perhaps we cannot understand—
no matter how many holy weeks
we live—the way that time must have
emptied out into the darkness
when they the took him from the garden.
we mark the days between with names
like good and holy, and know that
they are the days between and not
the beginning of whatever
comes after everything is lost.
they went back to the upper room
or went crying into the night,
one way or another they found
their way back to one another
and did all that they could do: wait.
then tonight we read the story
and extinguished each of the lights;
Ginger carried Christ candle
out of the sanctuary . . . some-
times it causes me to tremble . . .
and after Supper we went out
and sat at another table
with friends, and walked out to find the
moon like a cosmic Christ candle:
the darkness cannot put it out.
I look forward to April 1 for a far geekier reason than pulling pranks: it is the beginning of National Poetry Month. As life would have it, today felt like a poem, full of words and imagery and resonance, which was the word that kept coming to mind. Ginger and I had a lunch date at a new restaurant called Kokyu Na’ Mean that belongs to Flip, one of the most creative chefs I know and who now has two food trucks and a restaurant that are all killing it. I spent some time at Cocoa Cinnamon with another friend and world-class donut and bagel maker, Rob , dreaming out loud (more about that soon) and then walked over to Fullsteam where the Pie Pushers truck was set up for the night celebrating their fourth birthday as a food truck. Becky and Mike have done an amazing job bringing their dream to life and make awesome pizza. And wings. And breakfast pockets. And biscuits. Then I went into Fullsteam because I ran into another friend, Doug, who is worth sitting down with any time I get the chance. The day was filled with metaphors and images, with rhythm and even a little rhyme. A poem.
Resonance. When I hear the word, I think of what it feels like to sing in our church sanctuary, which is mostly brick and wood and glass. The notes fill up the room and, when I’m singing well, make my lungs feel expansive, as though I’m breathing in the whole place and feeling the vibrations of brick and beam in my very bones. The dictionary gives two definitions that come close:
the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating;
the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object.
The synchronous vibration of a neighbor. That’s what I felt today and it was deep and full, and it felt like reinforcement. Resonance.
I’ve returned lately to a poem that has resonated with me for many years, going back to my days as a high school English teacher, and it’s one I have quoted in previous posts. On this first day of National Poetry Month, I am feeling its reverberation, even as I think about the people I got to hang out with today. The poem was written by Naomi Shihab Nye, who lives in San Antonio. I hope one day I get to sit down for a coffee or a meal with her.
Famous
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
I’m thankful for those who are famous to me and who made today a poem—deep, full, and reverberating.
I’ve carried this idea with me for a couple of days, hesitant to share because of the gravity of the loss for the families of those who were killed in the plane crash in the Alps. I decided to risk it nonetheless.
black box
for all of the tragedy
that has marred human history
there are few satisfactory
explanations we have learned
that offer comfort instead of
blame. I’ve listened the experts
say there is evidence he was
depressed, and so he crashed the plane—
as though that would make things better.
I felt my heart sink under the weight
of their words because I know too
well the darkness visible; I’ve
done my time in the valley of
the shadow, and have seen many
faces there that I recognize.
I don’t know what happened in the
Alps, or what it feels like to be
a loved one searching for answers.
I do know what it’s like to be
trapped in the dark, hoping someone
will find a way to break down the door.
It’s one of my favorite words. I did a search on this blog and it brought up sixty-four posts in no time at all. Several years ago, when I was doing a mass mailing of my resume in search of employment, Ginger said, “You fail better than anyone I know.” That sentence remains one of my favorite compliments.
The accounts of Monday in that first Holy Week are rather sparse. Jesus appeared to have laid low. Perhaps he had some sense of the trajectory of the week ahead. I’m not one that thinks he knew exactly what was coming down and was just playing it out. I also think he was smart and aware and mindful of what was swirling around him. As I thought about him on this day, I could hear the Mamas and Papas singing in my head:
monday monday can’t trust that day monday monday sometimes it just turns out that way
On this Monday, I spent my lunch hour reading The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth by Bill Holm, which is one of those books I learned about because someone else (bell hooks) quoted him. The book is about his life, or his choice to live, in the small town of Minneota Minnesota and the first chapter is titled “The Music of Failure,” the title coming from a poem he wrote. He explains how it came about.
