I did my best not
to watch but couldn’t
help but listen when
they talked about it on
the radio as
I drove to work to
play with kids and words
the announcer spoke
of the prince and his
longtime girlfriend . . .
they were just pronounced
man and wife she said
and I wondered how it
feels for her to be
sentenced as both
anachronism and
appendage so
unceremoniously
Peace,
Milton
Mary came to the grave yard alone
expecting to pour out her grief;
and she met someone she should have known
even though their encounter was brief.
She stayed after the others had gone
back to town to tell Christ was alive;
in the light that came after the dawn
he called her – and her heart was revived.
And she walked with him and talked with him,
and he told her that she was his own;
her heart must have been filled to the brim –
more was rolled away than just a stone.
Share the words by which we are freed:
Christ is risen, risen indeed.
Peace,
Milton
When we moved into our house last summer, we moved into a home where the house had been fixed up (it was built in 1926), but the yard was – well – a trash heap, in the back at least. The front yard was mostly weeds, some prettier than others. Because we wanted Ginger’s dad to be able to enjoy the backyard, since we could secure it, we put our energy there, building a fence and a deck (thanks to our friend, Cameron) and, with the help and expertise of the folks at Bountiful Backyards, we turned the trash heap into an edible, beautiful landscape. This week, which has been my spring break from school, it was time to do something about the front. Ginger and I bought some plants, were given many more by Mary Anne, our generous neighbor, and I went to work.
I started this morning by digging a hole for a camellia and I kept hitting bricks. After about the sixth one (yes, I catch on quick) I realized I was hitting more than some random refuse. Rather than digging down, I started scraping the top layer off of what turned out to be a brick walkway that ran across half the yard. The bricks were in good condition and lined up beautifully. In the nearly ninety year history of our house, it has spent little time unoccupied. Granted, our neighborhood has been what is called euphemistically “transitional,” but people have been in the house. I had to wonder how people could forget a brick walkway. At the same time, I knew how people forget sidewalks and even cities. I remembered a passage from Annie Dillard’s wonderful book, For the Time Being
New York City’s street level rises every century. The rate at which the dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortes walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago; the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall neat the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.
Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place but to forestall burial. (123)I planted azalea bushes that are about eighteen inches tall, a Japanese maple seedling that after three years has almost grown two feet, a hydrangea that isn’t much taller. Our neighbor to the right has one azalea that almost covers the whole front of her porch. She has no idea how old it is because it preceded her. Whoever planted them is long gone. Spending my day digging and planting was an exercise in mortality, in all that is temporal. I was not doing eternal work. I was planting living things whose days, like mine, are numbered. And, somehow, I was enlivened by the process. After seven hours of hard work, I came in energized as much by the process as whatever I might have accomplished.
Grain for grain, sun and rainThe last two lines describe how I felt digging around today: in tune with the land, with the eternity that lives in passing moments and daily gestures of mortality, with the hope I find in planting something I will not see full grown, with the connections in the conversations with passing neighbors, with the holy that lives in hard work. I have spent the day in the dirt, the very stuff we are made of, planting things that will bloom and die.
Find my way in nature's chain
Tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land
Today was a cold and rainy day here in Durham.
The sky never brightened beyond the dull gray of the clouds that rattled and wept most of the day. Here, where spring has arrived in full force, the temperature struggled to reach sixty degrees. In a week full of bright sunshine, the weather somehow knew how to set the scene for Good Friday. My plans to spend the day digging and planting fell by the wayside, because of the rain and a fairly sleepless night thanks to my allergies.
I had two things on my calendar for the day. One was to meet Ryan, a new friend as well as a Methodist minister and community activist, and the organizer of the Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry I wrote about not long ago. The plan was to meet him at the Pie Pushers food truck for a slice of pizza and conversation. The truck was parked in the lot at Sam’s Quik Shop, which shares the lot with a self-service car wash. We got our pizza and made a table out of a shelf in one of the car wash bays so we could eat and talk. We stood in the stall for almost an hour and a half. I had imagined the time between noon and three today being quite time alone in the garden, planting and praying and thinking about Jesus’ execution. Instead I came away both challenged and encouraged by time together with Ryan and Ginger as we talked about how our faith is best lived out in our broken world.
