I had a day of rest today, thus, today’s word.
respite
it’s the streetside café
that pulls you out
of the crush of people
filling the sidewalk;it’s the bench in the park
where you can sit
unnoticed with the
disquieting revelationthat the world can
go on without you,
yet expects you will
be back before long;it’s the first inch of
day lilies pushing to
the light, after taking
the winter off.
Peace,
Milton
It’s not hard to find pain around us.
I can name several friends who have marked the anniversary of a parent’s death, some who are facing difficult decisions about their jobs, others dealing with illnesses and uncertain outcomes. That just skims the surface. Pain is common currency, along with disappointment and loss. One of life’s lessons, I suppose, is that pain is woven into the fabric of our existence and is not something other than life.
That’s enough to take in on its own terms. Then I came across these words from Stephen Dunn in The Poet’s Notebook:
What does it mean if you know that a particular disappointment or sadness in your life cannot, relatively speaking, compete for emotional attention with a normal day for a normal person in the Sudan, in Bosnia? Do you write the poem of disappointment differently?
Perspective:
A sense of proportion. I miss my father—and my grief is real, even as I don’t know how it feels for a son whose father has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for who knows how many years without being charged or tried. We hear gunshots in our neighborhood sometimes at night and I never worry about a car bomb going off at the Durham Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning. We feel inconvenienced in going to the grocery store and women in Africa walk miles and miles to get water everyday. The contrast is as obvious as it is tragic, and there is more to perspective than simply ending this paragraph with #firstworldproblems, which is why I like Dunn’s question:
Do you write the poem of disappointment differently?
I heard a speaker, who was working hard to help the audience understand the magnitude of world hunger, paint a picture this way: instead of giving a big number he said, “Imagine a 747 packed full of children crashing every ten minutes all day everyday; that’s how many children die of hunger in our world.” The image was graphic, even evocative, but I didn’t know what to do with it except feel horrified and helpless. I couldn’t get “the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation” to them, if you will. I didn’t know what to do with the distance between those kids and me, between understanding and change.
I look back at the definitions in the earlier paragraph and I see the word can go two directions: a point of view or a sense of proportion. The two are not necessarily synonymous. If my point of view is self-serving, I stand little chance of a “true understanding of the relative importance of things.” I can’t find my place in this world if I am convinced I am the center of it. I won’t be able to grasp what a normal day feels like for a normal person in Iran or Afghanistan, or even across town, if I look with eyes colored by fear.
And—not but—my grief an my disappointment are real. I don’t think Dunn’s question is rhetorical. The pain any of us feel is not measured by competition, as I am reminded by an old favorite, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Here’s why we write the poem differently: those dying in the streets of Baghdad are family, as are those planting the bombs. We are connected, related, with all the complications and hope that come with those ties. Grief in any language fluently spoken here.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Peace,
Milton
the words are falling
out in twos and threes tonight . . .
a trickle of thought and
thankfulness trying to
keep a promise:
I said I would meet you here,
and bring a word:
mosaic: diverse pieces forming a
more or less coherent whole.
Start with the shiny
shards of my day:
the old woodworker
with an evergreen spirit,
the young teacher
with a student’s soul;
dinner with old friends
who fed us with
the hope of our history—
then I baked cookies.
life is not that sequential—
a collection, instead,
of the details, the tiny
bits of nevermind
that become something
of value all together,
even when the glaze
machine is broken
at Krispy Kreme.
Peace,
Milton
Before I left for work today I perused the shelves in my office to find a book to accompany me at lunch. I picked up The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets, which I have had for a long time. I looked to see when I bought it and the inscription said, “October 2000. On the way to Marshfield,” which means I rode with Ginger when she was interviewing at the church there and must have picked it up along the way. I’m guessing I got it at the Borders at Braintree. It’s no longer there.
The premise of the book was to print from the notebooks poets carry with them to jot down ideas, observations, and whatever else they choose to collect. The list of contributors includes Stephen Dunn, Donald Hall, Carolyn Forché, Charles Simic, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford. I flipped back and forth, following no particular order, and then continued the practice when I sat down to write tonight. I stopped when I came to this question in the middle of Mary Oliver’s musings:
Which would you rather be, intellectually deft, or spiritually graceful?
