don't eat alone

I spent two and a half hours today with the allergist. (Hang in there — I don’t intend to talk about this for the rest of Lent, I promise.) Since I had done without my medications for a week, I was able for them to do some testing on me, which meant I laid down on my stomach and made a canvas of my back for the nurse who first took a purple washable Crayola marker and made dots — six across and ten down — for all of the different allergens to which I was to be exposed. Then she took a tray of needles and stuck me with a different thing in each of the spots. (Yes, it was as fun as it sounds.) She then left me alone for about fifteen minutes to give the sticks a chance to do their magic. When she returned, she recorded what had happened. Out of all the possibilities, I was allergic to all of them but four: red cedar, mouse, cockroach, and dust mites.

In the discussion that followed, I was not given much hope for change. The doctor talked about what the numbers mean, told me to keep up my fistful of pills regimen, with some adjustment, and to think about whether or not I wanted to begin the three to five year process of seeing if the shots would work to build up my immunity. I knew going in there was no magic trick that was going to cure my allergies, so I had set my expectations accordingly and I left more philosophical than despairing, looking for some larger lesson to take away.

In looking at the dictionary this evening, I found it interesting that the word allergy was not even a part of our vocabulary until 1906 when Clemens E. von Pirquet coined the term — from the Greek allos meaning “other” or “strange” and ergon meaning “reaction.”

Strange reaction.

When the nurse came in about halfway through the process, she looked at my back and said, “The trees and grasses are not your friends.” (The antithesis of what the Little River Band used to sing — “the albatross and the whale they are my brothers.”) That was sad news for me. I really like trees. Grasses, too, though I don’t like to mow. I love to be out in our yard, digging and planting; now I find out my body thinks I’m conspiring with the enemy and keeps calling up reinforcements.

I’ve spent a good bit of time this evening on reframing the whole thing into some sort of lesson or metaphor as a means of helping me figure out how to live in this chronic state of combat, and how to hear what the doctor said while also not letting what feels like resignation be the last word. I have explored some alternative forms of treatment in the past; it’s time to go there again. I love where I live, even if the trees and grasses don’t like me right now; there has to be a way to write a different chapter to this story.

Here in the middle of Lent, in the middle of life, I am face to face with the now and the not yet, the what is and what might be. I am face to face with reality, but I’m not willing to concede what I have been told is the whole story, so I’ll keep sniffing and hoping and praying and sneezing, and trust there is more light yet to break forth.

Peace,
Milton

After writing about allergies, I went to bed with metaphors on my mind and woke up thinking about music as both metaphor and soundtrack for life, or at least those thoughts were running in the background. Before I left for church, I listened again to Scott Simon’s interview with Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell introducing their new record, Old Yellow Moon. Part of the discussion centered around aging and singing. “Can I ask both of you how does your voice change over the years when you hear it and you feel it?” Scott Simon asked them.

“Oh, boy.,” said Emmylou, “I mean, I sound so young and my voice sounds so high and kind of thin to me. I don’t mean in a bad way, but I really have shaken hands with one of my voices right now. I think it’s got a little deeper. It’s got some more grooves in it. And with me it was never about my voice as much as how can I tell the story of this song? And if I really love a song, nothing is going to get in my way because it’s more about the emotion of the story of the song. And if I can’t go as high as I would like then I’m just going to stay low.”

Rodney added, “For me, it’s truly my experience about 10 years ago, as I turned 50, I made peace with my voice. And now I really like the sound of my voice.”

Before church, I sat with a couple of friends who are both musicians and we talked about those performers, like Harris and Crowell, who have continued to write and sing as they have aged and those who have chosen to repeat hits from years ago rather than make a present day offering. Don’t get me wrong. When I see Emmylou perform, I hope with all my heart she will sing “Boulder to Birmingham,” but that song has more life because she has something new to sing as well. Because she has continued to grow, the song keeps growing with her. She isn’t trying to be who she was then; she is being who she is now.

When I sit down in the sanctuary for worship each week, one of the first things I do is look through the worship guide to see what hymns we are going to sing. Music is one of the thin places for me, so I like to see what invitations await. This morning I found one of my favorites: Robert Lowry’s “How Can I Keep From Singing,” which begins:

my life flows on in endless song
above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
that hails a new creation:
through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
it finds an echo in my soul —
how can I keep from singing?

