don't eat alone

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

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 . . . .”

Stories matter.

Peace,
Milton

Ordinary.

Look it up and you will see the dictionary doesn’t deal with the word too kindly:

of no special quality or interest;
commonplace;
unexceptional;
plain or undistinguished;
somewhat inferior or below average;
mediocre;
customary;
usual;
normal.

And yet, I’m happy to report today was an ordinary day—and it was good.

According to the same dictionary, the part of the Catholic Mass that is repeated every time is called ordinary. In that context, the word carries some sense of essential, of ritual: meaningful repetition. I also think of the season of the church year between the end of Pentecost and the beginning of Advent that we refer to as Ordinary Time. I have come to see it as the time where we get to tell our part of the gospel story. From Advent to Pentecost, we follow the life of Jesus and then the beginning of the church; in ordinary time we have room to figure out what the story means on a day to day basis.

Today was a beautiful day here in Durham. Spring is a season that actually follows the calendar in this part of the world, so there was a cool breeze to accompany the sunshine. I had time this morning to read and write, had lunch with a good friend, picked up a few groceries, read and wrote some more, took a nap with the pups, cooked a little, listened to some music, and read a few email messages. One of them came from an old friend who introduced me to a new poet—Mark Nepo—with this quote:

My efforts now turn
from trying to outrun suffering
to accepting love wherever
I can find it.

The words sent me searching and I found these words of his as well:

The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.

I did a little bit of searching and learned Nepo is a cancer survivor, poet, teacher, and seeker. His journey has brought him to a profound sense of the importance of daily life, from what I read. I am grateful for the resonance I found there.

Maybe ordinary does mean all of those things the dictionary says, but not today. The dailiness of our lives is distinguished by how well we pay attention to the details, how well we turn habits into rituals, how deeply we sink our roots into the commonplace. We live ordinary lives shot through with love and grace and mercy, and we have the chance in our comings and goings to offer those things to one another when we meet over meals, in grocery lines, or just passing on the sidewalk, if we are willing to be where we are.

Peace,
Milton

One of the people who has mentored me through her writing over many, many years is Madeleine L’Engle, going all the way back to Ms. Reedy at the Lusaka International School reading A Wrinkle in Time to us at the end of the day if we finished our work. One of the sentences that has stuck with me from her nonfiction work, and that rises to the surface every so often is her observation that during wartime our vocabulary shrinks. I’m haunted by the sentence I think because I feel as though our American vocabulary, particularly in public discourse, has continued to shrink over my lifetime. We have lived as a people constantly at war, if not with someone or something else, then with ourselves. As a nation, war comes close to be our defining metaphor.

I thought about L’Engle’s observation when I read this paragraph from bell hooks:

This is why it has been difficult to honestly talk about race. We are surrounded by a profound silence about race. And the talk we hear, the public talk about race is usually a pouring of gasoline on the fire. Most of it does nothing to end racism. It’s the profound silence that we live within because we lack a language that is complex enough. Our task as people who love justice is to create that language.

To wage peace requires a more versatile vocabulary than us and them. For justice to be restorative, we need to expand the language of forgiveness and reconciliation. To create community, we must work together to find a more expansive articulation of inclusion.

Our task as people who love justice is to create that language. That sentence reminds me of the early days of HBO and Rich Hall’s Sniglets, which were words that were not in the dictionary but should be. For example:

Accordionated (ah kor’ de on ay tid) – adj. Being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time.
Bovilexia (bo vil eks’ e uh) – n. The uncontrollable urge to lean out the car window and yell “Moo!” every time you pass a cow.
Exaspirin (eks as’ prin) – n. Any bottle of pain reliever with an impossible-to-remove cotton wad at the top.

I spent many an afternoon with the kids from my youth group trying to come up with sniglets of our own. Though our intent was frivolous and humorous, the practice of looking for what needs to be named matters. John begins his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” As people created in the image of the Creator, we are called to create and make things more complex, to find the words we don’t have and speak them.

In another section of the book hooks says,

Creativity is not quiet . . . . The root meaning of the word ecstasy is to stand outside—that’s what creativity does, it allows the creator to move beyond the self into a place of transcendent possibility—that place in the imagination where all is possible. And in that process one is both moved beyond measure and awed. 

It’s true that our dictionary grows every year. Some of the words are created to explain technological advances, others are slang or cultural colloquialisms. Many in the media and in politics have mastered the art of the euphemism, which has less to do with being creative than it does providing something to hide behind. The business world often fashions words into new usage (I almost wrote they bully the words) in an attempt to make the language more pragmatic. (Please tell me why we now “gift” someone something, when we have been able to give it to them all along.)