Late this afternoon, Ginger and I went out our back gate and across the alley to Mary Anne’s house. She is our back fence neighbor and a wonderful gardener. She sent a note out on our neighborhood listserv inviting everyone to a plant swap, which was followed by a sentence that said you didn’t have to have anything to swap to come and take part. Five or six other neighbors showed up, most with plants from their yards. Everyone was generous and helpful. We came home with six or eight buckets full of plants from irises to day lilies to Lamb’s ear to a Japanese maple seedling. Everything we brought home was small. My planting tomorrow will be an exercise in hope because most everything will need a year or two to take root and grow into itself.
I love working in the garden and I don’t always know the names of the things I’m planting. As we walked around Mary Anne’s yard, she knew them all by name and could not only tell you how to treat them in replanting, but also had stories to tell about how the various plants came to take up residence in her garden. Her stories seeded tales from the rest of us about plants and gardens and homes and families. We all left with plants for our gardens and seedlings of relationships in our hearts.
By the time we got back home, it was time to fix dinner. Ginger, her parents, and I shared the meal around our dining table. The Alzheimer’s continues to disappear my father-in-law, but tonight he had a few lucid moments. One of the things Ginger does best is invite him to step back into old memories that are still alive in his mind. He can’t recall the names of our Schnauzers for more than a minute or two, but can revel in every detail of his life growing up and while he tells those stories a little lightning sparkles in his now mostly vacant eyes.
Those who had followed Jesus stood together while Jesus was dying on the cross; many of them stayed together in the days between death and resurrection. Even in the deepest darkness, faith is a team sport. It is not good to be alone, even in the dark. Thinking about those with whom I gathered today sent my mind back to a Wendell Berry poem that moves me each time I read it. I offer it tonight as we sit in the dark together.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.Love the Lord. Love the world. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. Amen.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Brothers and sisters, from where have you come?Such was the question that greeted us as we prepared to share Communion in our Maundy Thursday. Those of us scattered across the sanctuary had come from different places. The answer we were called to give in unison was compelling:
We have come from the dust, and from the earth, and from the breath of God.I had spent the afternoon digging in the dirt, planting azaleas and hydrangeas and camellias and gardenias and all the other things that ought to grace the front yard of a Southern home. I looked down at my hands to see the dirt still under my fingernails. One of the reasons I love gardening is because of how it has helped me deal with my depression. Something about digging in the dirt centers me, encourages me – and it appears to be at an existential and theological level: I am handling the very building blocks of my existence. The difference between me and the topsoil is breath. God’s breath. Ginger begins most every service as she did tonight, inviting us to sit still and then “Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.” It is a distilled metaphor of the flow of life: from breath to love, all belonging to God. As we sat in the pew, I could feel the air in my own lungs and hear my breathing, thanks to my allergies. The questions continued:
And why have you come?Again, none of us was there for the same reason, or so I assumed. I was one of the readers in the Tennebrae service; I was also there because I love this service as much as any during the year. And, again, we were called to answer in unison:
We have come to receive the bread and the cup: the bread and the cup of promise, the bread and the cup of remembrance, the bread and the cup of hope.Tonight after church, Ginger and I went to Six Plates, a wonderful wine bar here in town, to celebrate our twenty-first anniversary. We ordered the cheese plate, as we always do when we go there. Tonight, Manchego cheese was one of the offerings. It reminded me of the Manchego crème brulee I had at the Magnolia Grill on my first birthday in Durham. It was amazing. When I mentioned it, we began recalling great meals and dishes we had had together. Life happens around the table, in the making of meals and memories, in the sharing of food and friendship. And, on this night, it all came down to a meal for Jesus and those who loved him.
What is the bread and the cup of promise?Twenty-one years ago, Ginger and I looked into each other’s eyes and made promises. Outrageous promises. We used time tested words about better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health without knowing what lie ahead. We were mostly committing ourselves to grow into the promises. I read the passage tonight that described Peter denying he even knew Jesus – not once, but three times, each one more vociferous. Then he heard the rooster and remembered he had promised he would be true to the end. In the next week or two, we will read the story of the next meal Jesus and Peter shared together – a meal in which the promise was restored because of who Jesus was in his life.