Somewhere in the first couple of lines, I realized the resonance with what had been running through my mind. Lowry’s words were the metaphor in the background: how can I keep from singing? (A parenthetical note: I’m a singer, not a dancer. If this were Ginger’s metaphor, she would choose the latter, I’m sure. The common ground, I suppose, comes from Guy Clark: “You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money, Love like you’ll never get hurt, You’ve got to dance like there’s nobody watching, It’s got to come from the heart if you want it to work.”)

As Ginger moved into her sermon, she quoted Walter Anderson, an artist and writer who — I found out later — suffered from severe depression:

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have: life itself.

His words made me wonder if he knew Lowry’s lyric, for he was also calling us to hear the music in the circumstance. I’m not suggesting we just tar-la-la our way through the trouble fields as though nothing is happening. Guy Clark, once again:

it don`t matter how much it hurts
you’ve got to tell the truth
some days you write the song
some days the song writes you

And when we sing, whether the songs are old or new, we must sing the song for today. We can’t reach back to make it feel like it used to; a nostalgia fix is about as helpful as pinning it all on the sweet by and by. We sang a new (to me) hymn this morning by Carl Daw, “God of Grace and God of Laughter” — here’s the second verse:

when our lives are torn by sadness,
heal our wounds with tuneful balm;
when all seems discordant madness,
help us find a measured calm.
steady us with music’s anchor
when the storms of life increase;
in the midst of hurt and rancor,
make us instruments of peace.

The music, for me, is both actuality and metaphor, the songs are both sanctuary and symbol. The stacks of CDs in our house and the number of tracks in my iTunes demonstrate that I am not speaking only metaphorically when I say my life has a soundtrack.

no storm can shake my inmost part
while to the Rock I’m clinging
since Love is Lord of heaven and earth
how can I keep from singing?

Indeed.

Peace,
Milton

I go to a famous physician I sleep in the local hotel
From what I can see of the people like me
We get better but we never get well
— Paul Simon, “Allergies”

My week has been marked by my allergies, and in particular preparing to go to see a new allergist on Monday. In anticipation of the appointment, I have had to do without my allergy medication. Monday saw the end of the Allegra and my nasal spray, yesterday I had to stop the Benadryl, and tomorrow I must do without the Singular. All of them are things I take regularly to try and keep myself moving and breathing and not feeling too itchy. Needless to say, this has been a stuffy and itchy week. Though the doctor didn’t give me any rationale for my medicine fast, I assume she wanted to unmask my symptoms so she could get a clear picture of what is going on. The frustrating part for me — or at least the part that leads me to go into Monday with fairly low expectations — is I’ve seen lots of allergists over the years and gone through lots of testing and I think, after all the unmasking, she will probably just give me new masks because Paul Simon is right: “we get better but we never get well.”

In the fall of 2000, I went to the doctor because I was having trouble staying awake. Every time I sat down I fell asleep. After we talked for a bit, she said, “I think you’re suffering from sleep deprivation.” The statement was funny to me because I had spent my life to that point getting by on five maybe six hours of sleep. I had always been the guy who went to be late and got up early. She sent me to what Ginger and I affectionately called Sleep Camp to see if I was suffering from sleep apnea. The testing was supposed to take place over two nights. The first night was for them to see my sleeping patterns and determine if I had the condition. The second night was to fit me for the CPAP, which is the machine that blows air up your nose while you sleep and, well, let’s you actually sleep.

I arrived at Sleep Camp about 10:30 one night, as instructed, and the nurse spent about thirty minutes hooking up all the wires and then he told me to go to sleep, which I did. About 1:30 he came in and woke me up. “There’s no need for you to come back a second night. There’s no question about your apnea. No wonder you’re so tired. You’re sleeping in ninety second increments.” He fitted me with the sleeping apparatus and sent me home with a CPAP and, for the first time I could remember, I woke up feeling rested. What I didn’t see coming was once the mask of the apnea was taken away, I found a deep depression underneath it. I thought I was tired, but I was actually depressed. It took a little longer to learn to live with and through my depression.