My mind went two very particular places. The first was a scene from Fight Club:
Narrator: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving…
Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it’s very clever.
Narrator: Thank you.
Tyler Durden: How’s that working out for you?
Narrator: What?
Tyler Durden: Being clever.
Narrator: Great.
Tyler Durden: Keep it up then… Right up.
The second was a song by The Story, a now defunct duo that was Jennifer Kimball and Jonatha Brooke. It is called “Grace in Gravity.” It was the title song to their 1991 album.
what we are and what we were once
are now far estrangedcoming to the biggest city
in the dead of summer
you were chosen ’cause you
would not close your eyes.
you danced among the finest–
black and blue in revelation,
a melancholy nothing could describe.this is grace in gravity
grace in gravitytouring in South Africa
the mountain roads one day with a friend,
visions to the ocean off the coast.
(so blue, so green)
he was white and you are black and
this makes some vague difference after
twisted fire and glass and steel,
you’re silent as they try to explain…this is grace in gravity
(in another world now)
grace in gravityand what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
what we are and what we were once
are now far estrangedyour friend is cared for promptly now
but you must travel further to
another saving grace that takes your kind.
this journey marks a step
that no one knew was irreversible,
you say there is forgiveness
and they say you’ll never dance again…this is grace in gravity
grace in gravity (don’t know where you’re going)
grace in gravity (going, going)
grace in gravityand what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
what we are and what we were once
are now far estranged
I heard them sing at Club Passim in Harvard Square soon after the album came out. They said the song was based on a true story of a black ballet dancer who, after a car accident in South Africa, was paralyzed after the ambulance drivers chose to take the dancer’s less gravely injured white companion to a better hospital before they took her for treatment.
you say there was forgiveness . . . .
Deft is a shield; graceful is an invitation.
Deft is a power move; graceful is a risk.
Deft aims to rise; graceful is how you fall.
Deft is alone; graceful is together.
Which would I rather be, intellectually deft, or spiritually graceful?
The question feels like a prayer.
Peace
Milton
Of all the gifts Ginger has given me over our quarter century of living gifts to one another, one that sits high on the list was a iconography classes. Thanks to her ingenuity and thoughtfulness, I got to go once a week to Andover Newton Theological School and work with Christopher Gosey, who was artist in residence as well as both an amazing iconographer and teacher. The gift came while my depression was at its worst and Ginger saw it as a way to offer me a chance to learn a new way of spiritual practice and prayer. She was right.
Chris offered an experience that connected with me on several levels. In the vocabulary of the craft, icons are written, not painted. (I know—tonight’s word is paint; I’m coming back to it.) Icons are also intended to be copied and not signed. The call was to trace from a “cartoon”—a line drawing of the saint or of Jesus—and then paint the icon just as it had been done for centuries. Icons are not intended to be worshipped or revered in the Byzantine tradition. They are “windows to heaven,” intended to create a thin place for prayer and worship. We mixed our own colors, adding natural pigments to acrylic medium in such a way that the paint was almost translucent. Every line on the icon had to be painted twenty to forty times to get it to the right level; the brush movements became a means of prayer and focus.
I loved the stories, the history, the preparation, the conversations, the CDs of random Russian church bells he played in the background, and the icons I finished, which hang in our dining room. After the class was over, I kept working with him until we moved south of Boston and he moved to New Hampshire. I thought about him and our afternoons tracing the lines of faith and prayer because of something Ginger said in her sermon this morning. She was preaching from Ephesians 2:1-10, but her focus was particularly on the last verse: “We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for the good works which God has already designated to make up our way of life.” (New Jerusalem Bible) As she drew to the end of her sermon she said, “We are dust, which becomes pigment in God’s artwork.” We are paint.
