don't eat alone

This week has been a grey one for me—one in which I have brushed up against my depression. Some of it is weather related, but that’s too easy an attribution. Some of it is grief. Monday marked what would have been my parents’ fifty-ninth wedding anniversary; Tuesday marked nineteen months since Dad died. Some of it I don’t understand, though I have learned to read the signs. Over my years of living with depression, sleep has always been an escape. When I notice I want to sleep even when I have been getting enough rest, that’s a good signal that there’s more going on that needs my attention.

Today the weather matched my feelings. The temperature has been on a downward slide since midnight and some sort of precipitation has been falling all day—particularly when I needed to get out of the car. This afternoon I wandered from one grocery store to another trying to figure out what to serve for Thursday Night Dinner, which is our weekly gathering of friends around our table. I had already looked through what was on my kitchen shelves and what I had in the pantry and what I picked up at the Durham Farmers’ Market last Saturday. Between Whole Foods and Harris Teeter I found a few other things that spurred my imagination. My friend Laura showed up as she does most every Thursday to help cook and we set about creating the menu:

cream of roasted tomato and pepper soup with mini grilled brie and apple sandwiches
roasted Brussels sprouts and pear salad with parsnip-apple-vermouth puree and a balsamic reduction
Guinness braised pork loin with pineapple and apples, roasted beets and beet green-walnut pesto
mini blackberry-strawberry cobbler

The afternoon in the kitchen and our friends around the kitchen helped stare down the greenness; what began as a cloudy day ended as a starry night, at least in our dining room. Sitting with a table full of people I love and who love me, I felt joy.

The dictionary offers joy as a synonym for happiness and misses the point. To sit around our table tonight was not a reprieve for me, or a recess from sadness. I brought my grief to the table and it was fed by joy, by the persistent, tenacious, determined promise that love will be the last word. Joy is not an escape. It is, as the old song says, down in my heart to stay.

I may wake up in the morning to find the sun is still not rising on my horizon and I have several more grey days to wade through. I may find myself wanting to go to sleep to get our from under the weight of these sad times. But the joy given me in the kitchen this afternoon and around the table tonight will not be taken away. The biggest lie of depression is that I am all alone; joy tells the truth—I am loved., I belong.

If you went back through this blog to its beginnings over nine years ago you would find the idea that life and faith are team sports stated over and over again. You might even get a little tired of reading that we are all in this together and that we are loved—really, really loved. The best news I know is we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. I repeat myself, I suppose because I need to hear it. Too many years of bad theology taught me I was fundamentally flawed, a wretch that needed to be saved. Look at the story again. All of creation came pouring out of the God’s joy. God spoke light and love into being, animated everything the panda to the platypus, and brought us up out of the dust to share the joy of it all.

We are born in love and indelibly marked with joy and hope. The darkness is not a permanent stain. Joy is an indefatigable force, God’s gravitational pull that holds us in the orbit of grace, that draws us together. I know. It pulled me in tonight.

Peace
Milton

Last week I was supposed to drive up to Raleigh, as Andy and Barney used to say, to speak to the Presbyterian Campus Ministries group at North Carolina State University. I was deterred by freezing precipitation, so I went this week instead. The group meets for a meal and a meeting each Wednesday in the basement of the West Raleigh Presbyterian Church—the congregation that is using my book as their Lenten focus.

I drove in fairly heavy traffic listening to the folks on NPR talk about the contentious case before the Supreme Court, the aftermath of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress yesterday, and something else that made me decide to switch over to the mix CD I had in the car and let the music take me out of the violence and into some hope. I needed a little peace.

I walked into a room of thirty-five students who were laughing and talking in the gathering room, which was littered with second hand couches and pillows. Some of the students were in the kitchen preparing dinner: jambalaya! When the food was ready we moved to the fellowship hall, filled our plates, and then sat down at round tables for the meal. The five students at my table were sophomores, except for one freshman, and charging off into food science, industrial engineering, and art and design.

After we ate we came back into the couch room and four of the students led us in singing. Our hymns were “Desperado” by the Eagles, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White Ts. I turned to the girls sitting next to me and said, “I feel right at home. We sang ‘Desperado’ when I was in college.” I even gave myself permission to cut loose on the last verse when it comes time for the back up singers to wail, “Let somebody love you.”

