don't eat alone

As the first week of Advent comes to a close, here are some songs that can help make up a soundtrack for the season. They aren’t necessarily Christmas songs, but they speak to me.

First is Amos Lee’s “Cup of Sorrow.”

I want to drink from your cup of sorrow,
I want to bathe in your holy blood.
I want to sleep with the promise of tomorrow,
I know tomorrow may never come.

Karla Bonoff is one of the song writers whose songs run across many years for me. “Home” is one I keep coming back to.

the people I’ve seen
they come in between
the cities of tiring life
the trains come and go,
but inside you know
the struggle will soon be a fight

and home sings me of sweet things
my life there has it’s own wings
to fly over the mountains
though I’m standing still

This past summer, as I mentioned earlier, I spent a week with Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin at Camp Copperhead, a songwriting camp. Here’s my favorite song from their collaborative record, Colvin and Earle called “Tell Moses.” The last verse says,

Ferguson, Missouri, people in the streets
hands above their head standing up to the police
waiting for a hero to step into the breach
‘ain’t nobody coming so it’s up to you and me

tell Mary, tell John
say the hourglass is empty and the judgment day has come
tell preacher, farmer Brown
say Joshua’s blown his trumpet and the walls are comin’ down
sell sister, brother too
tell them where they’re gonna meet us and what we’re gonna do
tell Steven, tell Shawn
there’s a message in the music, everybody sing along

water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
water is wide, milk and honey on the other side
keep on traveling along

Thanks to my summers at camp with the folks from Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, I learned of David Ramirez and his song “Find the Light.”

I wish upon you an easy life
I wish upon you hard times
I hope you know that both joy and pain
each need their moment to shine
I wish you ears that are quick to listen
that you’re slow to use that tongue
but most of all I wish upon you love
as the sun sets the moon begins to rise
so even in the darkness you’ll find the light

Following the light, I’ll move to a song called “There’s a Light” on Emmylou Harris‘s record, “Light of the Stable.” The song was written by Beth Nielsen Chapman.

there’s a light, there’s a light in the darkness
and the black of the night cannot harm us
we can trust not to fear for our comfort is near
there’s a light, there’s a light in the darkness

I was with some friends not long ago who reminded me of another of Beth Nielsen Chapman‘s songs, “How We Love,” which feels like a good closing song.

life has taught me this
everyday is new
and if everything is true
all that matters when we’re through is how we love
faced with what we lack
some things fall apart
but from the ashes new dreams start
all that matters to the heart is how we love
how we love, how we love
with the smallest act of kindness
in a word, a smile, a touch
in spite of our mistakes
chances come again
if we lose or if we win
all that matters in the end is how we love

Peace,
Milton

I know. It’s still the first week of Advent and I have already missed a day writing. I have a good reason: I went to see Billy Joel at his monthly concert in Madison Square Garden. Last night was his thirty-fifth show, and my first in the Garden.

Last Christmas, Ginger and our friend Jay gave me tickets—for a show on January 7, 2016. Later that afternoon, my mother called to say she was going in the hospital and my brother and sister-in-law were on their way to help. I got there at the first of the year, as she was going into hospice. Needless to say, we didn’t make the concert. She died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday.

Jay was able to return the tickets and bank the money with the ticket agency and I started looking at a time to reschedule. Last night we finally made it. He sang for nearly three hours and I sang most of it right along with him—me and 18,000 of my closest friends.

The last song he sang before his encore was piano man. We could see it coming when he strapped on the harmonica holder. As he came to the last chorus, the house lights came up so we could all see ourselves, Billy stopped singing and let us take the vocals:

sing us a song, you’re the piano man
sing us a song tonight
‘cause we’re all in the mood for a melody
and you’ve got us feeling alright . . .

He picked up the closing piano part, we all cheered, and couldn’t help but wonder what it felt like to realize a song he wrote almost forty-five years ago had brought him to that particular moment: a moment he was built for.

