don't eat alone

One Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, I posted a video on my Facebook page of a group called The Lone Bellow singing their cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” which is my favorite song. I captioned the post, “Here is our invocation for the morning.” A friend wrote back questioning the hope in the song, saying all he could hear was an old woman who had lost the love of her life and was now trapped in a mundane existence.

Tonight — this darkest of in between days — seems like a good time to explain what I hear in the song. My friend is listening well to Prine’s words. The woman is voicing her grief eloquently. What she had once is long gone, whether the old man is gone or they both have just grown weary of all of the losses that life inflicts. The first couple of verses give a quick topographical map of both her sadness and tenacity — and it’s right there I hear the first haunts of hope in the midst of all that feels so heavy. She has lost much and she is still here. The losses are not the last word, even if stammering out something of substance is hard to do. The chorus seems like something the disciples could have sung together as the cowered in the despair on this very night:

make me an angel that flies from montgomery
make me a poster of an old rodeo
just give me one thing that I can hold on to
to believe in this living is just a hard way to go

The song is an invocation — a call to trust and live out loud — because I head a grit and determination in the darkness. She is joining the chorus of poets, prophets, and peasants all the way back to the psalmist:

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (PS. 137:3-4)

In her own way, the old woman in the song is answering the psalmist’s question: you just sing, strange land or not. Sing as though the darkness will last only as long as the night, and grief for a season. Let’s keep singing as though we were going to live through this. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” said the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Yes. Just give me one thing I can hold on to.

As I age, I appreciate what it takes to stay alive, to keep going. I joked with Ginger yesterday that as wearying as this Lenten season has been I imagined Mary getting to the tomb and finding Jesus only to have him say, “Could I have just one more day of rest? Come back in the morning and I’ll be ready.”

“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,” Mary answered. And Jesus got up.

Perhaps what pulls me most in the song are the imploring requests of the chorus — make me, give me. It’s a prayer aimed in every direction — at God and anyone else who will listen, and as such is an invocation for us to do the same. God has given us to one another that we might lead each other through the darkness and doubt, through the grind and the grief, together.

We are saved by grace together. Now let us sing.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve sat here longer than usual tonight staring at the empty page, not because I don’t have ideas but because I’ve been trying to figure out what is best to say. Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve read my share of blog posts and editorials and the like talking about what the Supreme Court Justices asked and said today as they listened to arguments over the case involving California’s Proposition 8. Tomorrow they will hear arguments related to the Defense of Marriage Act.

It’s not that I have trouble knowing where I stand, or taking a stand. I wore my red Chuck Taylors to work today and joined in the avalanche of Facebook friends who posted red flags as their profile pictures. I’m a strong GLBT ally and I want to see equal marriage become the law. But that’s not news.

My guess is most everyone who wrote on either side of the issue today was repeating themselves, however. I didn’t read one article or post that began, “I’ve changed my mind” or “I’ve never said this before.” Most all of them seem written as though they are trying to convince those who disagree with them. I came close to doing the same thing — and then I changed my mind because I keep wondering what I most need to say. I could write an open letter to Justice Roberts or try to answer one of the big conservative bloggers or try to combat the vitriol that gets erroneously labeled as Christian, but I’m not sure that would do much but contribute a little more to the shouting and shoving already going on.

The more I sat here, the more I thought about a conversation I had today with one of my coworkers who is lesbian. I sent her a picture I found on Facebook of the HRC red flag with bacon stripes titled, “Equality and Bacon for All.” We had a good laugh and then I said, “Whatever happens when the decisions come down, remember love wins. We win.”

And she said, “I really never believed we would get to this day in my lifetime. Really.”

She didn’t even hold out the hope that we would have the discussion, much less that we choose to take another step in our maturing as humans to love one another equally. She thought she would live her whole life being treated as less than a person and yet she chooses to be one of the most loving, determined, and compassionate people I know. As the straight white Christian male — that’s four for four, if you’re counting dominant groups — I have never had to deal with a day in my life where I faced what she lives with everyday. And she is not alone.