As they sang to each other about opening the gates of their hearts, they demonstrated their togetherness by the way they treated each other. When I got home tonight I looked back over my lunchtime reading: more of bell hooks, this time quoting M. Scott Peck:

An important aspect of the realism of community deserves mention: humility. While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the ‘soft’ individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other’s gifts, and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness others share their brokenness, and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection. Be fully aware of human variety, and you will recognize the interdependency of humanity.

hooks continues:

Sadly, accepting human variety means that we must also find a way to positively connect with folks who express prejudicial feeling, even hatred. Committed to building community, we are called by a covenant of love to extend fellowship even when we confront rejection. We are not called to make peace with abuse but we are called to be peacemakers.

The dictionary definition of peace points either to moments of quiet and stillness, such as I was seeking on the highway, or to the cessation of violence. What it misses is the active force of peace, as said well in the slogan of the Baptist Peacemakers Fellowship some years ago: peace, like war, is waged. And it is waged together. You’ve got to let somebody love you.

Though we often think of peace in contrast to violence, I wonder if its true opposite is fear. At the heart of prejudice is fear: of the unknown, of change, of loss of significance or power. Those who use their political power to foment discord and despair operate out of the fear of losing their control. Peace—serenity, calm, determination—grows from the power of community, the courage of love. There is no “them,” only Us. The work to be done is not in seeing who to leave out, or how to draw the lines so we always get our way, or how to make sure nothing changes. We are called to be peacemakers: to make sure everyone knows fear is not the last word, to throw open the doors so all have shelter and food, and remember we need each other—every last one of us.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — Here’s a little bedtime music.

One of the things I love about my job as a trainer at the computer store is I get to know people. Mine is the one position in the store that sees repeat customers because they have purchased a one-year membership that allows them to come in as often as they can make appointments. Getting to see them regularly means we get to know a little about each other beyond their questions about their computers, phones, or tablets.

Last year, I got to talking to one of the guys about my book and he responded by pointing me to Matzoh Ball Gumbo, which talks of food and faith from a Jewish and Southern perspective. The next time he came in, he brought me some articles. A few weeks ago, I ran into him at Cocoa Cinnamon—turns out he lives in my neighborhood—and I was telling him about my next book (man, I love saying that), which is about home. He had another recommendation: bell hooks’ belonging: a culture of place.

I knew hooks’ name, he shunning of capital letters, and some of her reputation, but I had no idea what I was in for. The book is her account of and reflection on moving back to rural Kentucky where she grew up—and left. She moved back to come to terms with home. The book is beautiful and hard. Yesterday at work, the man came in for a training session, though not with me. I looked across the table and we exchanged smiles. I had written him an email note to say thanks for his recommendation, but more for his interest and his taking time to connect. When he saw me yesterday he said, “Let’s get together on purpose.”

This morning I had time to read and write. I picked up the hooks book on the way out the door. Near the end of one chapter she said:

As Berry reminds us:

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health – and create profitable diseases and dependencies – by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. (40)

For the second time in a week, Wendell Berry showed up in someone else’s writing—and this time he was talking about the ways in which connections heal us. The last two nights have brought me email notes from the mothers of high school friends from Nairobi days asking to be included in a Lenten Journal email list that predates the blog. Another email came today from the mother of one who was in the youth group in Fort Worth and has stayed a friend ever since. Several months ago I reconnected with someone from Baylor. We had both gone to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1978 with Wallace Daniel, our Russian history professor. It was my graduation present; it was the end of her freshman year. Her name is Elizabeth Crook and she is a writer who lives in Austin. (Here is a link to her latest book.) We have not seen each other since we wandered with our group through Moscow and Leningrad. The more we read of what the other is doing, the more we realize we would have been friends had the geography cooperated. This week, she wrote to say her sister, Noel, who is a poet, would be 
“in conversation” with Naomi Shihab Nye on March 11 at Book People in Austin. (If you’re close enough, go!). I wrote to say Naomi is one of my favorite poets and “a friend who doesn’t know me yet.” I also told Elizabeth that Ginger and I would be in Austin this summer for a wedding. She wrote back to say we had to get together: “I’ve missed you for thirty-six years.”

