don't eat alone

From time to time, as I read an author’s work, my connection with the writer moves beyond the page to a more personal connection. They become my friend—an odd use of the word, I suppose, having never met them—because of the resonance I feel. Reading their books becomes a conversation of sorts. I can almost hear them reading to me, even though I have no idea what they actually sound like. Madeleine L’Engle is one, Frederick Buechner another, and now Marilynne Robinson is quickly joining that circle. Here is the opening paragraph to her essay, “Wondrous Love.”

I have reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered, what has become part of its substance—I might say a part of my substance. Some of the things are obvious, since they have been important to me in my career as a student and teacher. But some of them I could never have anticipated. The importance to me of elderly and old American hymns is certainly one example. They can move me so deeply that I have difficulty even speaking about them.

One of the things I miss most about our life in Durham is the monthly gathering at Fullsteam Brewery for Beer and Hymns. The man who leads the evening, Jesse DeConto, does a marvelous job of connecting old and new, memory and meaning, and we all sing our hearts out. One of the hymns we have sung there, and that Robinson mentions, is “In the Garden.” Until I got to seminary, I always thought of the song as rather saccharine until one day in Dr. Reynolds’ hymnody class he explained that the song was written from the perspective of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb on Easter morning and meeting Jesus, first mistaking him as the gardener and not recognizing him until he called her name. Robinson speaks of the hymn with these words:

Jesus spoke as a man, in a human voice. And a human voice has a music that gives words their meaning. In that old hymn I mentioned, as in the Gospel, Mary is awakened out of her loneliness by the sound of her own name spoken in a voice “so sweet the birds hush their singing.” It is beautiful to think what the sound of one’s own name would be, when the inflection of it would carry the meaning. Mary heard in the unmistakable, familiar, and utterly unexpected voice of her friend and teacher. To propose analogies for the sound of it, a human name spoken in the world’s new morning, would be to trivialize it. I admire the tact of the lyric in making no attempt to evoke it, except obliquely in the hush that falls over the birds. But it is nevertheless the center of meaning of this story that we can know something of the inflection of that voice. Christ’s humanity speaks to our humanity.

The sound of his voice. It evokes, for me, images of old RCA Victor records with the little dog staring at the amplifier, surrounded by the words, “his master’s voice.” And it ties in beautifully with a comment from my friend Terry—in Durham—in response to last night’s post on tone.

I think of music as I am reading this, Milton. One can learn, and needs to learn, scales, chord structure, harmony, etc., but when it comes down to it, timing and tone are what most express the emotional content, and thus most communicate the feel of a song. Stan Getz was called “The Sound” because of his warm, lyrical tone. I am inspired by your observations to think of Jesus more as “the sound” rather than “the word.”

In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Sound. Yes.

During my years in Durham, Terry and I played and sang together. He is one of the best harmonica players I have ever heard; he, too, knows about tone and timing. We called ourselves, Oysters on the Half Shell: we’re raw and delicious. One of the songs I loved to do with him was a John Prine tune that says,

what in the world’s come over you
what in heaven’s name have you done
you’ve broken the speed of the sound of loneliness
you’re out there running just to be on the run

The song has always intrigued me because, though I cannot articulate how one might break the speed of the sound of loneliness, the words are deeply resonant because there’s something about the word, sound. The sound of loneliness is a cry in the night, a mournful song, or, perhaps, an expansive silence. You know it when you hear it.

Robinson has more to say:

I tell my students, language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.

One of the old hymns I keep coming back to is “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing“, and particularly the line that says, “Tune my heart to sing thy praise.” Tonight, I feel the tuning touch of my friends, those I know in the flesh, and those I know through words and music.

The Sound became flesh and dwelt among us. Within in us. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Today has been a day of missing for me.

I began by posting this picture of my mother’s recipe box, which now resides here in Guilford. She has stayed on my mind ever since. My brother and sister-in-law left today for Cambodia , which they have done before, but somehow it matters more this time. I spent the afternoon preparing for dinner for those who would gather around our Guilford table and missing those who ate with us in Durham. And now it’s late and my heart is awash in feelings that I don’t know how to articulate in any way that make a coherent blog post.