So here’s what I want to say: I’m with her.

She inspires me, as do the veritable army of gay and lesbian people who have loved me and shaped my life down through the years from my days as a youth minister to my time as a hospital chaplain and a high school teacher to those who helped me in the darkest days of my depression to church members and coffee buddies and coworkers and on members of our chosen family and folks here in our city who have loved us and given us room to begin to grow roots here.

I’m with them.

No, let me say it a different way so it doesn’t sound like one of those conversations where you talk about someone in the third person even though they’re sitting right there.

I’m with you. I love you. Thank you.

That’s the best I have to offer.

Peace,
Milton

One of the small memories of my senior year at Baylor is sitting talking to a friend in the Student Union Building as people walked by. Those who recognized us would inevitably ask, “How are you?” as they passed. My friend looked at me and said, “No one really wants to wait for the answer. Watch.” And she proceeded to toss funny and even tragic answers as they tossed their drive-by question and, as long as she smiled, not one of them heard a word she said.

I thought of that afternoon this evening because I am grateful for friends who ask how I am with the expectation I will feel free to answer honestly. I was lucky enough to get asked twice — once by Claudia and once by Leon, both at Cocoa Cinnamon. My answer to both was something along the lines of “Life is good and weighty. These days are heavy and important.” Lent has been hard to carry this year to the point that I have dropped several days in my writing discipline. The weight comes from the season, for life’s circumstances, and from trying to figure out what lies on beyond Easter.

One of the other voices I heard in my afternoon travels was that of Chinua Achebe, the noted Nigerian writer who died last week. In his memory, Terry Gross played a Fresh Air interview from 1988, which centered around his novel Anthills of the Savannah. Thanks to NPR, I was able to find the transcript of what I heard as I drove.

GROSS: One of the characters in your new novel says that writers shouldn’t stop at documenting social problems. They should give prescriptions. And another character, who is a writer, says in response: Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches. Is that how you feel, too?

ACHEBE: Yes. Yes. I think that’s one of the few instances in the novel where you can identify what the characters are saying with the way I feel. And that comes from the pressure which is mounting on us, on…

GROSS: On writers?

ACHEBE: …creative writers, yes – especially in post-colonial areas of the world – to tell their people what they should do to be saved and to tell them not in the way that great stories have told, but in specific detail, almost ideological ways. And I think it is the duty of artists to resist. This is why the artist and the poet in the novel is resisting, and, of course, exaggerating, because this is part of the whole business of teaching. The whole business of prophecy is, in fact, to exaggerate. And so when he says it’s my duty to give headaches, you know, this fixes it in the mind, which is why we use extreme images like that.

Though I didn’t remember the exchange word for word, what I heard was him speaking of the poet, the novelist, the teacher, and the prophet as if they were one and the same,  or at least inextricably linked. And out loud in the car I said, “Yes.”

This morning I learned from Garrison Keillor that today is Flannery O’Connor’s birthday. One of my favorite of her quotes is, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” Both writers were describing the trajectory of Holy Week, if not all that we call faith: a life lived in disquietude, in creative tension, in the cacophony of community, in the revolution that is the Resurrection. This week is about Jesus walking through the injustice and betrayal and humiliation and pain and blowing right through the tomb to come out on the other side a brighter shade of grace than anyone could have imagined. This week has less to do with the paying off of some strange cosmic debt than it does nothing but love gets the last word.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Here’s where the metaphor breaks down.

Poets, writers, prophets, and teachers, for the most part are solo gigs. They create by themselves; they offer their individual work. They may unite a following, or incite a revolution, but they are keep to themselves. The headache of faith is we are called to make great art of this life together. We are called to incite, to listen, to engage, to tear down, to build up — together. The only way anyone is going to know the truth that nothing can separate any of us from the love of God is if we are out there loving the hell out of everyone.

Everyone. From Fred Phelps to the hunger strikers at Guantanamo. From the Supreme Court Justices to the members of Congress. (The biggest stretch for me, perhaps.) From the greed-driven on Wall Street to the hungry folks down on the corner. From those who are like us to those who are not.

