don't eat alone

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

One of the realities—and wonders—of American life is Lent and Spring Training move side by side on the calendar. Red Sox fans observe Truck Day, which marks the trucks leaving Fenway Park with all the Spring Training equipment. This year it fell on Ash Wednesday, so I have been mindful of this tandem spiritual journey this year in particular.

I never played organized baseball. Some church softball along the way, though I would hesitate to claim any sort of expertise based on those games. Growing up in Africa I had an unexplainable attachment to the Boston Red Sox, which has both stayed with and grown in me over the years, but I have not always been a student of the game, nor one who counted the days until Spring. I grew into that, and the older I get the more important the dusting off of the diamond becomes. Today is the day, at least as a Sox fan, I get to hear one of my favorite sentences: “Pitchers and catchers, report.” Those rank among the most beautiful words in the English language. Spring is on the way. Baseball is coming back. It’s next year.

I’m not the first to wax philosophical about the game by any stretch. Perhaps my favorite comes from George Carlin and his comparison of baseball and football. I spent a good bit of time this afternoon reading different articles and stories. I wish, on this day of hope and promise, I had had the time to watch The Sandlot and Bull Durham and The Natural and Field of Dreams back to back to back to back.

Part of the reason I love this game its sense of time and space. The baseball diamond goes on forever. The foul lines are specific, but there is no back line. The batter can hit it out of the park, but it’s still a fair ball. The grandstands are not a boundary, they are seats in the middle of everything. Whatever lies beyond the diamond is still part of the game. Baseball is also the one sport where the clock doesn’t matter. Vince Lombardi said of football that he never lost a game, he just ran out of time. Innings mean we mark time in baseball by failures rather than second hands. Three outs, and in between the failures fall the successes, the near misses, the things hoped for. You play until someone wins, not until the clock runs out, but not sudden death. Both teams get their turn at the plate. And you play everyday.

Baseball is the only sport with the space to keep ridiculous statistics. We can know the probability of the success of a left handed batter who switch hits on Tuesday nights when it’s raining in Baltimore. Beyond the minutiae, the seemingly minuscule and meaningless numbers offer the chance of the long shot, even feed our hope in lost causes, not with the randomness of a lottery ticket, but with the trust that the impossible is probable. It really could happen, so don’t leave early.

The game also has a crucial mix of team work and individual performance. Baseball, at its core, is about what it means to work together. The baserunner has to watch the batter to know when the hit and run is on; a successful double play means three or four folks did what it took to make it happen. It is a team game even as it all rides, from time to time, on one person making the play or missing it—then we all win, or we all lose. Lent reminds me that my journey is personal, but not individual. I am walking well traveled roads, the grandstands filled with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before me. It matters that I am one on the road, and life will go on without me; both things are true.

Lent and baseball share a sense of faith and failure. The journey from here to the cross and then the empty tomb call me once again to trust the impossible is probable. I do not choose to be a Christian because it offers me safety or security in my existence any more than I have been a lifelong Red Sox fan because I expect them to win every year.

David Bentley Hart writes,

These—and I shall close on this thought—are the great moral lessons that only a game with baseball’s long season and long history and dramatic intensity can impress on the soul: humility, long-suffering, dauntless love, and inexhaustible faith in the face of invincible misfortune. I could no more abandon my Orioles than I could repudiate my family, or my native heath, or my own childhood—even though I know it is a devotion that can now bring only grief. I know, I know: Orioles fans have not yet suffered what Boston fans suffered for more than twice the term of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, or what Cubs fans have suffered for more than a century; but we have every reason to expect that we will. And yet we go on. The time of tribulation is upon us, and we now must make our way through its darkness, guided only by the waning lights of memory and the flickering flame of hope, not knowing when the night will end but sustained by the sacred assurance that whosoever perseveres to the end shall be saved.

Amen. Play ball.