The bread and the cup of promise is Christ Jesus our Lord. We come to receive the promise of his life in ours.
What is the bread and cup of remembrance?Most any time I come to Communion and we talk of remembering, I think of a youth camp many years ago when Kenny, who was the camp pastor, asked us to identify the opposite of remember, to which most answered, “Forget.”
The bread and cup of remembrance is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to remember Jesus and his life in ours.
What is the bread and the cup of hope?Jesus shared the bread and cup with his disciples and was dead by the middle of the next afternoon. They knew nothing of Easter. They only knew the one they had trusted had been executed among common criminals. They ran. They hid. They went fishing. They went to the tomb. When it comes to acting out the Easter story, we know the Cross is not the Last Word. As Tony Campolo has preached more times than he can remember, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming . . . . In our daily lives, we, like the disciples, have no idea what tomorrow holds. We know only the pain and promise we find in today, and the hope we have mustered and saved from days gone by, based on the love we have found to be true. Or, perhaps untrue. Hope is keeping on. We hope when we set the alarm clock for tomorrow morning, when we plan whatever’s next, when we look beyond all that so easily besets us, when we sit down together for dinner.
The bread and the cup of hope is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to renew our hope in him and his life in ours.
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heartAnd then we shared our meal of promise, remembrance, and hope together and went out into the night, knowing tomorrow is the day that marks God’s magnificent defeat,
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
In my heart in my heart
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
the wildflower patch is coming
back for an encore performance
after last year’s inaugural run
right now everything is a verdant
vibrant and bloomless array of
weeds and flowers, best I can tell
so I hesitate to pull anything
up by the roots because I just
might be pulling up wildflowers
from the highways of my youth
I remember fields of bluebonnets
surely weeds were among them
is it reason enough to pull up
what I don’t recognize because
it’s not something I planted
Peace,
Milton
Because Easter is a moveable feast, our twenty-first wedding anniversary falls on Maundy Thursday. So we celebrated tonight. The Playmakers Repertory Company at UNC is doing a production of Big River, a musical telling of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The musical was on Broadway in the mid-eighties. The songs were written by the King of the Road himself, Roger Miller. Playmakers put on a great show, as usual, and we had a wonderful time.
At one point early on in the play, Jim tells Huck that life has “considerable tragedy and considerable joy.” One comes with the other. I would go as far to say one is essential to the other. When we have the capacity to experience considerable tragedy, it opens up to considerable joy, and vice versa. To be able to feel deeply means all of the feelings. To keep pain at arm’s length is to do the same to joy. It is also to keep others at bay as well. The shared experience of considerable emotion, regardless of the emotion, is a tie that binds.
One of the songs that most moved me this evening was called, “You Oughta Be Here With Me.” A daughter was singing in grief at the death of her father and in uncertainty of what the future might hold.
if you think it's lonesome where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
if you think there's heartache where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
because with you I'm whole, without you I'm cold
so if you think about me where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
if teardrops are falling where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
loneliness calling where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
because with you I'm whole, without you I'm cold“There’s bound to come some trouble in your life,” Rich Mullins used to sing, “but that ain’t nothing to be afraid of.” Poets and songwriters all the way back to Ecclesiastes have known what Jim was telling Huck. The contour of our existence goes as low as it does high. The human race is not run on a flat track.
so if you think about me where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
this is the story of two common heartsWe’re not yet as old as the couple in my song, and I look forward to many more years together. I’m also happy to say, twenty-one years on, I wrote a pretty good song back then. It was not just my imagination running away with me. I am grateful for the considerable love that Ginger and I share in both our tragedy and joy.
that started out young and grew old
they have practiced a lifetime
the waltz of a well-worn love
We drove to Hampton, Virginia Sunday after church to surprise our friend Charles who turns fifty tomorrow. We walked into their house around suppertime, ate, and then sat around the table talking as old friends do. Our conversation turned to music and then to the music we grew up on, which is gospel. Thanks to Youtube, we were able to share a few of our favorites, starting with Vestal Goodman and Johnny Cook singing, “Looking for a City.” I know. I’ve written and linked before to several gospel video clips because I do find something there that moves me even though the theology of the songs doesn’t always match up with mine.