Annie Dillard wasn’t at the concert, but she’s been talking particulars as I have been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this week. I mentioned her “tree with the lights in it” a couple of days ago; she also described an encounter with a puppy that pulled her into the present tense. And then she said,

I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity. Now that I have “patted the puppy”—now that I have experienced the present through my senses—I discover that, although the door to the tree with lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time: Where else? That Christ’s incarnation occurred improbably, ridiculously, at such-and-such a time, into such-and-such a place, is referred to—with great sincerity among believers—as “the scandal of particularity.” Well, the “scandal of particularity” is the only world that I, in particular, know. What use has eternity for light? We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal. (80)

One of the reasons I love live music or theater or pretty much anything is it matters that you are there in the moment. Stuff happens that isn’t recorded or ever duplicated. If you wanted to experience it, you had to be in that particular place at that particular time. Like last night when, in the middle of “In the Middle of the Night” Billy and the band broke into a cover of “Take it Easy” and sang the whole song. Just for fun. And I was in that particular room on that particular night to see it.

I have been at concerts where I was moved by an artist’s performance, only to buy the record later and find I didn’t really like the music. There was just something about being in the room, being in the moment—that particular moment. The reason stories carry truth better than statements is because they are about a particular someone in a particular place, whether it’s Scout, or Holden Caulfield, or Stephen Kumalo, or Daisy Buchanan, or Mary figuring out how to give birth in a barn.

Richard Rohr writes,

When you start with the specific, you have a beautiful doorway to the universal. On the other hand, when you start with universal theories, it makes it very hard to ever get back to respect for the particular. In fact, you tend to find a reason to see that the particular is never good enough. It is always flawed and imperfect. There is inevitably a reason why this particular person or thing cannot be included, because it is seen to be abnormal, poor, broken, leprous, sinful, or unorthodox. Look at our Christian history: it seems to have been a nonstop search for who is unworthy and who does not belong. What a horrible waste of energy. 

The particular pulls us into the present and pulls us towards one another. As Rohr says, we do damage to one another when we deal in labels and concepts, when we think truth lives in the propositional rather than the personal. Look at Genesis: creation moves from the swirling universe, focusing closer and closer, getting more and more particular, until everyone and everything is named. At the end of his all-wrestling match, Jacob grabs the stranger and says, “Tell me your name.” Make it particular. Then he wouldn’t let go until he got a blessing; and he walked home with a limp.

Listen to Billy Joel and you hear how the particular creates a place for everyone:
Anthony works in a grocery store, saving his pennies for Sunday . . .
Brenda and Eddie were still going steady in the summer of ’75 . . .
Come on, Virginia, don’t make me wait . . .
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway . . .
I’m in a New York state of mind . . .
It’s nine o”clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in. . . .

As I try to listen for any hopeful sounds in the blasting white noise that passes for public discourse these days, I am reminded that the voice of God, and the voices that sing harmony with the divine, don’t need megaphones or manipulation. As I write, the image that comes to mind is just after the giant angel chorus has excelsis deo’d the shepherds to the manger and the sky is a little less crowed and a bit more starlit, but a couple of voices remain to sing in the background:

don’t go changing to try and please me
you’ve never let me down before
don’t imagine you’re too familiar
and I don’t need you anymore
I would not leave you in times of trouble
we never could have come this far
I took the good times I’ll take the bad times
I take you just the way you are

Everybody sing along . . .

Peace,
Milton

P.S. I found a recording from last month’s concert at the Garden. Here is “Piano Man.”

One of my early sixtieth birthday presents happened this summer when I got to go to Camp Copperhead, which is Steve Earle’s songwriting camp. Since he and Shawn Colvin put out a record together this year, she was there as well. There are many stories to tell of the week, but tonight I want to share the lyrics to a song I wrote while I was there. I suppose I should say I completed it, since I had carried some of the words around for a long time. They seem like a good offering tonight. I will work on getting the melody where you can here it another time.

will you find me in the dying of the day
and remind me what I have to keep and what to throw away
the words that I can lean on when there’s nothing left to say
will you find me in the dying of the day

will you find me in the darkness and the doubt
and remind me what I have to hold as I feel tossed about
show me what flickers in the shadows that never will go out
won’t you find me in the darkness and the doubt

Lord have mercy Christ have mercy
can we still sing if hope is ground to dust
Lord have mercy Christ have mercy
I’m not looking for dead certain
I only need to trust

that you’ll find me when the battle has been lost
and remind me I am on your side no matter what the cost
stoke the fire that burns inside my heart to stand the killing frost
will you find me when the battle has been lost

oh, will you find me . . .