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. I know Berry was talking about connections to the land, primarily, and we are fed and healed by one another in so many ways. My friend, Billy Crockett, who lives not far from Austin, wrote a song many years ago called “Lines.” The chorus says

lines that run from vine to branches
lines that carry love’s advances
for those who try to find their place in time
there are lines . . .
there are lines

The healing that came in the connections over the last couple of days reminds me that in our most meaningful moments time stands on its head: we are, as Madeleine L’Engle says, every age at the same time. Connections from Africa, Austin, Appleton, and the Apple Store all converging to remind me of the ties that bind and heal.

Yes. A source of delight. Now sing along.

Peace,
Milton

My friend Paul pointed me to an article in the New York Times that has stuck with me for several days now titled “Bringing a Daughter Back From the Brink With Poetry.” The author told a simple story of how she worked to reach out to her teenage daughter as she was going through a particularly difficult time. She had me from the opening lines:

When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, my 13-year-old daughter, Marisa, was so angry that she stopped wearing shoes.

She chose the most ineffective rebellion imaginable: two little bare feet against the world. She declared that she wouldn’t wear shoes again until we had a new president.

I had learned early in motherhood that it’s not worth fighting with your children about clothes, so I watched silently as she strode off barefoot each morning, walking down the long gravel driveway in the cold, rainy darkness to wait for the bus.

The principal called me a few times, declaring that Marisa had to start wearing shoes or she would be suspended. I passed the messages on, but my daughter continued her barefoot march.

I spent a fair amount of time tonight looking for the word that matches best with what pulls me in the mother’s story. I was moved by the mother’s kindness towards her daughter, her trust, and her support, but the word that resonated most was patience.

Patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.

I’ve tried to picture what it must have felt like as a parent to watch your child walk barefoot down the driveway on a cold morning and being able to give her space to figure it out on her own. Because the mother was able to accept the suffering of both her daughter and herself, she was also able to create space for her daughter work through it and to foster trust between them.

When I lose patience it often has to do with my choosing to force my schedule or my agenda on whatever is happening around me. When I taught high school in Massachusetts, one of the boys in tenth grade English was this big Labrador of a kid who came bounding in everyday full of energy that was no particularly focused. He would often ask, “Mr. B-C, may I stand on my head?” Our classes were full and passing periods were short. I had a lot of material to cover. His request was not particularly convenient, yet somewhere in the midst of it I had the wherewithal to answer, “OK—just till the tardy bell rings.” He put his books on his desk and then stood on his head with his back up against the wall. When the bell rang, he sat down and we went on with class.

He sat next to another boy who was depressed and angry. More than once, he refused to do assignments and was bitter or even rude in response to attempts I made to reach out to him. My headstander would say, “That’s okay, Mr. B-C, I’ll help him.” His patience with his friend was hopeful and healing. I saw them one day at lunch their senior year. Both had grown beyond what I had known of them in class. I said to the depressed one, “When you were in my class I really worried about you. I think if it were not for your friend and the way he cared about you, I’m not sure you’d be here.”

“I think you’re right,” he said and smiled. We all smiled.

Patience knows there are no shortcuts. If we are to accept the delay or trouble or suffering, then we must choose to take the long way home: to walk through the valley of the shadow and not take the shortcut of safety; we must wait for the moment of awareness or discovery rather than forcing the shortcut of explanation or instruction.

The mother in the article took to leaving poems in her daughter’s shoes once she started wearing them again as a statement of solidarity. One of the poems was Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” part of which says,

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Patience is connected to other words that matter: wait, listen, trust, hope, relax, rest, love. It is less of a concept or an idea and more of a visceral and incarnational truth. We live it out the same way the mother let her daughter carry on her barefoot protest rather than siding with the principal. Patience is looking for a way to say, “I am on your side and I will take as long as it takes to make sure you know that.” It is, as Ginger often says, learning to look for the emotion behind the behavior. It is assuming positive intent rather than jumping to conclusions. And it is our calling in everything from family relationships to church committee meetings to board rooms and classrooms to job sites to grocery store check out lines—any place we can offer compassion rather than demand compliance or conformity.

Patience, like poetry, can bring us back from the brink.

Peace
Milton

I am writing late tonight because I have been at a wedding.

The daughter of church friends got married this evening. Several weeks ago, they contacted me about baking pies for the wedding. They didn’t want a cake. Instead they wanted individual mini pies—equal amounts of key lime and chocolate chess. We came up with the idea of using small mason jars for the key lime pies and I baked the chess pies in muffin tins. Yesterday I baked one hundred and ten pies. Here they are before the wedding crowd hit the dessert table.