None of that is what I am talking about. To move to a place of transcendent possibility is to move together, to talk together, to listen to one another. We have etymological work to do as well, learning from one another what connections we make between words—normal, gender, dominant, equality, to name a few—as well as the history of the words’ impact. If I am going to speak the language of love and justice, then I must think about what my words mean to my hearers and not assume they understand them the same as I do. Here in lies one level of the messy, deliberate, frustrating, hopeful, galvanizing work of building community and making peace.

And I think it is less about making up new words than it is coming to terms with words we have and learning how to speak the truth in love. To learn those words, I have to step out of my circle, read books that do more than affirm what I already know, listen to those whose presuppositions about life and faith and race and whatever else are not the same as mine, and leave a few of my questions with them. These are not conversations that are going to take place on the twenty-four hour news channels; their vocabularies are shrinking on purpose. We must share our words in coffee shops and churches, around dinner tables and on street corners. We must become subversive vocabularies determined to learn and share a language worthy and capable of the community we want to create.

As King Lear said,

The weight of these sad times we must obey;
speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Word.

Peace,
Milton

My friend Claudia is an artist and graphic designer here in town. We get together about once a month for lunch. Besides just hanging out and catching up, she brings some sort of drawing and I bring a poem and we swap them with each other. The idea is then she goes home and paints whatever she sees in the poem and I write about what I find in the painting. We still don’t know where the project is taking us, but we are having fun on the journey together, which was our intention.

We meet for lunch at the same place each time: Old Havana Sandwich Shop, which is one of my favorite places in Durham not only because of the amazing pork dishes, but also because of Elizabeth and Roberto who own it. They are good at what they do and they are good people. Their restaurant is a labor of love, and they have worked hard to make it one of Durham’s treasures. This past week, they planted their first crops on their farm that will be connected to the restaurant. The journey has not always been easy, yet they have kept moving forward with grace and focus.

I went a bit early for lunch because I was hoping to get to talk to Roberto, mostly because I love talking to him. He has a kind and dedicated spirit, always ready to offer a hopeful word. I also love to talk to him because he is usually trying something knew, or has something to share that he has learned, and that usually means I get to taste something really good.When I got there he invited me to come back into the kitchen so he could keep working while we chatted. He slow roasts about one hundred and fifty pounds of pork a day, and roasts the whole hog. While we talked, he was taking the meat from the bones and preparing it to go to the service line.

He worked deliberately and carefully, handling the meat with gentleness and even regard. He kept a steady pace, but was not in a hurry. And there was a place for everything; he wasted nothing. As he worked, he answered my questions about how he used the bones, the rendered lard, and even the skin. He told me one of the women who worked in the kitchen was Mexican and showed him how to make salsa de chicharrones, or pork skin sauce, which requires to take the cooked skin and boil it down with tomatoes and other things until it becomes the consistency of paté. It was a part of the sandwich I had for lunch, and it was so rich and flavorful.

During most of the days this Lent, I have not decided on the word for my Lenten Journal, but as he worked and told stories, I knew today’s word would be intention and I would tell you about Roberto, who infuses his life and his cooking with it. He is a man intent on making his best offering.

After lunch, I met Ginger so we could spend the afternoon reading and writing together, though on separate projects. I went back to bell hooks’ belonging: a culture of place, which I have set aside for a few days, picking up where I left off. The essay I read was about her grandmother, whom she called Baba and who was a quilter. hooks described her and her work:

She was a dedicated quiltmaker—gifted, skillful, playful in her art, making quilts for more than seventy years, even after her “hands got tired” and her eyesight was “quitting.” It is hard to give up the work of a lifetime, and yet she stopped making quilts in the years before her dying. Almost ninety, she stopped quilting. Yet she continued to talk about her work with any interested listener. Fascinated by the work of her hands, I wanted to know more, and she was eager to teach and instruct, to show me how one comes to know beauty and give oneself over to it. To her, quilt making was a spiritual process where one learned surrender. It was a form of meditation where the self was let go. This was the way she learned to approach quilt making from her mother. To her it was an art of stillness and concentration, a work which renewed the spirit.

In the margin next to that paragraph I wrote, “cooking”—and I thought once more about Roberto because how she described her grandmother’s connection to quilting is how I felt watching Roberto cook: it was an art of stillness, concentration, and renewal.

The Latin root of intention is intendre, which means “to stretch toward.” I love the image that creates in my mind. To live with intention is to stretch toward wholeness, toward grace, toward connection, toward excellence, toward love. To watch Roberto cook with intention stretched me to see my day differently, as did hooks telling me about her grandmother incarnating the “ongoing practice of patience, combining spirituality with creative imagination” in her quilting.

With our monthly meeting, Claudia and I are stretching toward being better friends and better artists by creating interdependence, even as we are being fed by Roberto, who cooks with patience and kindness and whose dishes taste like invitations. From both of them I am reminded we are called to stretch toward one another, to live with the intention of creative community.

Peace,
Milton