Everyone. Achebe’s words remind me I think of God as much more of an artist than an accountant (with apologies to any accountants out there). The theories of the atonement that talk about Jesus’s death being required, as though God has to balance some kind of ledger in blood have never resonated for me. But our God of awesome whimsy, of grandeur and generosity, of color and splash and serious subversiveness, came as a kid and grew up, told stories that weren’t readily understandable, hung out with the undesirables even as he ate with the rich folks, and painted Palestine with love and grace and healing like nobody’s business.

The layers of Lent lie heavy because we are being called to come to life again this week as we march through death once more. We march through death every week. But this week we remind ourselves in ways we often forget that death is not the last word. What kills us and divides us and damages us does not tell the whole story. Yet if we lose sight of our calling as poets and prophets, the art and oddness stop here.

the weight of these sad times we must obey
speak what we feel not what we ought to say
(King Lear, V, 3:17)

Rise up, poets, and follow.

Peace,
Milton

I haven’t written for a couple of days because we shipped up to Boston to surprise our foster daughter for her thirtieth birthday. We pulled off the surprise and had a wonderful whirlwind of a celebration. We awoke this morning to the Durham version of the stormy weather covering a good part of the country, though ours has been all rain rather than snow.

In our church, this Sunday has to carry both the Palm and Passion parts of the Lenten story, and so our service begins with palm fronds and ends with Jesus going to Golgotha. To help us make the transition, Ginger and Carla changed all the vestments on the altar from purple to red and also changed their stoles. Two songs ran through my head as we moved from hosannas to heartache, if you will — and neither were hymns.

The first was Gordon Lightfoot’s “Rainy Day People,” which I will admit I have not thought of in a long, long time. The gist of the song is those who know how to appreciate a rainy day understand it’s part of life:

rainy day people always seem to know when it’s time to call
rainy day people don’t talk, they just listen till they’ve heard it all
rainy day lovers don’t lie when they tell ‘ya they’ve been down like you
rainy day people don’t mind if you’re cryin’ a tear or two
if you get lonely, all you really need is that rainy day love
rainy day people all know there’s no sorrow they can’t rise above
rainy day lovers don’t love any others, that would not be kind
rainy day people all know how it hangs on a piece of mind

The second song came out of my remembrance of the first, only because I kept thinking about our call to follow Christ being a “rainy day way” — one acquainted with sorrow and grief, which reminded me of Julie Miller’s song, “Way of Sorrow.”

you’ve been taken by the wind,
you have known the kiss of sorrow,
doors that would not take you in,
outcast and a stranger.
you have come by way of sorrow
you have come by way of tears,
but you’ll reach the destiny
meant to find you all these years,
meant to find you all these years.

The hope we know is informed, even fed, by the rain and the sorrow and all we live through on the way to the empty tomb. Here’s to walking the road together.

Peace,
Milton

This morning I watched the ESPN documentary on Jim Valvano and the 1983 NCAA Men’s Basketball Champion team from North Carolina State. For those of you who don’t know, NC State was the longest of long shots that year and Valvano’s life was cut short by cancer. Part of the documentary included his acceptance speech upon receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 1993. You can find the full speech here. Early on, he tells the crowd the three things everyone should do everyday are to laugh, think (do something to work your mind), and find something that moves you to tears.

Think about it: if you laugh and you think and you cry, that’s a full day. Do that seven days a week and you’re going to have something special.

Not a bad agenda for tomorrow.