The ceremony was unusual and meaningful. The couple had worked with the minister, who was the bride’s uncle, to create a special moment. They invited us on a metaphorical journey from

darkness to
light to
awareness to
love to
relationship to
maarriage.

At each step along the way they had quotes and poems and a vow they made to each other, building to their exchange of rings and pronouncement. When the minister said they were husband and wife, the bride bounced in anticipation of their kiss. It was a beautiful moment.

Early on in the ceremony as he talked about darkness, the minister said, “What is dark is not empty—if you know how to see there is mystery. It was then I thought of my word for today:

adventure: daring and exciting activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm.

His sentence took me back to the words of Chuck Raymo, who used to write a science column for the Boston Globe and has several books about seeing in the dark as an astronomer. Raymo says once he learned how many stars there were in the sky he wondered how there could be any darkness. Then it hit him: the light just hasn’t gotten here yet.

Annie Dillard says if you want to see the stars you have to go sit in the dark. If you know how to see there is mystery.

Tomorrow is the beginning of March. When April comes, Ginger and I will celebrate twenty-five years of marriage. I think back to April 21, 1990 and see we had little idea of what our life together would hold. We knew we were moving to Boston, but not much was defined beyond that, other than we knew we were going together into whatever mystery there might be. Durham was nowhere on the radar.

I think about our quarter century and I want to go back and supplement the sentence I heard tonight. It’s not just about thinking the dark is empty; we can feel that way about the daylight as well, about the everydayness of existence: when the morning light comes streaming in, we get up and do it again. Amen. In both daylight and dark, we need to know how to see if we are going to engage the mystery. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only those who see take off their shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

We don’t have to be in faraway places or doing exotic things to find adventure. The dailiness of existence calls for enterprise and enthusiasm if we are to see the mystery. If we are to live life together our eyes and our hearts must be open everyday as we carry our griefs, share our joy, and catch each other by surprise.

Peace,
Milton

Content.

How you pronounce the word in your head as you read will determine the definition you infer.

con-TENT
in a state of peaceful happiness.
satisfied with a certain level of achievement, good fortune, etc., and not wishing for more.

CON-tent
the things that are held or included in something.
the amount of a particular constituent occurring in a substance.

In my brief word study, I learned they both come from the same medieval Latin root word, continere, which breaks down into “to hold together.” To be content with life, then, is to have some sense of the things it holds that matter and, perhaps, some sense of what we have to learn to accept. The last part of that sentence reminds me of one of my father’s maxims: you have to learn the difference between a problem and a predicament. A problem is something you can solve; a predicament is something you have to learn to live with.

In both churches where Terry and I played and sang together over the last couple of weeks, I had people come up and tell me how perfectly the song fit my voice. It felt good singing it—but here’s the deal: it was lower than I am used to singing. I have been a tenor all of my life. I find great joy in singing the high harmony parts. I hear those parts first in both my head and my heart. I like the air up there. I sang the song in D because the song was called “Prayer in Open D” and discovered I a new home for my voice. My tenor days may be numbered. I will have to learn to be content with being a baritone, have to learn to listen for new harmony lines and let someone else take to the skies. It is not a drastic change, but it calls me to change how I think about me and how I relate to the world. If my voice is moving down the scale, how do I do the work to find my voice and, as the definition says, not wish for more?

When I first started my Clinical Pastoral Education training at Baylor Medical Center in the fall of 1981, there was a little boy on the oncology ward who had bone cancer in his right arm, which was his dominant arm. The day they told him they were going to have to amputate his arm he began eating with his left hand. He saw how life was going to be—the predicament at hand—and he began to learn to live with it. The adjustments in my life pale by comparison, but the spirit of his approach to life is worth emulating.

Writing that sentence brings me face to face with the difference between contentment and resignation. To be content—to not wish for more—is not to say, “I guess this is all there is.” Resignation seems laced with despair; to be content is to be shot trough with gratitude. To go back to the song, to sing a different part is still to sing harmony; to change the key is to sing it where it fits my voice. What matters most of all is to keep singing.