I thought of Chris explaining to me that the black pigment was actual ash, the brown was actual dirt, and on he went through our jars of colored powders explaining how they came from earthy substances, just as we do. When I got home, I went back to some of my New Testament Greek resources to find the word translated as “work of art” is poiema, which even my spell check knows is the root word of poem, and that took me back to the sermon and Ginger’s quoting of Mary Oliver’s “Poem”:
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morningin the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would ratherplumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinctand imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is —so it enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
The word paint was added to my Lenten Lexicon by my friend Claudia, who is a wonderful artist. She and I challenge each other by swapping paintings and poems: I write about what she paints; she paints about what I write. Poetry and painting are very connected for me because of our friendship. When Ginger made her statement about dust being pigment, I thought of an artist’s palette, the array of collected and created colors that create the options and opportunities for the painting, in the same way I look for words and phrases to join together in a poem. Both types of art are collections, gatherings of the elements it takes to make a whole picture.
I went back to the verse in Ephesians to notice the sentence says, “We are God’s work of art.” Not I. We. Not works. Work. We become the artwork together. We are saved together, even because of each other. Grace is incarnated in the context of community; faith becomes a verb as we learn to trust one another.
As Ginger was preaching, one of the notes I wrote was, “God is not Bob Ross.” Tonight, I looked him up on line and was reminded his old PBS show was called “The Joy of Painting.” Though I am willing to stand by what I wrote, I had to smile because the Creative Artist who imagined us and breathed us into being is the source of joy, the one who colors this world with an amazing palette of people who were made to be mixed and mingled, scattered and gathered: we are God’s artwork, God’s poem.
We are paint.
Peace,
Milton
I’m not a mathematician. I know enough to explain what pi is, but that’s about it. I didn’t even make it to the end of the book The Life of Pi. As I said yesterday, Pi Day is Pi(e) Day: an excuse to make and 
eat pie and invite people over to eat with us.
As the day has approached, Pi(e) Day has come up in conversation more than once and we have said, “You should come” without keeping track of just how many folks we had invited. When we sat down for dinner, twenty-five of us were gathered around our dining table and every other table we could find in our house, along with most every chair. Ginger did an amazing job imagining how everyone could fit and then setting up the room—well, two rooms.
For the first course, I made beef samosas, much like those I used to buy from the street vendors in Nairobi when I was in ninth grade. Then we had two small tarts: one with asparagus and cheese and the other with apple, gruyere, and roasted beets. The third course was a tamal pie served in a small mason jar. For dessert we had three choices: key lime pie; dark chocolate, salted caramel, and Oreo pie; and avocado pie with an Oreo and Frito crust. We ate and talked and laughed and then sat at the table and kept laughing and talking long after the food was gone.
One of the words offered for my Lenten Lexicon is sacred space. Okay—two words. That’s the way the house felt tonight. A thin place. A connected place. A birthing place for hope and memories. A fortress of friendship.
I am filled up with gratitude.
Peace,
Milton
I have spent the day preparing for tomorrow.
Two years ago it struck me that March fourteenth—3/14—was as good an excuse as any for an all pie dinner, so we had our inaugural Pi(e) Day. Now pie holds an important place in our home, particularly at Thanksgiving, or—as we like to call it—Pie-a-palooza. Some years ago I fell into the ritual of baking as many pies as I could the week before Thanksgiving—some for us and most for Ginger to travel around and give away. It is one of the things that makes Thanksgiving my favorite holiday. To find a reason on the other side of the year to focus on pie is awesome.
I am actually fairly clueless as to the significance of Pi when it comes to math. I’m better at cooking so on Pi Day I am more concerned with the ratio of flour to butter than anything that relates to 3.14. Since the menu is a surprise for those who are coming to dinner, I can’t tell you yet, but the day has reminded me how much joy there is in the preparation. One of the things I miss about working in a restaurant is preparation was a part of most every day because our creations were incredibly temporary. We made things we knew wouldn’t last, which meant we had to come back the next day and do them all over again.