Dag Hammarskjöld prayed, “For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.” Tonight, that is my prayer.

Peace
Milton

Our church has a gathering each Wednesday night during Lent and they asked me to prepare the meals. I spent the day working on soups and bread and dessert for sixty and, after sitting here at the computer for some time now trying to keep my promise, I have found the words elusive, other than having the word garlic stuck in my head, even as the house still smells like it. So I found my way to a poem, once I gave in to the aroma of the evening.

garlic

I have spent the day
working with my hands,
and not with words.
I have chopped and sliced,
measured and stirred,
sautéed and simmered,
all on my way to soup.
The church supper is long
over, and my kitchen
still smells like garlic.
I have spent the last two
hours staring at a screen,
typing lost drafts, trying
to force ideas to ripen.
I should have something
profound to offer and
I do not, other than to
say I wish I knew words
that smelled like garlic.
That would be enough.

Peace,
Milton

When I asked for words to ponder during Lent, one friend offered two: soul music.

As I started thinking about it, I began to think of songs, though not necessarily Motown. I began to think of songs that have spoken to me in recent times–some old, some new. Tonight, then, I offer a Lenten soundtrack of sorts. The first is from Kris Kristofferson: “Feeling Mortal.” The chorus says,

God Almighty here I am
am I where I ought to be
I’ve begun to soon descend
like the sun into the sea
and I thank my lucky stars
from here to eternity
for the artist that you are
and the man you made of me

The next is from Sarah Jarosz and it’s a cover of a Tom Waits song called “Come On Up to the House.”

well the moon is broken
and the sky is cracked
come on up to the house
the only things that you can see
is all that you lack
come on up to the house

all your cryin don’t do no good
come on up to the house
come down off the cross
we can use the wood
come on up to the house

Peter Mayer is a singer-songwriter whom I have come to appreciate in recent years, though he has been around for awhile. His song “Holy Now” is a call to look at life in wonder.

when holy water was rare at best
it barely wet my fingertips
but now I have to hold my breath
like I m swimming in a sea of it
it used to be a world half there
heaven s second rate hand-me-down
but I walk it with a reverent air
cause everything is holy now

Mavis Staples is a prophet of a singer, and this song speaks of the love that will not let us go: “You Are Not Alone.”

a broken home, a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone

Our closing hymn is a song Paul Simon wrote in the mid-seventies, and yet it sings as though it were written yesterday. Here is “American Tune.”

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
for lived so well so long
still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Sing to the night, my friends. We don’t sing alone.

Peace,
Milton

For all of my life in church I have noticed that Jesus’ basic formula for the parables was to begin with, “A certain man had two sons . . . ‘“ and, almost inevitably, the story had to do with how the brothers responded differently, and, on occasion, how they responded to each other. The Old Testament is built around brother stories as well, including Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau, all stories of sibling struggle in one way or another. They are on my mind because of my continued reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow, which is a series of reflections on Jacob.

I am the eldest of two brothers. My brother Miller is twenty-one months younger than I am. We share a great deal in common, like most siblings, I suppose, and we have our distinctions as well. The last two months have been pivotal in our finding each other in new ways because since our mother died we are the family we have left.

I suppose that is dropping the punch line for the post a bit early, but in reading L’Engle today, as she talked about Jacob wrestling with the angel and then preparing to meet his brother whom he had betrayed, and as she noticed that Isaac and Ishmael had come together to bury their father after spending a lifetime alienated from one another, I have thought a great deal about what has happened between my brother and I over the last several weeks.

Our story is not a direct comparison to the ones listed above. Neither of us had betrayed the other, or stolen a birthright, or anything quite so drastic. We spoke from time to time and tried to keep up. At this point, I won’t speak for him. I will say for myself that I allowed the physical distance between us—we haven’t lived in the same town since we were in seminary—to be more than a metaphor. There was no bad blood. Though we share many similarities, we are different in many ways and I allowed the differences to define how I related to him. In my book, I said we were not essential to each other. What I meant was we didn’t know much about the details of one another’s lives, and so we lived with old images of who the other really was.