Peace,
Milton

When I was crowdsourcing words for my Lenten practice, my friend David sent, “homemade (pimento cheese).” I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

homemade (pimento cheese)

turn the gas burner on high
and lay the peppers on the flame
till they blister and turn black;
put them in a bowl, cover it
with plastic wrap so they sweat;

grab an old box grater and all
the cheddar cheese you can find
in the fridge; press the block
against the holes and be careful
not to include any fingertips;

unwrap the peppers and rub
the burnt peel away, then
pull them open and wipe out
the seeds; cut them into thin
strips and add to the cheese;

spoon in the Duke’s mayonnaise
(accept no substitutes), some
black pepper, a couple of shots
of Tabasco sauce, and, of course,
a friendly splash of bourbon;

late tonight invite a friend over,  
pull the cheese out of the fridge,   
put on some John Prine, pull out
the bourbon again, and open a 
fresh tube of Ritz crackers; enjoy.

Peace,
Milton

When I wrote yesterday’s post on being right, I had not yet purchased, much less begun to read, Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, but I got to work early and the Yale Bookstore is next door . . . . I sat down this morning and read her preface, which is a beautiful and articulate piece about the nature of public life in our time, bouncing off of Walt Whitman’s understanding of public life in his time after the Civil War. Robinson writes:

But the language of public life has lost the character of generosity, and the largeness of spirit that a has created and supported the best of institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of political memory . . . .

What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to—power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy? (xiv, xv)

Her words do two things for me. First, they resonate deeply. I grieve the loss of a gentler public discourse, of honest collaboration across party lines and differing ideals. Second, the call me to confess my cynicism about our government and our political process. I have not watched any of the political debates because I think they have nothing to offer in return for my time spent. I have felt relatively hopeless about the upcoming election because I don’t see a functioning, responsible, and (dare I say it) inspirational government emerging from it. I find myself feeling the best I can do is vote against something, rather than for something, even though I know I have sold both myself and my country short in taking that perspective. Still, these days I have low expectations and I still assume I will be disappointed.

Since Robinson’s book is a collection of essays, I did not feel compelled to read them in order and flipped to one entitled “Imagination and Community,” hoping for a good word, and I found these words:

When people make such remarks [such as mine, above], such appalling judgments, they never include themselves, dear friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an”us” and a “them.” Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the “us” who presume to judge the “them.” This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through hunan history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism . . . .

It is simply not possible to act in good faith toward people one does not respect, or to entertain hopes for them that are appropriate to their gifts. As we withdraw from one another, we withdraw from the world, expect as we increasingly insist that foreign groups and populations are our irreconcilable enemies. The shrinking of imaginative identification which allows such things as shared humanity to be forgotten always begins at home . (30-31)

Sunday after worship Ginger had a question and answer time with whomever wanted to come just so they could get to know her better, since we’ve only been here a little over three months. As she talked about her hopes for our church, she talked about the variety of theological perspectives in our congregation, which is true of most UCC churches. Then she said, “I get the feeling many of us don’t know each other well. What if we took the time and the risk to ask questions, to make ourselves vulnerable, and really get to know each other?”

Ginger’s question is a call to imagination: I will imagine there is more to you than I know. Such imagination will help to create the kind of community Robinson is talking about. When was the last time we sat down with someone who is not of like mind on whatever the issue and asked them to talk about it so we could listen, rather than correct them or assume we already know what they are going to say? When was the last time we took a risk to “speak what we feel and not what we ought to say” (to quote the closing words of King Lear), instead of holding our cards close to our vest because we can’t imagine our words will be welcome? How do we create a community where we can freely share the hopes and dreams of all the years?

Robinson says,

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. (21)

During our time in Durham we had a chance to be a part of Moral Monday Movement, which sparked my political imagination more than anything else in my recent memory. The movement is particular to North Carolina and a very personal attempt to build a more inclusive and compassionate community within the state. Its very particular nature is what gives it wider appeal and application. Other states have begun similar gatherings and protests. The spirit of the movement is fed by the nonviolent actions and protests of the Civil Rights Movement and seeks to create a conversation that finds its substance in the common good and making sure we are taking care of all of us. No Them; just Us.
Robinson closes her essay with these words:

It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community. The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another. (33)

There’s no way, of course, I could write about imagination without John Lennon singing in my ear: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

I need to put that last phrase on repeat: I’m not the only one.

And I trust neither are you.

