that choosing to ride into Jerusalem would change things. And he instigated the change because that was what his whole life was about. To hang on for dear life would have been an act of despair. “Faith,” says the writer of Hebrews, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (11:1) His ride was a call to courage.
The next thing I read was this word from Eric Folkreth, the pastor at Northaven UMC in Dallas.
The original Palm Sunday crowd was full of all the beautiful misfits that had been drawn to Jesus for years . . . the poor, “tax collectors,” “prostitutes,” a perfect storm of outsiders that very predictably caused the religious authorities to be squirm.
And yet, in a culture obsessed with “gotcha” games of “guilt by association,” Jesus still calls us to seek out the beautiful misfits of our world…to not worry about how that looks to the authorities . . . and to form that most beautiful band of misfits into “the church.”
The coffee shop where I was sitting was filling up with people who were settling into a quiet Sunday morning with family and friends. The green was filling up with folks carrying palm fronds and preparing for worship. I moved to the celebration as the Episcopalians processed out of their church in a straight line behind their priest and their church banner, everyone staying on the sidewalk. The Congregationalists spilled out of our church and on to the green with a randomness that spoke in living metaphor. The Catholics walked as a group, but not in formation. We even had a live donkey, who stood beside me munching on straw. I know it has come to be called the Triumphal Entry, but looking at the unassuming animal next to me, I wondered if Jesus’s ride looked more like a homemade neighborhood parade than a procession of pomp and pageantry. His choice to come to town was a hopeful one, not a triumphant one. His was not a statement of conquest, but of solidarity. To have acted in power would have been to act in despair.
We finished our short service and then made our way to our different houses of worship. When I got inside, I had a few minutes and I was struck with this thought. The current campaign rhetoric to “make America great again” is cynical despairing, not because it doesn’t look to the future, but because it doesn’t come to terms with the present. I know we have serious problems, and I also know we are the most diverse and inclusive as we have ever been as a nation. More people have a voice in the conversation than ever before. Again, there is much work to be done, but we live in a courageous time. We live in a hopeful time, should we choose to make the choice to see as such and live into the substance of things hoped for as we deal with issues of justice and inclusivity. Jesus could have come to town looking for a fight. Instead, he created space for all those who had chosen him over despair to celebrate. Yes, we have tough days ahead as we mark Holy Week, and let us remember our journey with Jesus goes through the cross, not to it.
We are making a choice of courage and hope, not of despair.
Peace,
Milton
the road from here to resurrection
is mapped in my mind (and my heart),
from palms to parables, crowds to
cross. I know the days, the steps,
the words, the mileposts.
my feet are covered with the dust
from the feet of disciples
who walked this way when the road was
not so well marked and Holy Week
had not been scheduled.
I won’t get to Easter because
the road is familiar, or the
liturgy expected. I need
more than a map or a memory
to roll away the stone.
Peace,
Milton
here in america
we yell at each other as though
anger were a pre-existing condition,
and diatribe an anagram of democracy;
but screaming doesn’t make it so:
louder and truer are not synonyms—
the same goes for rich and smart.
the word becomes flesh
the light shines in the darkness
and the shouting cannot put it out.
Peace,
Milton