My mother’s time in hospice gave Miller and I time together we have not had in many,many years. We took advantage of it and did the work we needed to do to find each other. The breakthrough for me was realizing if I had worked as hard to be kind to my brother—to trust him, to hope for him, to reach out to him—as I had in other relationships, he would have been essential to me. The roadmap to reconciliation is pretty straightforward: he’s my brother, my only brother; be kind.

In an earlier chapter, L’Engle says, “It is not frivolous to say that sin is discourtesy,” which at sound a bit understated at first. She continued:

Sin, then, is discourtesy pushed to an extreme, and discourtesy is lack of at-one-ment. If you drive your car without thought for the other drivers on the road, you are separating yourself. To be discourteous is to think only of yourself, and not of anybody else.

Discourtesy. The antithesis of kindness and compassion. Love, at its core, is about thinking of someone else before yourself, to understand life is lived in relationship, not solitude. To choose to disregard the connections is discourteous. Sinful. I read her definition and understand I was discourteous to my brother. For far too long, I evaluated the relationship on what I was getting out of it first, and I missed out on some good stuff. When I got home after the funeral, I sent him a poem I had read on the Writer’s Almanac on Christmas Day—the day my mother first went into the hospital. It is “Brothers Playing Catch on Christmas Day” by Gary Short.

Only a little light remains.
The new football feels heavy
and our throws are awkward
like the conversation of brothers
who see each other occasionally.
After a few exchanges,
confidence grows,
the passing and catching
feels natural and good.
Gradually, we move farther apart,
out in the field,
the space between us
filling with darkness.

He leads me,
lofting perfect spirals
into the night. My eyes
find the clean white laces of the ball.
I let fly a deep pass
to his silhouette.
The return throw
cannot be seen,
yet the ball
falls into my hands, as if
we have established a code
that only brothers know.

The poem reminded me of an afternoon in the yard of our home in Nairobi, Kenya, when I was in ninth grade and Miller was in seventh. We were throwing the football back and forth, as we did many afternoons, but that day I started asking questions: Who first thought up the shape of the football? How many sizes did they try before they got to the one that worked? Who made the first ones? Miller listened for a while, as we kept the rhythm of throw and catch, and then he said, “Why do you ask so many questions? Just throw the ball.” We both laughed.

The certain man and woman who had two sons are both gone now. My brother and I are now orphans together. We are what’s left of our family of origin, as they say. I am thankful that I am his brother.

Peace,
Milton

I spent the better part of yesterday and all of this morning cooking with friends in order to serve lunch for Stigma and Mercy: Prison Re-Entry and Restorative Justice Conference, which was held at our church today. One hundred and fifty people showed up to talk about how we help folks get back into society after they have served time in prison. And they ate a lot of soup.

As we prepared for the meal, we could hear snippets of the speakers over the speakers in the Parish Hall, but I didn’t get to take in much of what happened, other than to overhear people talk about what stirred them as they shared lunch together and to hear some of the reflections from the steering committee who came by the house after it was all over. It did take me back to something I read several days ago in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow because it wouldn’t officially be Lent if I wasn’t reading something by Madeleine L’Engle. She was talking about going for jury duty and taking Nicholas Berdayev’s Revelation and Truth to read as she waited to see if she would be chosen to serve.

I opened the book, surrounded by my fellow jurors who were reading, chatting, doing needlework or crossword puzzles. There couldn’t have been a better place than a criminal court in which to read Berdayev’s words telling me that one of the greatest problems in the Western world today is that we have taken a forensic view of God.

The first image that jumped to mind for me was God on one of the investigative crime shows on television, and L’Engle, in the next sentence, confirmed my definition:

Forensic: having to do with crime . . . . And there I was in a criminal court, being warned by a Russian theologian that God is not like a judge sentencing a criminal. Yet far too often we view God as an angry judge assumes that we are guilty unless we can placate divine ire and establish our innocence.