Peace
Milton

we’re a couple hours past our solstice sunset
and tucked into the delicate balance of
light and dark that make our old house hum
my heart sings along with all it remembers

one of our porch lights appears to have given
up and left the lighting to the other one
while we carry on behind their lopsided wink
among alternating rooms of bright and dim

so this is life slipping between sunshine and
shadows turning off lights to welcome the dawn
dancing with shadows we know all too well
and reaching to find each other in the dark

once again night settles in like an old friend
as the candle of another day flickers out
the house is still humming as is my heart
I need you in the dimming of the day

Peace,
Milton

My semi-regular Sunday synthesis of NPR and morning worship began in my kitchen and a segment on Weekend Edition Sunday called “Reminder: Our Memories are Less Reliable Than We Think.” Charles Fernyhough, a researcher from England, has written a book called Pieces of Light that looks at how memory works and what we carry with us as we go. As he talked about what scientists are learning about memory — and that often we remember things from a third person point of view, he said,

There’s something weird going on with memory. The scientists are telling us that memory is a reconstruction, and yet we, as people, tend to stick to our old-fashioned ideas that memory works like a video camera, for example, that it just records, and it files things away in mental DVDs that we can pull down and set playing. And in a way, that’s not surprising, because we see memories as foundational for who we are. We commonly feel that we are our memories; our memories define us. So something needs to change. … Accepting that memories are not literal representations of the past as it happened doesn’t mean that we have to forget about them or start disbelieving them all. But they’re shaped by who we are now. They’re shaped by what we feel, what we believe, what our biases are.

His words came back into view as I listened to the gospel reading in church, John 12:1-8, which is the account — the memory, if you will — of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet.

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

Scholars wrestle over when the gospels were written, but no matter when one dates the documents it stands to reason Jesus was long gone before anyone started writing anything down. Jesus didn’t have an official biographer; no one made transcripts of his sermons and parables. They remembered. And when they remembered scenes like the one described above, they looked through all that had happened in between. In recalling Judas’ words, for example, John couldn’t help but also remember Judas betraying Jesus to the authorities. All the gospel writers have their moments where they remind us Judas was no good from the start. Whether they knew it in real time is indiscernible; when they re-membered the events — when they put the pieces back together — they couldn’t do it without recalling the damage he did that last night in the Garden, and so most every time he is mentioned the writers insert, “the one who betrayed Jesus.”

When I was in high school, I remember my father preaching a series of sermons on the disciples. The one on Judas was titled, “What Have You Done to My Name?” The quote that sticks with me was Dad saying, “He so defiled the name that no one would even name their dog Judas.” Of course, my brother and I tried to name the next three dogs we got after the disgraced disciple. Down two millennia of Christian memories, we have put him back together not as one of the twelve, or the treasurer, or anything else but the one who betrayed Jesus.

Here’s the thing. He wasn’t the only one. Peter denied Jesus three times, even cursing his name, yet he wasn’t remembered as a betrayer. Almost every last one of them deserted Jesus in his final moments on the cross. But when those stories were re-membered, they became wonderful tales of grace and redemption. Peter dove out of the boat and swam to breakfast; Judas jumped from a tree limb and hung himself. I don’t think it’s as simple as, “he was rotten from the start.” Fernyhough said our memories are “by what we feel, what we believe, what our biases are.” Such seems to be the case even among the gospel writers.

I realize none of them was writing an exhaustive biography of Jesus, much less the disciples. We get but glimpses of all of the twelve, not full character development. Yet, as I have ruminated during the day, I’ve wondered why Peter thought he could return and Judas didn’t. And then it took me to thinking about a couple of old friends who have gotten written out of my story, though in far less dramatic fashion. Through some recent discussions, I’ve been thinking about friends — close friends — who are not so close anymore. No, that’s too much of an understatement. I’ve wondered what to do about once vital friendships that have grown unessential. I guess I should say I’ve been wondering about my part in the distance. After hearing the NPR segment this morning, I’ve been wondering if how I remember the past creates any possibility for us to find each other or chooses instead to learn to live without them. In a couple of cases, we just drifted apart; in a couple of others, we have some damage to deal with. The task, it seems either way, is whether I want to remember them as a relic of the past or a relationship that matters.

When I read John’s words about  “the betrayer,” I wonder how the story would read had Judas had a chance to tell it. And then I imagine Judas walking up on the beach not long after Peter had climbed out of the water. With all my heart I believe Jesus would have fed him and then said, “Judas, do you love me? — Feed my sheep.”

Peace,
Milton