There is something centering about preparing the mirepoix for a soup, slicing potatoes, and stocking your station before the meal service begins, just as today I found great pleasure in getting things in place for an afternoon of cooking tomorrow. By tomorrow night what we will have to show for our work will be mostly memories and the bonds between us that will be fed by being at the table together.
This evening I have been mindful of the basketball games in the background as teams work their way through their respective conference championships, all of them hoping for that “one shining moment.” As I know I have said before, I love the NCAA Tournament and am always amazed by how some of these folks rise to the occasion and give us some incredible games to watch. Life, however, is made up of much more preparation than performance, much more dailiness than shining moments. If the payoff were only in the winner’s circle, this would truly be a miserable existence.
In the living of these days—the routines and rituals—we prepare ourselves for those moments that create room for us to make our offering. The preparation tunes our hearts, hones our skills, sharpens our senses, and reminds us that whatever shining moment may come may feel critical but will not be lasting. Win or lose, we will be called back into the dailiness of grace, of gravity, of getting ready, and that dailiness is where eternity lies.
People get ready . . .
Peace,
Milton
Shame.
Since the first day I asked for suggestions for my Lenten Lexicon, I have stopped at this one and wondered what to say.
Shame.
As a noun, its something we feel: humiliation, dishonor. As a verb, it can be something we inflict on someone else: we shame them. Maybe that’s why the word came up for me today. I saw an article by Al Mohler, the President of one of the Southern Baptist seminaries, who has developed a new tactic in his crusade against the LGBT community and equal marriage by referring to their “erotic liberty,” a crass choice of words that reduces humanity to sex acts. He’s attempting to use shame as a weapon.
His article pointed me to another word on the Lexicon List: zealot because it brought to mind a quote from a friend from years gone by when those who made the guy president of the seminary were making their first moves: “Never trust a zealot with a clear conscience.”
What he did in his article reminded me of a white family we knew when we lived in Zambia who were a part of the American diplomatic corps. They had a big German Shepherd named Tammy whom they had trained to be a rather vicious watch dog, or at least to sound like one, because they were frightened of black people. Tammy knew how to do her job. However, when Tammy did something wrong, the woman would bark, “SHAME, TAMMY. SHAME,” and the dog would melt into a puddle of fear and regret. It was horrible to watch. I always felt sorry for the dog.
By coining his phrase “erotic liberty,” he seems to be attempting a similar move, which is a dehumanizing one, and one that won’t work, regardless of what laws get passed or overturned. His words sent me looking for an old Wendell Berry poem that I would offer in response.
Do Not Be Ashamed
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.
What I love about Berry’s poem is his call to say, “I am not ashamed.” I will tell my story. I will live my life. I cringed when I read his article because I think of a whole host of people whom I love who could be hurt by his words. And then I remembered their strength, their love, their tenacity, their inward clarity. I thought again of the stories I know of people who have lived lifetimes together, who incarnate love wonderfully. No decree or media-savvy sound bite can bury love, no matter how loudly it is screamed.
John Berger says,
The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story, however mild, has to be fearless; the powerful today live nervously . . . . Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women, and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.
His gospel of shame and derision may rally the troops around his castle of self-righteousness for one last stand, but it crumble in the face of the story of Love.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
Now that’s a story worth telling.
Peace,
Milton
P. S. — Since I linked to Mohler’s article, I feel compelled to link to something more redemptive. Here is a video of Wendell Berry reading “A Poem on Hope” on Moyers and Company.
To say my father was a sports fan is like saying I like to cook. The man would pull over and watch five year olds play football just because it was a game. He became the Sports Chaplain at Baylor because he loved going to the games. I’ve thought a great deal about him today as the conference basketball tournaments are beginning because he watched all of them, right on through the NCAA Championship. This happens to be a time of year when I turn into a sports fan for much the same reason, so we talked to each other a great deal.
One summer several years ago I said, “One of the things I want to do with you is go to the Final Four.” The following February he called and said, “Milton” in this way of saying it that was sort of a stage whisper packed with surprise. Then he said, “I got ‘em.” He had three. The plan was for my brother and I to meet him in Atlanta and we would watch the games. Work schedules for both Miller and I made it where we couldn’t get there until Sunday, so my nephews went up for the semi final game on Saturday and my brother and I flew in later. I arrived to find out that Dad had discovered the Braves’ opening day was that Sunday, so he got us baseball tickets as well.