One of the singing experiences that had a profound impact on my life was being a part of a production of Celebrate Life, which was a youth musical by Buryl Red and Regan Courtney based on the gospels that was a centerpiece of Baptist youth choirs for many, many years. The songs are receptacles of memories and emotions from long ago; some of them remain essential tracks in the soundtrack of my faith. As Holy Week begins, one in particular appears -- a Communion song called “In Remembrance.”
in remembrance of me eat this bread
in remembrance of me drink this wine
in remembrance of me pray for the time
when God's own will is done
in remembrance of me heal the sick
in remembrance of me feed the poor
in remembrance of me open the door
and let your brother i, let him in
take eat and be comforted
srink and remember too
that this is my body and precious blood
shed for you, shed for you
in remembrance of me search for truth
in remembrance of me always love
in remembrance of me don't look above
but in your heart, in your heart
look in your heart for God
do this in remembrance ofmeAfter the weekend with Julie and Jay here, a great night with Charles and Jennifer and Samuel in Virginia, and the chance tonight to help out some of my Durham friends on their food truck, I feel full and fortunate. I am grateful that I can look around me and quite easily see the love of God in the faces looking back. As we move through this significant and holy week, I’m carrying this song, and the line in particular that sings:
do this in remembrance of me
in remembrance of me
in remembrance of me always love.Peace,
This Sunday is one with two faces,
from shouts of hosanna to curses,
and which emphasis that one places
or whether one reads all the verses
that take Jesus from palms to Passion
and us from fanfare to forgiveness.
We move in liturgical fashion
to do all we can to bear witness
to a love that will not let us go,
even when we’re the cause of the pain.
The two things held together help show
our untamed God cannot be detained.
Did ever such love and sorrow meet?
This is our magnificent defeat.
Peace,
Milton
I’ve spent the last three days volunteering with the Full Frame Documentary Festival, one of the highlights of the Durham calendar and the largest documentary film festival in the world. I was assigned to the Artist Hospitality Team whose job it was to take the film makers and subjects of the documentaries to and from the airport. What I loved most about the gig was I had twenty-five or thirty minutes with these folks in the car to find out about their movies and to brag a bit on my fair city. I met some wonderful people who had worked hard to get their stories to the screen.
The thing they all had most in common was that their stories took years to tell. Often they had followed their subjects for four or five years, not to mention the time and effort it took to actually get the film funded and produced. The highlight of my weekend was my last run of the morning when I picked up Elmo from the airport.
Kevin Clash is the puppeteer who is the subject of the documentary Being Elmo that showed here this week. I took one of the film’s producers out to the airport to pick up Kevin so he could be here for the screening this afternoon. When I picked up his luggage, he pointed to one small bag and said, “Don’t let that one get crushed; it’s Elmo.” Having been a serious Muppet fan for many years, I was very careful with the luggage and quite excited to be the one driving them all back to town.
This afternoon, I got to see the movie.
When Kevin was nine years old, he saw Sesame Street and the Muppets and was so captured by them that he started making puppets of his own. He then began doing puppet shows in his yard, which led to someone in Baltimore discovering him and bring him to a local TV kids show, which led him to be discovered by Captain Kangaroo and then Jim Henson. When he joined Sesame Street, Kevin didn’t have a set character that he played with any regularity. Elmo had only a small part on the show and the puppeteer who was doing him was frustrated with what he was doing. One day, he tossed the puppet to Kevin and said, “Do whatever you want with this one.”
And Elmo, as we know him, was born.
When Kevin talked about how he developed the character of the little red puppet, he said he began to study the other successful characters on Sesame Street and realized that each one had a defining characteristic. The more he thought about Elmo, he realized what defined Elmo was he loved everyone. From that realization, Kevin brought the Elmo we know into being, who is one who loves better than he does anything else. “Elmo loves you,” the little red guy said over and over, and that unabashed, unfiltered love was the driving force of the movie.
