don't eat alone

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, or if you have read Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal, you know about Thursday Night Dinner. We gather each week with friends around our table for no other reason than to be around the table together. OK, so it also gives me a chance to try new things and have fun in the kitchen since I don’t cook in a restaurant any more. But even the cooking is aimed at us being together. The point of a good meal is to create a memory.

Ginger and I have had some kind of dinner gathering once a week for most of our marriage, and mostly on Thursday nights. In our years here on Trinity Avenue the dinners have taken on a new life. Some of it, I think, is because of Durham. This is a town filled with people for whom being together is a primary value. As I have said many times, it is the most encouraging place I have ever lived. Some of it is our big old house that feels as though it was built with open arms. From our first night in this place we felt at home. But most of it has to do with who sits around our table from week to week. Our dream has always been to have an open table where we can invite new people into the circle. Alongside of that dream, we have a Durham family of regulars for whom Thursday Night Dinner is as much a part of their lives as it is ours. They come early to help cook, they stay late to wash dishes, and in between we sit around the table and share our weeks and our lives.

We have gathered together to celebrate and to grieve. I suppose I would do better to find a way to say both of those are ongoing activities. We celebrate and grieve together on a weekly basis. John Berger says, “It is on the site of loss that hopes are born.” Around our table each week we have become midwives of hope. When we clear the table and everyone goes on to whatever tomorrow holds, I feel as though we have helped to give birth to more hope in our world.

As this Thursday night comes to an end, I feel as though if all I had to show for this week was I cooked for and ate dinner with my friends around our table that would be enough. I only wish the table were bigger.

Peace
Milton

One of my favorite Pierce Pettis songs begins, “The presence of your absence follows me.” The song has played in the background of my week because tomorrow, December 18, will mark five years since my dear friend David Gentiles died.

I could say many things about David, but maybe this will give you an idea: after five years, his Facebook page is still active because those he loved and encouraged have continued to talk to him. And those he loved and encouraged are legion. I am one of them.

For most of the month I have thought we were marking four years, but the other night as I was digging back through memories I realized it has been five years without him here on the planet. Life has gone on. All of his family and friends have waked up and lived and loved and hurt and missed him. And we are not alone. Most everyone we meet is living through the day after and the day after that, stringing together weeks and months lived in the presence of a palpable absence. The more days we live, the larger the cloud of witnesses, the more of those with whom we are without.

Tonight there are Pakistani parents who are living without their children, alongside of parents in Sudan, Sandy Hook, and Ferguson. A colleague at work who is in her twenties spent today at her father’s memorial service. One of our church members was back Sunday from her father’s funeral. The longer we live, the more grief becomes our most common currency.

We have much in my life for which to be grateful, not the least of which are the friends, family, and even acquaintances that fill each scene, that give us a chance to feel connected, challenged,and loved. Everyday we are called to be together, to invest ourselves in one another, to connect, to love, to be with each other, even as we understand one day we will be without.

Such is the risk, the cost of love.

It’s worth it.

Peace,
Milton

Going to the mall each day means being inundated with holiday music — well, the same ten songs. I thought tonight I might offer a soundtrack that has found me in these days. Talking about Patty Griffin’s “Mary” a couple of days ago set me to thinking. My list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it traditional, as far as Christmas music is concerned, but these are songs to learn and sing. Together.

Paul Simon’s most recent album holds a song called “Getting Ready for Christmas Day.”

Getting ready, oh we’re getting ready
For the power and the glory and the story of the
Christmas Day

To say Steve Earle has a Christmas song might be surprising to some. He actually has two. “Christmastime in Washington” remains powerful and current, but tonight I want to point to “Nothing but a Child.”

Nothing but a child could wash these tears away
Or guide a weary world into the light of day
And nothing but a child could help erase these miles
So once again we all can be children for awhile

Somewhere along the way I picked up Over the Rhine’s record, “Snow Angel.” One of the songs is called “Here It Is.”

somewhere down the road well lift up our glass
and toast the moment and the moments past
the heartbreak and laughter, the joy and the tears
the scary, scary beauty of whats right here
I’m wrappin’ up my love this Christmas
and here it is

Though it is not a Christmas song, James Taylor’s setting of Reynolds Price’s text, “New Hymn,” is hauntingly comforting, even as it is disquieting.