The story came back close this week because of a poem at the Writer’s Almanac yesterday called “A Drink of Water” by Jeffrey Harrison
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;
and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.
The word that came to mind was solace: to give comfort to in grief or misfortune.
In ways that perhaps only make sense in my head and heart, the word takes from the poem and the memory to a song: Mavis Staples’ “You Are Not Alone.” The song moves me because of its tenacious compassion.
you’re not alone
I’m with you, I’m lonely too
what’s that song
can’t be sung by two?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 aloneyou’re not alone, every night
I stand in your place
every tear on every face
tastes the samea broken dream, a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alonean open hand, an open heart
there’s no need to be afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not aloneI wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone
I’m gonna get it through to you
you’re not alone
“Open up this is a raid”—solace with determination.
I suppose I will never get used to not being able to talk to him about March Madness, or him call my name in that particular way. But I am not alone in my grief nor in my solace. I will rest in that thought tonight.
Peace
Milton
Coming and going from work today I heard stories about the SAE chapter—or, I should say, former SAE chapter—at OU being disbanded because of a video that surfaced showing the members chanting a song that used the n-word and talked about lynching. I have chosen not to watch the video and take the word of the reporters that it was heinous and terrible and, well, evil. It is also a reminder that we do not live in a post-racial society, even if it’s been fifty years since they marched across the bridge in Selma.
I had lunch today with bell hooks’ book once again and it feels as if she is listening to the news even though she wrote the words years ago about race and racism, about “the representation of whiteness in the black imagination.” Her words were illuminating, convicting, haunting and difficult. I pass some of them along here.
I think that one fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing. Yet it is this representation of whiteness in the black imagination, first learned in the narrow confines of poor black rural community, that is sustained by my travels to many different locations. To travel, I must always move through fear, confront terror.
Terror is the word that has stayed with me since. She continues:
Even though I live and move in spaces where I am surrounded by whiteness, there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear. All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness.
As much as I wish she were overstating the case, I think how many times I have heard in recent days of another police shooting of “an unarmed black man.” I think about the Supreme Court dismantling the Voting Rights Act, closely followed by state legislatures like ours here in North Carolina who went to work quickly making it more difficult for people of color to vote. And I think about those white students at Oklahoma who gave us a bold reminder that she is telling the truth.
In contemporary American society, white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists. This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness. The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror. It has also become a way to perpetuate the terror by providing a cover, a hiding place.
Hiding places like that fraternity house. The actions of those young men beg us to do more than treat them as aberrations. My guess is they didn’t just learn that song over the weekend. They learned it from those who came before them, who now act horrified but feel no differently than the students. That song has been sung before, perhaps long before there were smart phones with cameras.
The NPR story this afternoon talked about the history and status of SAE, mentioning more than once that many of its members had gone on to work on Wall Street. One current member basically said that’s why he joined: it was his ticket to a job in the halls of power and commerce. As I said the other night, all we have to do is look at Congress’ class picture to see white men still run the show and are an image that invokes terror to those who are not white.
What was perhaps most powerful in what I read over lunch was that hooks was not out to blame white people, but to ask us to come to terms with the reality of our collective history. As James Baldwin said, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” hooks talked about white people “who had shifted locations”—who had moved to see the world differently. She said of one, “Understanding how racism works, he can see the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing himself as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good.”
The thing I carry away as much as anything is a reminder that white is not normal anymore than being black or brown is different. We who have been born in privilege must shift to a location where we can see we are neither called to nor deserving of our place of power. It is not the job of the rest of the world to learn to do it our way. It is our calling, as those to whom much has been given, to deconstruct the cultural systems,—economic, political, religious—that feed the terror, to incarnate the truth that love casts out fear.
Like I said, her words were illuminating, convicting, haunting and difficult–and true.
Peace,
Milton