One of the keys for coming to terms with it, for me, was in finding metaphors to help explain what was happening to me. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to Paul Simon’s song when my allergies get bad: he helps me turn them into metaphor. I don’t mean I think the allergies themselves stand for something larger as much as they help me to think about how we decide what it is in life that we have to learn to live with, what we feel we can change, and what we choose to mask over by dealing with the symptoms. My take on the medical approach, as far as I can see, is that the energy is all in the masking of symptoms, not in finding a way to do away with them. Some Eastern medical practitioners both think about and treat allergies differently, as though the body is trying to say something, or that they are not something one has to get used to. When Shea, my acupuncturist, talks about them, she talks in more holistic terms about not only my whole body but also my whole being. She doesn’t have easy answers, but it does feel like she is asking better questions.

I am working to challenge myself to do something other than despair on there being any real answers. I have yet to meet my allergist; no need to decide she has already failed. Part of my task is to not settle for dealing with symptoms. Another is to work to find more than one way to look at the problem. I have spent my first fifty-six years dealing with significant allergies on one way or another. My guess is they are going to play some sort of role in most of the rest of my days. Whatever happens physically, I will give thanks tonight for the reminder to look for the masks I allow to settle in my life and to find ways to mix things up from time to time to see what needs to get out from underneath and what needs to be left behind.

Peace,
Milton

As I have gone about my day, the story weaving in and out of all of it has been the Pope’s retirement. To listen to the reporters, this is a day like none other in history. For the first time in six hundred years, someone has ceased to be the Bishop of Rome without ceasing to be. For many people around the world,  February 28th will hold the distinction of being the day the Pope stepped down. As I drove around, I began to wonder what else happened on this day in history; when I stopped, here’s some of what I found:

• 1066 — Westminster Abbey opened.
• 1784 — John Wesley chartered the first Methodist church in America.
• 1953 — Scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that contains the human genes, at Cambridge University.
• 1983 –The album “War” by U2 was released.
• 1993 — A gun battle erupted at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to serve warrants; four agents and six Davidians were killed and a fifty-one-day standoff began.

Depending on the year, this has been a day of joy, expectation, melody, confusion, and sadness. Like any other day, I suppose. Though the things I listed were somewhat random (I wrote down what caught my eye as I went down the list), it seems each of them has some element of faith, or at least some concept of something larger than ourselves — at least that’s what I picked. Crick and Watson gave us a picture of what wonder looks like at a cellular level alongside of the grandeur of Westminster; John Wesley and David Koresh stand at opposite ends of the continuum of how one lives out a prophetic call; and the U2 record provides the soundtrack: “How long to sing this song?”

Beyond the events that make news, each year has marked a February 28th when someone was born, another died, some got married, some disappeared, some succeeded, some failed, and — for some — nothing happened. In 2000, February had an extra day, which was marked for us that year by the inclusion of a foster daughter into our family. Since leap years only roll around every so often, today is the day in history I give thanks for her arrival. I’m also glad she stayed. Though the official relationship, as far as the state is concerned, ended long ago, she is part of who we are. Since  we moved to Durham, she has flown south every three or four months to see us.

This is a good day in history.

My first semester at Baylor, I took The History of Western Civilization with Dr. Wallace Daniel. He looked like a college professor, down to the wire rimmed glasses and the tweed coat with the patches on the elbows. He even smoked a pipe (it was the Seventies, after all). As he lectured, he would work a small tool in the pipe bowl, pause and light it, take a puff or two, and then put it in his coat pocket. I always imagined one day I would see a small fire come out of there, but it never happened. He did, however, light a fire in me. I became a history major, and in Russian history at that, because I wanted to be in his class. I wanted to learn from him.

He taught his classes with novels, you see. We didn’t get the Big Book of Dates and Wars and Kings. The novelists in any age, he said, are the ones who tell the truth. The facts are easy enough to find; you have to listen to the stories to learn what was really going on. Underneath the wars and royalty, people lived and died, and ate and socialized — that was the real history being made. We read Hard Times to learn about the Industrial Revolution and War and Peace to discover Russia before the Revolution, and as their characters told their stories, we found ourselves in the stream of humanity, for it is in the stories that we find ourselves and find our place.

Many of the media accounts today have focused on the intrigue within the Vatican as Cardinals jockey for position, or the regional politics of whether the next Pope should come from Africa or Latin America; they are not as much news as journalistic filler. A couple of people have talked about what Benedict will do now that he has stepped down: they have described his “stark” new abode, his desire to read and pray, and his inability to assume a public persona having been the pontiff. I appreciated the personal details because they got to the story of the man, beyond the pomp and circumstance.