As I listened to the folks who had worked so hard on the conference as they sat around our table this afternoon, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind is how little our justice system is aimed at helping people change. It focuses, instead, on punishment: making people “pay for their crimes,” which has an-eye-for-an-eye subtext. We have convinced ourselves that sort of payback is important, even though it doesn’t appear to work, which is why I am moved by the growing number of people who are working to promote restorative justice within our system where the point is to humanize and redeem. To make substantive changes in both our system and our hearts means not allowing things to stay the way they are. The same is true of our theology—back to Madeleine:

The human being’s attempt to understand the Creator is never static: it is constantly in motion. If we let our concept of God become static, and we have done so over and over again throughout history, we inevitably blunder into a forensic interpretation that does not work.

In a vain attempt to make people see God as an avenging judge, theologians have even altered the meaning of words. Atonement, for instance, a bad word if taken forensically.

Our journey of Lent takes us to the Cross, to the death of Jesus, and I struggle with the journey, in part, because I was taught a forensic view of God and the atonement growing up: Jesus died to pay the debt, to serve the sentence for my sin, for all of our sins. Since I was a kid I have never been able to figure out who was getting paid off. It made no sense that Satan was collecting the debt because that put him on a par with God that didn’t add up. If God was getting paid, it created a, well, forensic view of a God who had to kill Jesus to even deal with us. I find power and meaning in the Crucifixion in that Jesus blew the doors off of death and came out of the tomb. I also found resonance with L’Engle.

In forensic terms, the atonement means that Jesus had to die for us in order to atone for all our awful sins, so that God could forgive us. In forensic terms, it means that God cannot forgive us unless Jesus is crucified and by this sacrifice atones for all our wrongdoing.

But that is not what the word means! I went to an etymological dictionary and looked it up. It means exactly what it says, at-one-ment. I double-checked it in a second dictionary. There is nothing about crime and punishment in the makeup of that word. It simply means to be at one with God. Jesus on the cross was so at-one with God that death died there on Golgotha, and was followed by the glorious celebration of the Resurrection.

I am well aware that I could fill up my house with books written about the atonement and that I am not going to cover the scope of the discussion in a couple of paragraphs, and I find hope in L’Engle’s reminder that God is Love. This journey of Lent goes from Love to Love. Jesus’ death is a statement of who he is, and act of solidarity with both God and us: at-one-ment. Yes. Yes. Yes.

were the whole realm of nature mine
that were a present far too small
love so amazing so divine
demands my soul, my life, my all

Peace,
Milton

Yes, I know it’s two words tonight, but they go together like one. Bear with me.

There are times in life where nothing happens other than daily life and yet it feels somehow crucial and important. These are those days for me. My days have been full of everyday things, and those things have taken up some of the hours normally given for sleeping, which means I’m up late searching for words to keep my promises. Everyone else in the house is upstairs, and I’m sitting at my computer with my headphones on in the corner of this 1785 house that probably spent close to the first two hundred years of its existence without hosting a wifi network.

I have a wide collection of music, but there are certain records and certain songs that find their way to most every playlist. As I sat here staring at the blank page on the screen in front of me, one of those standards began to play: Jason Isbell’s “Flagship,” which ranks among the best love songs I know.

I realize it may not have much to do with Lent, but tonight his words and music are my offering, and these are the lines that get me every time:

you gotta try and keep yourself naive
in spite of all the evidence believed
and volunteer to lose touch with the world
and focus on one solitary girl

Yes. Every. Day.

there’s a few too many years on this hotel
she used to be a beauty you can tell
the lights down in the lobby they don’t shine
they just flicker while the elevator winds

and the couple in the corner of the bar
have traveled light and clearly traveled far
she’s got nothing left to learn about his heart
they’re sitting there a thousand miles apart

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

there’s a lady shining shoes up by the door
and cowboy boots for seven dollars more
and I remember how you loved to see them shine
so I run upstairs and get a pair of mine

and there’s a painting on the wall beside the bed
the watercolor sky at Hilton Head
then I see you in that summer when we met
and that boy you left in tears in his Corvette

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

ou gotta try and keep yourself naive
in spite of all the evidence believed
and volunteer to lose touch with the world
and focus on one solitary girl

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

Peace,
Milton