don't eat alone

Today may have been the most beautiful day we have had in Durham this year. The sun was bright but still soft, and there was a gentle breeze that kept it from feeling too warm. Today, being the third of April, marks another month since my father’s death; he died twenty months ago. As I thought about him I also thought about Jesus’ last words from the cross—“It is finished”—because my dad and I shared a love for a Gaither Vocal Band song that draws its title from those words. I’ve already watched it a couple of times tonight and was amazed once more when Guy Penrod and David Phelps go crazy on the tenor parts.

It is finished. The English teacher in me wants the antecedent to the pronoun to be clearer. What is finished? The song begins with a couple of verses that lay out a cosmic battle of good and evil taking place at Golgotha and then turns to the second verse:

but in my heart the battle was still raging
not all prisoners of war had come home . . . .

Jesus’ death did not mark the end of suffering or evil or sin, or even death. In fact, the simplest way to hear the words was he was saying his life was over. He finished the sentence and, as I remember best from the King James Version, he “gave up the ghost.” The song moves to a note of triumph that feels overstated, as much as I love the harmonies:

it is finished—the battle is over
it is finished—there will be no more war
it is finished—the end of all conflict
it is finished—and Jesus is Lord.

To look at these past few days—the continuing violence in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia; the grieving families of those who died in the plane crash in the French Alps; the horrible murders at the college in Kenya; those I know who are dealing with loved ones in hospice and hospital; friends living through the aftermath of broken relationships that held such promise—leaves me not ready to embrace such a triumphant spirit. I lean more towards words like Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” If what Jesus meant was what the chorus says, then we are taking a long, long time to play out the final scene.

Then I found words—or they found me—from three other voices. One was at one of the Patheos blogs in an article written by Jan Vallone.

Jesus, when you say that it is finished, are you pleading for your words to come to pass?
Jesus, I have never been as good as you, yet I’ve not endured the punishment you have. Still, I’ve oftentimes asserted, “It is finished” with grief and longing in my heart.

I said it when my obstetrician told me I would never give birth to a baby. I said it when my father and my mother died and my sister became estranged from me. I said it when I lost the job I loved, having worked a lifetime to secure it. I said it when my dear friend left me suddenly without explaining why.

Yet I survived all these losses—these crosses—because I knew the ending of your story. I knew although you claimed that it was finished, it wasn’t finished at all.
Instead, God resurrected you.

Likewise, every time that I thought my life was over, God resuscitated me, and I went on living, loving, even laughing, although doing so had seemed impossible.

Jesus, as you cry out “It is finished,” I think you’re giving us the words to pray in crisis. They mean: “God, I really need you now. I’ve done all that I can do. I don’t have strength to carry on alone. Now I trust that you will pull me through.”

And these words from Jayne Davis at Baptist News Global, telling the story of a friend who died this week and had written a Sunday School lesson on Jesus’ last words:

“Many years ago I saw a fountain,” Lamar wrote. “I cannot even remember where it was, perhaps a college campus or a city park. The picture comes back to me as sharply as if I saw it yesterday. In the center of the fountain was the statue of a young man with his hand pointing gracefully toward the sky, and from the tip of his index finger there gushed a steady stream of water, which was blown by the wind, and then of course, fell back into the pool beneath his feet. I do not know why, but there came to my mind at once the idea of life’s opportunities, and how they slip through our fingers as easily and as steadily as the water from his unmoving hand. . . .

“The question for Christians today is not: ‘What will be my last words, and will they be remembered?’ When that moment comes, the real question will be: Can I really say, ‘It is finished?’ ‘Have I made the most of my opportunities to do the work of God on earth?’”

The last word comes from a Texas friend who said:

No matter how hard I try I can’t get my head around this whole Easter thing. Death by torture. Darkness. Emptiness. And life emerging from it all. All I can do is embrace it with my heart. It is easier this year.

All three words come from people acquainted with grief, which is at the heart of what it takes to get to Easter—that I have come to understand over the past two years in ways I could not before. Life is full of “It is finisheds,” if that can be a plural. We know all too well about endings, about losings, about disappointments and betrayals. We are like the two who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus: “We had hoped . . . .”

Jesus said, “It is finished” and died. I don’t think they were words of triumph. His life was finished. His time with his friends. His earthly ministry and what he had tried to do. His healing touches were finished. His kind words. His parables. The last thing he did was to voice his grief, and perhaps his resolve. And it was over.

Yes, his last words are not the Last Word. Thank God. What happened next was a new beginning, not an undoing of the ending. In a couple of days we get to celebrate an act of Grace and Love that blows the doors off. Love wins. Love will be the last word.

But the grief still leaves a mark.

Peace,
Milton

Failure.

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.

Peace
Milton

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.

Peace,
Milton

Dance.

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

Shall we dance?

Peace,
Milton

Passageway.

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.

Peace
Milton