Peace,
Milton

One of the items on my bucket list is to attend a TED (Technology Education Design) Conference. By now, I imagine most of you are acquainted with TED talks and the variety of subjects they cover. I find them inspirational and challenging. TED 2016 begins today. I wish I were there.

In the days we were with my mother in hospice, my brother and I had a lot of time to talk and which TED talks were our favorites was one of the on going discussions. Miller mentioned one I had not seen by a woman named Kathryn Schulz titled “On Being Wrong.” Early in the talk she asked people what it felt like to be wrong. When they answered they felt embarrassed or humiliated, she reminded them they were describing what it felt like to find out your wrong. For the most part, we don’t think we’re wrong and when we encounter those who disagree with us—whom we think are wrong—we explain their stance in one of three ways:

The Ignorance Assumption—they just don’t know
The Idiocy Assumption—they have all the information, but they can’t figure it out.
The Evil Assumption—they are deliberately distorting the truth for their malevolent purposes.

Schulz continues:

This misses the whole point of being human. We want everyone else to see life our way. The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place.

Her statements connected with a book my brother and I are reading together called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions by Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright. If you are familiar with current theology, you will recognize the two names as learning progressive and conservative theologians, respectively. (Borg died about a year ago, but his scholarship lives on.) Contrary to the consistent pattern of our culture of listening mostly to those who agree with us, the two men struck up a friendship and wrote alongside each other, rather than against. In their introduction, they say they hoped to speak to three categories of “interested readers”:

First, we hope that those who would not call themselves Christians will find the conversation interesting and refreshing . . . .
Second, we hope to shift the log jammed debates into more fruitful possibilities . . . .
Third, we hope to open up more specifically the perennially important question of how different visions of Jesus relate to different visions of the Christian life.

Then they said,

It might be that one of us is closer to the truth in some areas, and the other in others; and that by our dialogue we may see more clearly things that the other has grasped more accurately. We are both prepared for that eventuality. (ix, x)

The third strand to this braid of thought came from reading Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s tribute to her fellow Supreme Court Justice and friend, Antonin Scalia. They were poles apart philosophically and yet, as she put it, “best buddies.”

Toward the end of the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, tenor Scalia and soprano Ginsburg sing a duet: ‘We are different, we are one,’ different in our interpretation of written texts, one in our reverence for the Constitution and the institution we serve. From our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies. We disagreed now and then, but when I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation. Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots—the ‘applesauce’ and ‘argle bargle’—and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion. He was a jurist of captivating brilliance and wit, with a rare talent to make even the most sober judge laugh. The press referred to his ‘energetic fervor,’ ‘astringent intellect,’ ‘peppery prose,’ ‘acumen,’ and ‘affability,’ all apt descriptions. He was eminently quotable, his pungent opinions so clearly stated that his words never slipped from the reader’s grasp.

Justice Scalia once described as the peak of his days on the bench an evening at the Opera Ball when he joined two Washington National Opera tenors at the piano for a medley of songs. He called it the famous Three Tenors performance. He was, indeed, a magnificent performer. It was my great good fortune to have known him as working colleague and treasured friend.

At the end of her talk, Schulz said to rediscover wonder in our lives we need to step outside of “that tiny terrified space of rightness” and look around and look out. What I see as I look at Borg and Wright, as well as Ginsberg and Scalia, is honest relationships—real friendships—dispel fear. Ginsberg saw her friend’s powerful dissents as refiner’s fire; neither Wright nor Borg feel the need to defend their position at the expense of the other. We learn to live with being both right and wrong in the context of relationships because that is where we best come to the realization that being right is not the primary value. Nothing changes when we spend most of our energy screaming, “You’re wrong” at someone else. All you have to do is watch anything having to do with Congress to see that. No one appears to be listening. No one thinks he or she is wrong. They appear to be scared to death not only that they might not get their way but also that the other side might have a point. As a result, we have a broken and ineffective government.

My point is not to make a political commentary as much as to say I am reminded in these days—again—that the world will be changed by not by those who force their rightness on others but by those who know how to listen to one another. As I have said before, never trust a zealot with a clear conscience. As I have quoted Ginger before, let us be ones who choose relationships over doctrine. Being right is not the most important thing.

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly . . . .

Peace,
Milton