One of the hymns of my heart is James Taylor’s “Secret O’ Life.” The first two verses say

the secret of life
is enjoying the passage of time.
any fool can do it,
there ain’t nothing to it.
nobody knows how we got
to the top of the hill.
but since we’re on our way down,
we might as well enjoy the ride.

the secret of love
is in opening up your heart.
it’s okay to feel afraid,
but don’t let that stand in your way.
’cause anyone knows
that love is the only road.
and since we’re only here for a while,
might as well show some style.
give us a smile.

isn’t it a lovely ride?
sliding down, gliding down,
try not to try too hard,
it’s just a lovely ride.

Sing along, my friends. This is as good as it gets.

Peace,
Milton

It’s Thursday, which means I spent a good part of my day getting ready for Thursday Night Dinner, our weekly gathering with friends and whoever else shows up to share the meal. Tonight it was all “regulars,” if you will—friends who come most every week and who help make both our house and our town feel like home.

Most weeks, I start thinking of or looking for menu ideas on Monday or Tuesday. This week, I stood in line at the grocery store after work yesterday because a snow storm was predicted and I knew I needed to get groceries if I was going to be ready to feed our friends. I had a couple of things in mind, but I mostly grabbed items that caught my attention and gave myself room to figure out what to do with them when I got to the house.

Though cooking is always an enjoyable adventure for me, some days things happen more easily than others. There are the days when things just fall into place and then there are those—like tonight—when you have to work hard and keep adapting to make the meal happen. Like Guy Clark sings in “Someday the Song Writes You,”

searching for a melody
to sing my soul to sleep
reaching for some harmony
down inside of me
somedays you know just how it goes
somedays you have no clue
somedays you write the song
somedays the song writes you.

The meal turned out well. We had a wonderful time around the table. Everyone had stories to tell from the week, which led to stories from other parts of our lives, which led to our knowing each other better and the bonds between us being stronger when we got up from the table to go out into the week ahead. All of it was good and the meal was not what I had hoped. I made some mistakes, had to leave what was going to be a key ingredient out of one dish and settle for things to not be exactly right on another. Let me be more specific: I thought I was putting some beautifully roasted parsnips in the oven to stay warm, but the oven was on 400° and I pulled them out to find a sheet pan full of charcoal. To rephrase Clark’s analogy, I felt like I didn’t cook the meal, the meal cooked me—or I can move to a different vantage point and see we had a wonderful meal together tonight, even without the dishes I had imagined, and let that be enough.

Enough: the amount or number needed, desired, or allowed; sufficiency.
Sufficiency: an adequate amount of something, especially of something essential.

When people find out I have worked as a chef, they often ask my favorite dish. The answer I give most often is, “I like to cook whatever will make you stay at the table and talk.” We sat down tonight at seven and got up around ten. All we had to do with the plates was rinse them and put them in the dishwasher; people ate everything. And, as I said, we fed each other well with our stories. Tonight I got to cook my favorite meal, even without the parsnips. I’m going to let that be enough.

Peace
Milton

Liberal.

It’s a word that most certainly elicits a response. In the media, it’s a lightning rod. In the dictionary, it means generous and open-minded. I’ve been thinking about the word for a couple of days now after having read an article about a professor at my alma mater who was calling for those in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) who called themselves “moderate” to admit they were “liberal”—and not in a good way.

For those of you who don’t know your recent Baptist history, the CBF began when the Southern Baptist Convention fractured in a political/theological struggle that began while I was in seminary. The divisions were as deep as the wounds, and both have continued down the years, alongside some healing as well. The CBF did not set out to be another denomination, and so a broad range of churches have been connected, particularly around mission endeavors, which means the theological spectrum among them is fairly diverse. In discussing his concerns about that diversity the professor said,

However, I am a conservative among the moderates in the CBF and urge those moderate Baptists who are really liberal, in the historical sense, to drop the label moderate and just call themselves liberals. When they agree with Marcus Borg’s theology, for example, they are liberal, not moderate.

The last sentence is the one that got me because Marcus Borg, who recently died, has been on of the people who has feed my life of faith. I remember reading Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and thinking the difference between us was where we grew up and what questions we were taught to ask. More than anything else, I came away with a sense of resonance. I trusted him as he professed his faith, even when it was not in the way I professed mine. The second book of his I read was The Heart of Christianity, which remains one of my favorite books, period. In it he talked about the church in North America having both an existing paradigm and an emerging paradigm. He was clear to say from the beginning that he was not trying to create a dichotomy as much as describe these two genuine expressions of faith as it gets lived out in the church existing alongside of each other.