Till our few atoms blow to dust
or form again in wiser lives
or find your face and hear our name
in your calm voice the end of night
if dark may end.
Wellspring gold of dark and day,
be here, be now.

Emmylou Harris’ record Light of the Stable has long been one of my favorites. The last verse of the title track says,

Come now, there it shines so bright
To the knowing light of the stable
Lean close to the child so dear
Cast aside your fear and be thankful

Hallelujah.

Peace,
Milton

Last night before I went to bed, I pulled the box up out of the basement that holds our tree (both Ginger and I are allergic to the real ones) and we set it up in the living room. As we working, I said to Ginger, “I wonder if life was this hectic for Mary and Joseph.” We laughed. We wanted to get to it earlier. We were able to do it last night. So we cut ourselves some slack and enjoyed the lights on our tree (I wish you could see . . .). Tonight we went caroling with a group of our neighbors, which is an annual event in Old North Durham. I look forward to turning on our outside lights every night.

Still, I am finding it hard to feel in sync with the season. To feel the rhythm of the dance, if you will. When I get to Sunday mornings and am able to do my thing as the prophet, singing and reading the scripture, I feel connected to the story. Yet, somehow, I also feel a little bit like Cindy Lou Who: Where are you, Christmas?

This week our church will have our annual Blue Christmas service, which is designed to make room for the sadness and heaviness many of us carry through these days. It is one of my favorite services of the entire year, even if it’s far more quiet and meditative than is comfortable for an extrovert like me. I wish more people knew it was there. There’s enough sadness to fill the room. (Did I mention the service is 7 p.m. this Wednesday at Pilgrim UCC here in Durham?)

For all the tinsel and trappings that make up the season, the more I hear the story and work, as Meister Eckhart says, to give birth to Christ in my time and in my culture, the more I find the sadness inherent in life is intrinsic to the story. The darkness of these days is not simply something to endure to get to Christmas, these are the labor pains. The light shines in the darkness. One of the songs that always speaks to me during this season is Patty Griffin’s “Mary.” The song begins,

Mary
you’re covered in roses,
you’re covered in ashes
You’re covered in rain
you’re covered in babies,
you’re covered in slashes
You’re covered in wilderness,
you’re covered in stains
You cast aside the sheet,
you cast aside the shroud of another man
who served the world proud
you greet another son, you lose another one
on some sunny day and always stay
Mary

The angel said his name would be Emmanuel: God with us.

Who knows how many times I’ve written that sentence. It doesn’t get old to me. Here in the darkness, God with us. Even if we aren’t finished decorating.

Peace
Milton

I was going back through some poems and found this one, so I spent a little time revising it and offer it anew tonight. Feel free to sing along.

first lines

I pulled into Nazareth was feeling ‘bout half past dead
I don’t want to hear a love song
doctor my eyes have seen the years and the slow parade of tears
headlights are flashing down the highway
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home
a look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping
when you’re down and troubled and you need a helping hand
keep a fire burning in your eye pay attention to the open sky
you who are on the road must have a code that you can live by
you come a-walking with a scar on your soul
taking too much too lightly
you with the sad eyes don’t be discouraged

there’s a river of sorrow in my soul
there’s a river of love that flows through all times
don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
there are the ones you call friends
the mississippi delta’s shining like a national guitar
another turning point a fork stuck in the road
people get ready there’s a train a-comin’
you can play the game and act out the part
baby I’ve been searching like everybody else
in the middle of late last night I was sitting on a curb
where have all my friends gone? they’ve all disappeared
like a bird on a wire like a drunk in a midnight choir