Years ago, I traveled to Waterton, Alberta, the north end of Glacier Park, and spent a whole sunny, windy August afternoon sitting on a slope high in the mountain listening to an Aspen tree. I wrote a small poem about that experience:
Above me, wind does its best to blow leaves off the Aspen tree a month too soon. No use, wind, all you succeed in doing is making music, the noise of failure growing beautiful.
Holm weaves a melody of music and failure throughout the chapter in his description of Pauline Bardal, an Icelandic immigrant to Minneota, and his piano teacher. He speaks of her playing the piano at her siblings’ funerals and says, “Hymn singing seemed one kind of preparation for the last great mysterious failure—the funeral, when the saddest and noblest of church tunes could be done with their proper gravity.” I had hardly finished the sentence when these words came to mind:
come ye disconsolate where’er ye languish come to the mercy seat fervently kneel here bring your wounded hearts here tell your anguish earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal
We are following the footsteps of failure this week, which is the path to resurrection. As we walk together, listen for the wind in the trees, sing along with the hymns all creation is singing, and let us make the noise of failure growing beautiful.
Palm Sunday is always a bit of a struggle for me. I feel conflicted, torn, not really up for the celebration because it doesn’t ring true since I know the rest of the story. I understand how Jesus’ “triumphal” entry into the city fulfilled the prophecies and made for good theological theater, but I also know the rest of the story. I know that some of the very people who waved palm branches and shouted “Hosanna” were in the courtyard at Caiaphas’ house, or shouting at Pilate to have Jesus crucified. Their hosannas ring hollow even though, perhaps, they meant well.
Many churches who follows the liturgical year save the palm fronds and then burn them to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday the following year, which indicates we understand the problem with Palm Sunday even as we wave the green leaves and line the parade route, which then leads me to believe the struggle I feel is built into the observance. On purpose. We shouldn’t take the hosannas at face value, or at least we should remember they are not the whole story. As Ginger said in her sermon this morning, Holy Week is a condensed version of our human experience, all the emotions stacked on top on one another. We have to live in the tension, she said.
The dictionary definitions for tension speak to being “stretched tight” physically, mentally, and relationally. Over the past years as I have struggled to come to terms with our American propensity to polarize most every issue and then to say that running to the extreme positions and screaming at each other counts as dialogue, I have found the phrase “creative tension” to be a redemptive and healing one. When our conflicting ideas stretch us apart, the creative tension in the middle, where we stretch ourselves to look for possibilities beyond the polar opposites, is the seed bed for hope and community. Perhaps, then, the same is true in the creative tension of Holy Week between Palms and Passion.
This evening I was cleaning up the kitchen and found a poem by David Ray that someone had given Ginger that is part of what put me on this train of thought this evening because it speaks to a creative tension of its own.
Thanks, Robert Frost
Do you have hope for the future? someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, or what looking back half the time it seems we could so easily have been, or ought… The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will become something we can bear. And I too, and my children, so I hope, will recall as not too heavy the tug of those albatrosses I sadly placed upon their tender necks. Hope for the past, yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage, and it brings strange peace that itself passes into past, easier to bear because you said it, rather casually, as snow went on falling in Vermont years ago.
During Advent, some of the words I come back to most every year belong to Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth century monk:
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to [a] Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture?
As I think of Frost’s hope for both future and past, for the grace to come to terms with “the selves we had to be,” I wonder if we would do well to paraphrase Eckhart’s words as we enter Holy Week, that both crucifixion and resurrection must also happen in our time. We must be the ones who wave the palms, who shout at Pilate, who take the money and kiss the cheek, who barge into the courtyard only to deny we know him at all, who run to the tomb, and who are called by name in the garden. The power in the story comes when we are stretched tight holding on to the story told in the gospels and to the one we are living out one holy week after another.
If Ginger were writing this blog post tonight with this word in mind, I can guarantee it would have a completely different feel and would involve “Uptown Funk” in some way. What’s really played in the record player of my mind for a couple of days are waltzes, which are, I think, my favorite kind of song because they manage to carry hope and longing in their rhythm. Life, it seems to me, moves in three-quarter time.
Tonight, then, is a musical post of several of my favorite dance songs, starting with Lyle Lovett’s “The Waltzing Fool”—
and the waltzing fool he knows they’re all thinking he’s only an old waltzing fool . . .
The second song may be in 4/4, but it’s a waltz at heart and it tells a great story: Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime”—
they’d sing, dance a little closer to me . . .