I could feel the tears running down my cheeks as I watched people of all ages fall into the arms of the little red ragamuffin or break into smiles when he laughed. What Elmo understands is when we share love from the core of who we are we create space for all of us to teach and learn and pray. I watched Elmo and I wondered about my own defining characteristic, about what animates my life and my faith.
After the movie, I met Ginger to go to a wedding reception for a couple whom Ginger married while I was watching Elmo. The groom was English and the bride from Durham. They are living in England and got married here in her home church and town. As their friends and family talked about them, what became clear was they, too, were defined by the way they loved both one another and those around them. The evening was one of pure celebration.
From the reception, we headed to Watts Grocery where we met Jay and Julie, two of our intentional family, and we ate and drank and laughed and talked as we have done more evenings than I can count. As we laughed, I thought of Elmo’s giggle as he hugged the kids of all ages that gathered around him after the screening was over, of Kevin Clash as he called an eight-year old girl to the front who makes her own puppets and whom he is mentoring as others did for him. I looked at Ginger, to whom I will have been married twenty-one years this coming Thursday and I thought, much like Elmo we all come to life when our love is what defines us.
Peace,
Milton
perhaps this could be seen
as meeting the minimum
requirement of my promise . . .
I far exceeded, however,
my quota for laughter,
baseball, and my spirit
soared like a fly ball
in the thin night air . . .
forgive me if I am
a man of few words
Peace,
Milton
Marco Werman, the anchor for The World, said, “texted” in a sentence as the past tense of the verb “to text.” Though I’ve come to terms with the transition “text” has made form noun to verb (notice I didn’t say, “transitioned”), I’ve struggled with how to speak of texting in the past tense. It rolls off the tongue like a grammatical mistake, an expression of miseducation, a triumph of convenience over thoughtful expression. I have worked hard not capitulate, choosing instead to say, “I sent you a text message,” hoping I could keep English from yet another assault of verbiating.
And there it was. On NPR, no less.
We Americans, the champions of expediency, have less and less need for verbs it seems. We find it easier to simply put nouns in their place. We friend each other on Facebook (“friended”?), where once we became friends with one another. Perhaps the one that gets me most is hearing people speaking of “gifting” something to another. What’s wrong with giving?
Catching up on other NPR stories I missed, I found this one on new books for language lovers a bit later and a review of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
John McWhorter, who specializes in linguistic change, takes us across dozens of tongues and thousands of years, even speculating about the first human speech. We learn the process that turned the Romans' femina (woman) into the modern French femme, shedding two syllables and even changing vowel sounds. But it's not all erosion and wearing down. McWhorter also shows how words can become more complicated over time, explaining, for example, where Italian verb endings came from. Seeing numerous languages laid out over history gives a valuable pause for those who mutter about decline. Languages don't decline; they change. Getting too attached to one moment in time is like getting too invested in the position of the goo in a lava lamp, McWhorter says. You can be bitter watching them shift, or you can be absorbed by the beauty in the process.I’m sure he texted people who had friended all day, once he heard his book would be impacted by a review.
To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.
Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.
Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”
there are some nights
when the sky turns
the color of friendship
and fades into the crisp
darkness of gratitude
we ate with friends
drank and talked as well
and then walked away
dropping bit of hope
like breadcrumbs
along the sidewalks
and silent porches
finding our way home
to our porch light
our beacon of belonging
summer will come
and winter will follow
and footprints will fade
but not this indelible
wisp of memory
Peace,
Milton
If you haven’t heard, Rob Bell has written a book
I haven’t read it, but he apparently has a lot of nerve claiming God loves everyone. What I have read are any number of blog posts, articles, and straight out rants claiming that Bell’s argument that Hell might not exist is not just wrong but evil or dangerous – or both. A Facebook acquaintance posted a link – without irony – to an article by John McArthur entitled, “Rob Bell: A Brother to Embrace or a Wolf to Avoid?”
Seriously?
I used McArthur’s own search function on his blog to see if he ever called Fred Phelps into question and found nothing.