In this Lenten season, I have been captured by the story of Jesus in the gospels and, as I have mentioned, the lack of detail. My friend, Todd, said in response to my post about  the weather, that the gospel writers only described the height of one person: Zacchaeus; they didn’t say a word about anyone else. Perhaps the lack of detail stands out for me because I find that I want to remember them more and more: the steep angle of the winter sun in the late afternoon, the gorgeous streaks of well-earned grey hair on Ginger’s temples that make her eyes sparkle even more, the collective concentration of those of us gathered this afternoon in Cocoa Cinnamon like pieces in an art installation, the delightful discordance of our children when they stand at the front of the sanctuary and sing, “I am the church, you are the church, we are the church together.”

On this day, I’m heading home to cook dinner for a gathering of family and friends. I expect we will make history.

Peace
Milton

One of my morning rituals is to read the Writer’s Almanac. When we lived in Massachusetts, in played on WBUR as I was going to work; here in Durham I read the text on the website. Besides a daily dose of poetry, Garrison Keillor also mentions two or three significant birthdays or anniversaries. Today is Steve Jobs’ birthday. The short essay on his life had this quote:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I smiled when I read the words because this has been one of those weeks when the theme of failure has risen back up in my life. It’s an ongoing theme, though I’m not sure of the melody. I have written about it several times — most recently here and here. A few days ago, Win Bassett pointed to the blog of one of his friends, Wil Wheaton, who is also a writer and was also hearing the same theme. He said:

. . . failing at one thing does not mean you fail at all things and that’s the end of it. Failing at something can often be the beginning of succeeding at another thing. . . .

. . . yesterday, I sat down and I plotted out a story I’ve wanted to tell for a long, long time. I sat down, thought about my big idea, and then had an incredibly fun time drilling down into that big idea to find the narrative story and character arcs that exist inside it. And the thing about doing that? It was fun. I wrote out a few mile markers to generally move the story forward, so I know what I’m driving toward, and when I got to the end, I discovered something incredibly awesome that I hadn’t even considered in the months I’ve had this idea bouncing around inside my brain. I typed it into my text document, gasped in delight, and clapped my hands like an excited child … which I guess, in that moment, I was.

This morning, I listened to the TED Radio Hour on WUNC as I drove to church, which is becoming a weekly ritual thanks to the station’s new schedule. This week’s episode asked “How Do Schools Suffocate Creativity?” The segment I heard centered around a TED Talk from a few years back by Sir Ken Robinson, a man who has spent his career looking at ways we can enhance how we learn and grow. As I was turning into the church parking lot he told a story, which a teacher told him about a little girl in her class who hardly ever paid attention. When they began drawing one day, the little girl became absorbed in the activity and more focused than she had evern been. The teacher asked her what she was drawing and the little girl said she was drawing a picture of God.

“No one knows what God looks like,” said the teacher.
“They will in a minute,” she responded.

Just as I parked the car he said,

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

That was my call to worship. When I took my seat in the sanctuary, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down what I had heard and, as we moved on into the service, I wrote, “Is that true about faith?”

Ginger preached this morning from Philippians and Paul’s admonition to be imitators of Christ. She talked about the television preachers she had seen this morning who were quick to say that being faithful to God meant God would take care of everything, which of course is just not true. Not only that, it’s not helpful because when everything doesn’t come up roses, we are left feeling like, well, failures. “One mistake,” she said, “can lead us down the path to self-doubt.”

I thought of what I had heard in the car: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Ginger continued: “Being human means we are born to mess up,” and she encouraged us to open our hearts and our hands and say together,

In the light of the Cross, I will let go of the need to be all things to all people.

I will let myself fail in Jesus’ name — just like Jesus did. One of my favorite sermons on the Crucifixion is Frederick Buechner’s “The Magnificent Defeat” Jesus was not a success by any earthly measure: he amassed no fortune, he had a marginal following, he had no political power, he had no family or heirs, and he was executed. His willingness to live such a life is what made the hope of Easter possible.

For the benediction to our day, Ginger and I walked in the cool of the evening through our town and found our way to some Mexican food along the way. We talked through the sermon and I told her what I had heard, alongside of trying to figure out what life looks like in the days ahead. The book tours I was able to do in the fall and in February were awesome and wonderful and important and small. I am where I have been often in my life, figuring out how to fail faithfully.