I’ve been sleeping for some hours
just woke up and you were there
I will remember you will you remember me
when the road gets dark and you can no longer see
in every heart there is a room a sanctuary safe and strong
didn’t say we wouldn’t hurt anymore
people that are sad they wear a frown
it’s coming on Christmas and they’re cutting down trees
I heard was there was a secret chord
eight years old with a flour sack cape tied all around his neck
I’ve heard love songs make a Georgia man cry
am I young enough to believe in revolution

when it’s dark outside you’ve got to carry the light
the waltzing fool he’s got lights in his fingers
there ain’t nobody asked to be born
shut it down and call this road a day
we’re living in a time of inconvenience
you come home late and you come home early
we are swimming with the snakes at the bottom of the well
all the unsaid words that I might be thinking
the presence of your absence follows me
something in your eyes makes me want to lose myself
here we go again another round of blues
it was all I could do to keep from crying

oh play me a blues song and fade down the lights
so many years so many hardships
just when every ray of hope was gone
tell anybody that ain’t got nobody somebody’s coming
when I was a little boy my daddy told me mister
don’t ever try to climb too high ’cause it’s the fall that gets you
screen door slams Mary’s dress waves
we are swimming with the snakes at the bottom of the well
when you start if you exist God believes in you
I am an old woman named after my mother
I’ve been lately thinking about my lifetime
I can hear her heartbeat from a thousand miles

Peace,
Milton

As I was driving to and from work today I heard interviews on NPR related to what is being called “The Torture Report,” or the “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” which looked at the secret prisons the CIA ran around the world after September 11, 2001. (And I read this summary.) They were justified as being what we needed to do to find Osama bin Laden and make the world safe again, or at least make us feel less scared.

When their practices first came to light, government officials came up with the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to avoid admitting that the people being held were being tortured. In the interviews today they were still holding that line of defense. When Robert Seigel asked rather pointedly if the ex-Congress member thought what was done was torture, Pete Hoekstra went into a song and dance about what was legal. Siegel asked if “in common language” what was done would be understood as torture. Hoekstra replied, “I can see how it could be considered torture.”

The questions I wanted someone to ask was, “If one of your family was in detention and these tactics were used on them, would you still say they were ‘enhanced techniques’?” and “When these kind of tactics have been used on our soldiers when they were prisoners of war, did we still see them as acceptable behavior?”

To justify what we have done and are doing by saying the terrorists are wicked people and we have to play their game to get them is not something I am willing to accept. It doesn’t make sense. I realize we live in a violent world. I realize there are people who want to do Americans harm. How does egregiously injuring some of them lessen the threat of their violence against us? How does imitating their inhumanity offer any chance of peace? In our fear and fury over the last decade and a half, we have spent lots of money, done lots of damage, and destabilized two countries. How has responding to violence with violence made things better?

It hasn’t.

Whatever defense is offered for our torturing uncharged detainees in secret prisons on foreign soil so they could sidestep American law cannot stand up to the question, “If these same actions were being done to someone you care about, would it still be OK with you?”

Then it shouldn’t be OK for anyone.

Peace,
Milton

It was the summer of 1984, as I remember it.

I was twenty-seven, living in Dallas, Texas and working as a chaplain at Baylor Medical Center. My father was pastoring at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston. The ties between us were strained a bit, in large part because I was working hard to figure out who I was distinct from the man I was named for, much as he had had to do with Milton the First when he had been my age. Actually he had to figure it out earlier because his dad died before he was twenty-eight.

Some time that summer my father called and asked to come see me. He drove up from Houston and we went to dinner. He told me a story I knew already but I could tell somehow he needed to tell it again. My grandfather lived longer than any Cunningham male and he dropped dead of a heart attack (that was the phrase Dad always used) at fifty-seven. As we talked, I did the math in my head: my father was months away from his fifty-seventh birthday. He knew we were still figuring things out between us and he was on a sort of farewell tour, just in case fifty-seven was his number as well. We had a great evening together. As he left he told me he loved me and he was proud of me. And then he went on to live until a month before his eighty-fifth birthday.

This Friday, December 12, I will turn fifty-eight. Or, as my father always pointed out, I am finishing my fifty-eighth year.

Though the number didn’t scare me quite as much as it did my father, this is a moment worth marking: I am the second male in my family to live beyond fifty-seven. I am grateful for the life I have lived and hopeful for the days to come. I am planning to follow in my father’s footsteps and stretch this out for awhile longer. And tonight I am also grateful for both Miltons who preceded me, who begat me, who helped shape me.

Here’s to beginning number fifty-nine.

Peace,
Milton