David Wilcox wrote a song about going to his high school reunion called “Last Chance Waltz” that kills me every time I hear it.
won’t you please waltz me free the turns of our steps are untangling me free from some dragged around memory and the rusty old remnants of fear and after 10 years I’m melting the shackles with tears
My closing offering comes from Pierce Pettis. The song is called “To Dance.” I couldn’t find a video clip, so I’ve uploaded the audio and offer the full lyric.
to dance a perspective of bones a musical bath clearing a path of one’s own blue jeans and muscle or crinoline rustle you learn it in class or alone yo dance
to dance it’s a gravity thing shoes to the earth pulling toward a verse that is beckoning the dizzy effect of rhythm & sweat flying like a kid in a swing to dance
arms in a moment’s unworried connection a telling of hearts where they don’t need protection a journey in place a private affection to share
to dance is swimming in time where passion in public and prudence can somehow align moving like lovers on top of the covers and everyone knows it’s alright to dance
touch without touching love without grieving hold on and let go without anyone leaving all of it part of the beat you’re receiving and sending back out through your feet in itself, it’s complete and God it is sweet to dance
to dance the movement confides limbs in a language spoken in three quarter time then is suddenly gone at the end of the song and you know you were safe all along to dance, to dance place in body part
I was one of the words that showed up when I crowd-sourced my Lenten Lexicon. Tonight I figured out why.
My plans for the evening have been laid out for a week: cook and watch basketball. I’ve been looking forward to it. I was flipping back and forth between the early games when Ginger walked through the kitchen and said, “Check out channel 256.” I followed her instructions and found one of my favorite movies, Man of La Mancha. My attachment to the musical goes back to my family stopping in London on our way back to Texas from Africa. It was 1967 and I was going into sixth grade. My parents took us to see the show because it was one of my father’s favorite stories. I figured out later we saw the original London cast before it ever came to Broadway and Robert Goulet turned “The Impossible Dream” into a lounge lizard cliché.
As a kid who, like his father, struggled to feel worthy, to feel good enough, the story of Don Quixote wrestling with reality and finding the courage to dream burrowed its way inside of me. In a world before YouTube, my father could quote most of the show. As I sat on the couch with Lizzy, our youngest Schnauzer, curled up beside me, I quoted most of the movie myself, and sang along as well. I was hardly through the first chorus and I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. The words and music opened a passageway to my memories and to my father. Even as I missed him I could feel him close.
I am grateful tonight to have found the thin place, the connection, the passageway that connected my life from sixth grade to high school (when the movie came out) to tonight, where I could remember once more
that the world will be better for this that one man torn and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star.
we gathered for dinner on
this penultimate thursday
because this is the night that
we eat dinner together
for no other reason than
we eat dinner together.
fourteen around the table—
a couple more than were there
the night Jesus broke the bread,
poured the wine and spilt his love
all over his friends, hoping
they would see beyond the dark.
they went out to the mount of
olives; our friends stayed awhile,
finished their wine and stories;
then they rose a little more
healed and alive, and went forth
from the porch into the night.
as we washed the last dishes,
recounted conversations,
and put up the leftovers
I wondered who came to clean the
upper room, and what they made
of the scattered crusts and cups.
the archaeology of
friendship and faith reveals
layers of our gathering
and grief, our hopefulness and
heartache, that go as far back
as the stories and suppers,
let us set the table for
those who will follow and take
their places for supper;
whether the first or last meal,
the table has been prepared—
oh, come, all is now ready.
rush hour was a contradiction
this afternoon—I could see the
stalled cars for what looked like
miles in front of me, so I dove for
the exit and the open spaces.
I saved no time, but I did keep
moving, winding down Durham roads
I rarely travel; my daily world is
small. I would do well to explore the
edges, the in-betweens, to take
the streets less traveled—at least
for me—I was discovering nothing.
Those houses have been there all along,
the cafés, wholesale meats, salons—
I am at the edge of their world,
ten minutes from my front door.
Saturday when I arrived at work I met one of my colleagues who was wearing a t-shirt that said,
“Stories Matter.” Naturally, I wanted to know the story behind the shirt. He told me it was for something called the 12×12 Initiative that is a twelve week road trip across country, starting yesterday from Raleigh to highlight twelve nonprofits across the country. They describe themselves this way:
We believe in the power of stories to motivate action and inspire compassion.