Michael Morrell is a Facebook friend I have never met, but I count him as a friend because he sends me books, thanks to theOoze.com. The latest one will probably make John McArthur invite Rob Bell over for dinner just because of the title: If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics
Within the miracle of a living and evolving universe, our understanding evolves regarding God, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, what it means to be a faith community, and what it means to be human. There is no final, un- changing form of Christianity. God’s last word was not uttered two thousand years ago in Nazareth. We can detect in the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and in the stories of His resurrection, the evolutionary bias of an eternal, loving Presence. The failure to update our theological and liturgical models has resulted in modes of worship, spiritual practice, and images of God, that are out of sync with reality (and Reality) as we know it to be.I’ve been meaning to write a review for awhile, but reading McArthur’s post – and my acquaintance’s willingness to pass it along – gave me the impetus to pass along some words intended to foster faith and community. Sanguin wonders aloud in his opening poem how Darwin might have responded had faith been framed differently for him. Though the poem is long, I’m posting the whole thing here because I couldn’t figure out what to cut.
If Darwin Prayed
I wonder, if Mr. Darwin
had imagined a God
bigger than the theist’s puppeteer—
and less aloof
from nature’s ways—
how he might have prayed.
I wonder,
if he had viewed the great march of time
with a mystic’s eye—
as Spirit’s unhurried play with form and function,
not creation leaving God in the dust
and pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—
if his heart might not have burned with faith.
I wonder,
when the push of Eros
and the pull of the possible
caused him to close the City of God
and leave the dreary seminary
to set sail on board his Beagle destiny,
if he ever imagined that he embodied Spirit’s
irrepressible urge to evolve.
I wonder,
when he reflected on the mystery of a finch’s beak
and the glories of the Galapagos,
if Mr. Darwin considered his own adaptive brilliance
that brought forth The Origin of Species
(his great gift to theology)
an occasion of an even deeper Mystery—
evolution awakening in him.
I wonder,
if, hunched long years
over beetles and mollusks,
he ever considered
St. Paul’s self-emptying God,
touching all with a rising,
noncoercive Presence,
and then going on ahead of us—
as did the Galilean—
calling from an undissected future,
beckoning this sighing creation
toward freedom and fullness of being.
I wonder, Mr. Darwin,
if your beloved Emma might have worried less
over your apostasy
if you could have played the prophet
and announced, with the Baptist,
evolution was filling every valley
making low the mountains,
preparing a highway
through Descartes’ desert,
for the advent,
and not the end,
of God.
(If I were God,
I too would keep my presence hidden,
an allurement of love that predestines no fixed future,
conferring maximum dignity upon life,
as together all that is
joins in the great procession
of the formless,
assuming forms most glorious,
crowning the human ones
with a distinctive diadem—
the capacity to select our own future,
naturally).
I wonderThe rest of the book offers prayers that follow the ecclesiastical seasons, each tied to a scripture passage, with most of them having been used in worship at Sanguin’s church. The overarching sense of the prayers is one of wonder and openness. These are not the prayers of people convinced they have the answer, or that they need to protect God, but people thriving on questions and committed to being lost in wonder, love, and praise.
if Darwin prayed.
One of the signatures of my life are pockets of unfinished things.