Peace,
Milton

Writing everyday for Advent means reading everyday; if I have any hope of saying something fresh, it will be with the help of traveling companions willing to let me borrow their words. I have seldom had a plan for what I would read. I wander the house, or a bookstore, looking for the volume that looks packed and ready to travel. This year, I have to give a nod to my friend Sid, because I picked up his favorite book after hearing him mention it, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I’ve read it before, but when it caught my eye on our bookshelf, I decided it was time to get reacquainted.

That the book speaks to me is interesting because I am not much of a naturalist nor a hiker. I couldn’t name more than a dozen or so plants by name, other than vegetables or herbs, and I have no desire to go camping. Yet, when Dillard writes about what she sees, she has a way of offering her vision, of using words of passion and insight that let me see as well and set me to thinking.

I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: “I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind–the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleecing high in the air.” White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: “As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then, you too will see deer.” (17-18)

I’ll admit: I had to look up “artificial obvious.” I thought I understood, but I got hung up on the word artificial, which mostly means not real or fake. She is talking about something other than real, but in a different sense. The natural obvious would be to say, “There is the forest. Can you see the trees?” The artificial obvious is to see the less apparent, to learn to see the things you weren’t looking for. To use an illustration I have used before, if I ask, “Have you seen any read bicycles?” You might realize you had not, but you might also begin to create an artificial obvious that would let you see pretty much nothing but red bicycles for the next week.

The Advent journey calls us to create an artificial obvious that would allow for God to be incarnate in a baby born in a barn, for shepherds and magi to find him by following stars and singing angels, and for the child to grow up to be more than we could have imagined. It’s what Madeleine L’Engle called “the Glorious Impossible.” When the angel showed up in Joseph’s house and frightened him nearly to death, the point of the visit was an invitation to a new obvious. The child was not simply a problem pregnancy; he was Emmanuel: God With Us. After than night, all Joseph could see was God on a Red Bicycle.

Dillard talked about another book she found by chance: Space and Sight by Marius von Senden. The book tells the stories of those who gained their sight when safe cataract operations first became possible. She recounted the words of one girl, sighted for the first time, who said she saw “the tree with the lights in it,” and that sent her looking for the artificial obvious that would allow her to see it.

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost changed and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly on fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never known it until that moment I was lifted and struck. (33-34)

Her last sentence struck me: I have been my whole life a bell . . . and it took me straight to the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem”:

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

The artificial obvious of Advent is the striking resonance of the Incarnation that let the shepherds hear the multitude of angels singing, that cracked the door in the innkeeper’s heart, and that let Mary break out singing words of wisdom, “Let it be.” We are still ringing, cracks and all. We are the people with lights in us.

Since I was taking my brother and sister-in-law to the airport yesterday, I didn’t get our tree up, as we try to do on the first Sunday in Advent. (I should add we have only made that deadline once or twice in our marriage.) Tonight when I get home, I plan to make my way out to the storeroom in the barn and bring in our tree with the lights in it: an artificial tree with the lights built in, since neither of our allergies do well with live pines in the house. Ginger and Rachel then take over the decorating, pulling out ornaments we have carted around for years, each with its own obvious to reveal. This year, I won’t be getting the bear ornament my mother has sent annually for most all of my adult life. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, I’ll see a red bicycle instead.

Peace,
Milton

As Advent began last year, I did not see the gathering dark heading my way. I was preparing for my mother to come for Christmas so she could see our new home in Guilford. We were still unpacking boxes from our move from Durham and she was determined to see our new house. She didn’t want us to live somewhere she had not visited. We picked the travel dates and bought the tickets. Around my birthday, she said she was afraid her health issues were not going to let her travel. We hung on to the tickets and hoped. She went into the hospital on Christmas Day instead of catching a plane, and she died nine days after Epiphany.

For the first time, I begin Advent without a mother and father. So did my brother.