The 12×12 Initiative exists with the hope of connecting people with causes through the power of story. We want to see individuals get involved in their own communities, embracing the stories around them, and becoming part of one themselves.
Here is their video.
And here is the link to their Kickstarter campaign, which has only hours left and is so close to their goal. (I love that they drove out of town not knowing if they were fully funded.) And I love the quote I found in the middle of their page:
“[Stories] make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.” — George Saunders
One of the lessons I learned about preaching fairly early offered a bit of a paradox: if I wanted to say something that applied to most everyone I had to preach to someone in particular. To make global statements was to miss most of the crowd; to preach thinking of individuals who needed a word of comfort or even challenge meant a whole bunch of people came out of church saying, “I felt like you were talking to me.” The truth is shared best in stories rather than grand statements.
bell hooks speaks about the power of “particular”—telling our specific stories rather than proclaiming the broad strokes—and she used her story of life with her grandmother, Baba, to make her point.
We have too often had no names, our history recorded without specificity, as though it’s not important to know who—which one of us—the particulars. Baba was interested in particulars. Whenever we were “over home,” as we called her house, she let us know “straight up” that upon entering we were to look at her, call her name, acknowledge her presence. Then once that was one we were to state our “particulars”—who we were and/or what we were about. We were to name ourselves—our history. This ritualistic naming was frightening. It felt as though this prolonged moment of greeting was an interrogation. To her it was a way we could learn ourselves, establish kinship and connection, the was we would know and acknowledge our ancestors. It was a process of gathering and remembering.
Story: the process of gathering and remembering. That’s as good as any dictionary.
My friend, Paul Soupiset, who tells stories through both words and pictures, offered a link—What’s So Special About Storytelling for Social Change?—last night that has kept me thinking about the power of narrative. The author, Simon Hodges, is looking at the way storytelling has taken hold in our time, focusing on a storytelling community in Amsterdam called Mezrab. As he talks about the need for new narratives, he says:
[C]limate change, inequality, violence and other challenges can’t be solved by doing more of the same. We need new narratives that connect with peoples’ deepest motivations and promote more radical action. Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds but in their emotions, values and imaginations, which are the drivers of real change. So if we want to transform society, we must learn to tell—and listen to—a new set of stories about the world we want to create.
He then goes on to tell what he learned listening to the group in Amsterdam, and he echoes what hooks learned from her grandmother.
So far so good, but what actually makes for a good story in this sense? That’s where my visits to Mezrab were so instructive. For one thing, the storytellers that got the most attention were not necessarily the funniest or wittiest. Instead, they were the ones that were most prepared to put their skin in the game, to state something that was uncomfortably close to how they saw the world. This radical subjectivity—perhaps the basis of all great art—is a crucial lesson for anyone who wants to communicate a complex topic. When we allow our own insights to organize the telling of a story, we give a more compelling account of events. Why? Because our deepest values are closest to what we share with others.
And then he mentions another community that used storytelling to bring healing:
A more local example came in the wake of the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby by two self-proclaimed Muslims in Woolwich, southeast London, in 2013. This event outraged the far-right English Defense League (EDL) who organized a protest outside a mosque in York. Knowing of this plan and anticipating violence, members of the mosque invited the protestors in for tea and biscuits. In the discussion that followed, both parties realized that they had a common interest in ending extremist violence. The protestors’ anger was successfully defused, and the day ended in an impromptu game of football.
The leader of the mosque, Mohamed El-Gomati, initiated a dialogue to identify elements of a shared culture among members of both the EDL and the Mosque. We can do the same with our own stories. Whenever there’s a situation in which we tempted to label one group as ‘the other’, telling a story that reveals shared values aids in the creation of new communities. The narrative ceases to be the property of one side’s rightness over another side’s error. Instead it becomes a story of co-creation and mutual responsibility.
Hodges talks about the power of stories to undermine belief systems. I love the sentence, even as dangerous as it sounds, because the truth is belief systems are constructs, walls that divide us; stories are relational tethers, the stuff communities are made of as we gather and remember, as we come together to tell the story of Love that is at the heart of what it means to be human.
Once upon a time . . . .
It was a dark and stormy night . . . .
In the beginning, God . . . .
No wonder one of my favorite hymns begins, “I love to tell the story . . . .”