When Ginger and I found our way to the UCC, we felt at home. The congregational church polity was a structure we understood and appreciated and it was coupled with a faith that trusted that “God was still speaking,” leaning back to the words of some of the first American Christians who believed in all that had been handed down and that “there was more light yet to break forth.”

One of my friends describes the UCC by saying, “If Christianity were a neighborhood, we’d be the last house on the left.” The liberals. The progressives. The people of extravagant welcome. It’s a good house in a good neighborhood.

The article left me feeling as though the professor saw liberal Christianity as a watered down version of the Real Thing, that those who had liberal leanings needed to admit they weren’t really the church. For me, being liberal means taking equality and inclusiveness seriously, making sure that all God’s people know they are wanted, in the same way that Jesus called us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Being liberal means understanding the heart of the gospel has to do with how we treat the poor and marginalized in our society. That’s right: the gospel is about social justice, in the same way Jesus said he had come to proclaim liberty to the captives. In the history of the denominations that now make up the UCC, we ordained an African-American man to pastor a predominantly white congregation before the Civil War, began ordaining women to ministry sixty years before they could vote, and ordained the first openly gay pastor in 1970. Liberal Christians have done much to further the gospel of Christ in our world, alongside of brothers and sisters up and down the theological continuum.

We have much to learn from each other. We are called to be in this together. We do our best work when we look for resonance rather than lean into labels. Yes, we have our differences, but let us choose not to let those define us and lead with invitations rather than instructions.

in Christ there is no East or West,
in him no South or North,
but one great fellowship of love
throughout the whole wide earth

Peace,
Milton

The last two Sundays I have had the privilege of playing music in church with my friend Terry, who is one of the best harmonica players I have ever heard. Soon after we moved to Durham I was asked to sing at the sixtieth birthday party of one of our church members. I sang “Angel From Montgomery” and asked Terry if he would play along. We have been playing together off and on ever since. We even have a name for ourselves: Oysters on the Half Shell. We are, as we like to say, raw and delicious.

The song we did Sunday is one that speaks to me and one I have always thought would be a good hymn for Lent because it is truly a song of lament. I haven’t sung it before because I never think of it until Lent is already here; this year I was ahead of the curve. The song is Emmylou Harris’ “Prayer in Open D.”

there’s a valley of sorrow in my soul
where every night I hear the thunder roll
like the sound of a distant gun
over all the damage I have done
and the shadows filling up this land
are the ones I built with my own hand
there is no comfort from the cold
of this valley of sorrow in my soul

there’s a river of darkness in my blood
and through every vein I feel the flood
I can find no bridge for me to cross
no way to bring back what is lost
into the night it soon will sweep
down where all my grievances I keep
but it won’t wash away the years
or one single hard and bitter tear

and the rock of ages I have known
is a weariness down in the bone
I use to ride it like a rolling stone
now I just carry it alone

there’s a highway rising from my dreams
deep in the heart I know it gleams
for I have seen it stretching wide
clear across to the other side
beyond the river and the flood
and the valley where for so long I’ve stood
with the rock of ages in my bones
someday I know it will lead me home

I’m grateful to Mike at West Raleigh Presbyterian Church because he recorded us Sunday. (You will notice we left out the bridge so Terry could play a harmonica solo.)

Lament:

• a passionate expression of grief or sorrow;
• a song, piece of music, or poem expressing sorrow;
• an expression of regret or disappointment; a complaint.

There’s a fair amount of scripture and song devoted to lamenting. Grief is at the heart of our faith—a reminder that hope and optimism are not synonyms. We are people of constant sorrow, so it is good to give voice to what and who has been lost, to sing to the night together, even as we remember we are walking towards the resurrection.

The amazing thing about this song is it names “the damage I have done,” which also reminds me grace is at the heart of our faith. If life were simply a matter of getting what I deserved, none of us would fare well. I know of the persistent resilience of God’s love because of those who have weathered the storms I have created, who have picked up the pieces of what I have broken, and continue to love me.

Sunday during the time with the children I told them when I thought of songs I wanted to sing I tried to pick ones that would sound good with harmonica just so I could hear Terry play. I love to play and sing, but there’s another level of wonder when he is standing next to me with his harp, which leads me to believe that laments are probably best sung as choral pieces, or at least in duos and trios. Singing of sorrow all by yourself will kill you. Another voice in the night is the first assurance that all is not lost, we are not alone; the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.

Peace,
Milton