This has been The Year of Few Words, as far as this blog is concerned. Other than my Advent and Lenten disciplines to write daily, my posts have been few and far between. I wrote less than one hundred posts. When I have tried to explain my silence to myself, I point to my grief, or my frustration and exhaustion with our cultural and political climate, or my choice not to add to the noise. Perhaps, now days away from my sixtieth birthday, I am less sure that the world needs to hear what I have to say about most anything than I once was.

But it is Advent, and I have made a spiritual practice of writing every day during the season. I feel out of practice. The path from my heart to the page is littered and less worn than I want. I need to prepare the way, to clear the path. Some of the cleaning is the daily leaf-blowing kind: cleaning the sidewalks, knowing that the wind will only fill them up again. Some is clear cutting the undergrowth where a path has never been. Some, I continue to learn again and again, is asking for help to find the paths others have cleared and worn, though they are new to me.

The days grow shorter through most of Advent in our hemisphere. In New England the sun appears to just give up around two-thirty or three, taking on the cinematic orange of sunset even though it still hangs fairly high in the sky. By four-thirty, it is gone altogether. By the time it is seven o’clock, I feel as though I’ve been up half the night. The passing of the solstice means the balance turns in favor of the light, but by Christmas the days are not yet longer enough for us to notice. The sun still seems to surrender rather than set. We have to trust the darkness cannot put it out.

I find it helpful that, here in America, the first Sunday in Advent shares a long weekend with a holiday we call Thanksgiving. We end the liturgical year using gratitude as a diving board into the darkness of the new year, waiting for the light in the stable to shine once again. My cup of thankfulness is overflowing because Ginger, my wife, surprised me with my brother, Miller, and my sister-in-law, Ginger. I had asked them to come soon after my mother died and then never heard much about it. Unbeknownst to me, they had colluded to surprise, and it worked.

We had dinner in the barn behind our house in Guilford, a barn we worked hard to restore this past summer. The sextant at church built us a big table out of reclaimed wood he had at his house. While the three of them cleaned and decorated, I cooked, and together we made an indelible memory of family. Driving back from the airport this evening, which is about an hour drive for us, I thought about the stories my brother and I recalled from our childhood and realized I have forgotten more than I have remembered. For all the afternoons we played with our friends in the backyard, there are calendars full of memories that go untouched by our recollection, unheeded, lost under the leaves of time that pile up as one year blows into another. Even the ones I remember are not constant companions, for the most part. I thought of words Paul Bowles wrote in The Sheltering Sky:

Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, and yet everything only happens a certain number of times. How many times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood that is so deeply a part of your being you can’t conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five more? Perhaps not even that.

There’s a line in the prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer that asks forgiveness “for things done and for things left undone.” I think of my life with my brother and I have to ask forgiveness on both counts. And then I find myself flooded with thanksgiving because in the midst of all that was done and left undone, we found each other in new ways even as we buried our mother. The change came mostly because we chose to give each other the grace we offered others. We reminded ourselves we were together. We were family. After many years, the days we share have begun to grow longer. And, I trust, there is still more light to break forth.

On a larger scale, the darkness this year has been particularly tenacious it seems, and, Christmas or not, it seems poised to go storming into 2017, challenging whatever light we might muster. On one of our walks to show Ginger and Miller our town, we walked past a stone marker that holds the words of the covenant made between the original settlers of Guilford. We read these words:

We whose names are herein written, intending by God’s gracious permission, to plant ourselves in New England, and if it may be in the southerly part, about Quinpisac [Quinnipiac, later named New Haven], we do faithfully promise each for ourselves and families and those that belong to us, that we will, the Lord assisting us, sit down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation and to be helpful to the other in any common work, according to every man’s ability and as need shall require, and we promise not to desert or leave each other on the plantation but with the consent of the rest, or the greater part of the company, who have entered into this engagement.

We are turned to the light when we turn to one another. It is the darkness that divides us, that harbors our fears, that hides the things done and left undone, that leaves us feeling alone. The night is far gone, yes, but I promise not to desert or leave as long as we are in this together. What do you say?

Peace,
Milton