Tonight, I have few answers. I just needed to say the questions out loud again and be reminded of what I know is true. I am also grateful for a friend who called to invite me to Nashville in a couple of weeks. His encouragement could not have been timed any better. Life is good and hard and also full of grace.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — (Here’s the shameless plug part: his deal is on Saturday, March 9; anyone up for putting something together either Friday or Sunday?)

My church is on a roll.

Not too many weeks ago, we spent three Sunday nights together for “Forgetting But Not Forgotten: Alzheimer’s and Faith,” which attracted over eighty people each week. On Tuesday of this week, we began a four week Lenten series, “Poverty in Durham: A Faith Perspective.” Twenty-seven percent of our children live in poverty. Though poverty is not unique to our town, I think the level of determination to figure out how to end poverty in our lifetime is not the standard discussion in most places.

And that’s what we are going to be talking about — not only how to get aid and support and food and care to those in need, but also how to offer that care in a way that treats the recipient as an equal and doesn’t make them pay for the gift by having to accept our condescension along with it. We are also going to be talking about systemic change — in our town, in our lives, and in our nation and world.

This week’s focus was “The Challenge of Poverty in Durham” and we looked at the challenge in faith, in fact, and in person. I don’t plan to recount the entire evening, but I do want to mention part of one speech that has hung with me. Mel Williams, who just retired as pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church and is now working with End Poverty Durham, was the one who talked about the challenge in faith. He began by saying,

At Watts Street, whenever we looked at a mission opportunity, we asked three questions:

is it good news?
does it seem impossible?
is it likely to fail?

If the answer to all three questions is yes, there’s a good chance the Spirit of God is at work in it.

From there, he moved through several Bible passages from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus pointing out God’s continual call to not only care for but to identify with the those in poverty. And then he asked:

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

The last speaker for the evening was a woman named Kimberly Crowe who spoke about poverty from a first hand experience. She recounted her difficult life, which included living in her car while she was six months into a high risk pregnancy, struggling to pay bills and find adequate housing, and also what life was like now that she was working two jobs and trying to raise her child who has some serious medical issues. In the question and answer time that followed, she brought her story into the present tense, saying she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to keep her fifteen dollar an hour job because they would not take her family needs into consideration for scheduling; the “needs of the business” were all that mattered. She anticipated she would have to let that job go so she could take her son to the doctor and keep the eight dollar an hour job to at least bring in some money.

At the close of the program, several people descended on her with offers of rides and other tangible support. Her needs were ones we could meet. As we did, Mel’s question came ringing back in my mind:

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

Our state legislature and our governor have decided to “fix” the tax system here in North Carolina. I think they mean “fix” as in make it work again; I hear it as “fix” as in setting the game up so the winners and losers are predetermined. The proposal discussed today was to do away with our state income tax and raise sales tax on food and also adding it to several services, which means ending a tax that distributes the burden of bill paying over all of society and beginning one that burdens those who have less at every turn. Taxing food and clothing punishes the poor, period. At the very same time, our legislators are considering ending the corporate income tax. We are not just turning our backs on the poor, we are knocking them down and driving over them.

And our state is by no means unique. Much of the rhetoric on the national level centers around blaming the poor for ruining our economy since they get things like food stamps. We even call the programs “entitlements,” as though it was some sort of privilege to have to stand in line for hours to get economic assistance, or that a welfare check was some kind of golden ticket. Too often, poor is used as a euphemism for lazy or stupid. Neither is true. Poverty is not a disease, or a life choice, or even a consequence, or a judgment; it is not having enough to live like a human being. And Jesus called us to do all we can to let people know they are uniquely and wonderfully created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

i hope the question haunts me long past Lent and on beyond Easter. It’s hard and messy because it means we have to talk about the strata of our society that involve race and class and education. It means we have to look at those who stand with signs along the side of the road and figure out what to do for that one person and we have to think about how to change our social systems that thrive on the backs of the poor. Our elected officials are not going to lead us because in the polished halls of wealth and power where they live, they can see only as far as their arrogance and fear allow. This one’s on us.

What if God is leading us to the poor and the poor to us for the cause of our salvation?

Discuss . . .

Peace,
Milton