I have shelves of unfinished books, stacks of papers to be gone through, any number of unfinished household projects, and – thanks to an attempt, at least, to finish unpacking one corner of the guest room in our house – a folder of unfinished songs. At the end of the last century, I was a songwriter, collaborating with a good friend. I wrote lyrics and contributed on the harmonies. When that chapter of my life came to a close, I came away with the idea that I was not a melody maker, so the not-yet-songs found their way into folders and unfinished stacks and have stayed hidden for so long that I find it hard remembering them. Some in the stack have stayed with me in one form or another, but others were a complete surprise. This is one that caught my attention:
a world away
on a road outside nairobi
someone’s walking home
someone’s burning dinner
someone’s about to go
half a world away from me
I don’t know any names
on a road outside nairobi
it happens just the same
on a subway in st. petersburg
someone has to stand
a woman’s having trouble
another lends a hand
as the five o’clock train fills up
like a mobile sardine can
on a subway in st. petersburg
they’re heading home again
name a town pick a place
take a lap in the human race
find yourself a world away
in the people you won’t see today
in a house in yokahama
the little one’s asleep
while parents balance bank accounts
and say the rent’s too steep
grandma’s on the telephone
asking how’s my little girl
in a house in yokahama
it’s not such a different world
name a town pick a placePart of the reason this particular text struck me is the theme, which is one I’ve carried with me for many years. I can remember saying to friends in college, “Sometimes it bothers me that there are places I’ve never been – whole cities, countries – where no one has ever waked up and said, ‘I wonder what Milton is doing.’ They have never missed me and they’re doing just fine.” As long as I’m printing older works, I even wrote this poem a few years back:
take a lap in the human race
find yourself a world away
in the people you won’t see today
spokane
a family is gathering for a meal
outside Spokane
the daughter is still
wearing her soccer uniform
the mother is chatting
as she passes the potatoes
the father is nonverbal, tired
trying to engage the dog is
waiting for someone to share
they will finish their dinners
their conversations
their homework
they will turn on the television
the phone will ring several times
It will not be me
no one in that house knows
I live across the continent or
I have tales to tell of my youth
of my life, of what I did yesterday
they don’t know I can cook or play
guitar, or that I’m writing a poem
they don’t know I’ve never
been to Spokane and
they’re not concerned
they are finding their dreams
building their lives
breaking their hearts
living out their days
without knowing me
and they are not the only ones
in all my years
the phone has never rung
and a voice declared
“come quickly to spokane
we just realized we can’t
go on without you”
the same could be said
for the table across the room
from me here in the coffee shop
the gossamer tether of humanityThe other reason I was caught by the folder I found was there were several poems/lyrics that were fairly complete and yet had sat in the blue cardboard folder with the picture of Pooh reading to Piglet while each one of them sits on a stack of books and the inscription, “Words and Such.” On the bookshelf next to the desk where I’m writing tonight are three more binders of unborn and unfinished songs, a whole stack of journals with snippets of insight, a couple of folders with articles and quotes, five icons that need to be completed, and a draft of a novel that I finished, but never could figure out what to do next. Within arm’s reach is an archaeological exhibition of the layers of my writing life with almost as much left undone as done, I suppose.
doesn’t appear to reach as far
as the next booth unless the light
is just right and I can see the lines
I’m not sure which view
is easier to live with
In my darkest night,In this trinity of existence – archaeologist, settler, explorer – I re-member my life in what has been, what is, and what is to come. I cannot see beyond the borders of my limitations and can reach farther than I can imagine.
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
First the news of Lazarus dying
before Jesus had time to get there --
Then the image of Jesus crying
must have giv’n the disciples a scare . . .
He got to the tomb and called out his friend,
with the others saying, “He stinketh” –
they had no idea death was no end,
Jesus said, “Death is not what you thinketh.”
God showed Ezekiel a valley of death
then gift wrapped bones in new life and skin –
God’s subversive pow’r in every breath:
in our endings is where God begins
touching that miraculous circumstance
where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance*
Peace,
Milton
*with grateful appreciation to Mark Heard
I spent the morning and early afternoon at the Third Annual Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry at Avent Ferry United Methodist Church in Raleigh. My primary connection to the event was through my friendship with Ryan Rowe, who is a member of the church and the organizer of this year’s conference. He asked me to help with the food.
The conference is named for a former pastor of the church who was responsible for helping the church to galvanize its identity in the midst of the civil rights struggle. In 1958, they were meeting in a dairy barn that belonged to a rich benefactor. The church was an all white congregation. Crum invited James Lawson, an African-American and fellow Methodist, to come a preach. The man who owned the barn, and who was also going to donate land to let them build a church, said if Lawson came he would evict them and take back his land.
Ryan read part of the sermon Crum preached the following Sunday, prior to Lawson taking the pulpit. “Money cannot buy our witness,” he said. And then he repeated himself. Then Crum went on to say the second galvanizing principle was to stand against those who were wrong but “to love them in the midst of their wrongness.” “Speaking the truth without love,” said Crum, “is not Christian.”
And then, fifty-three years later, James Lawson himself stepped once again into the pulpit of Avent Ferry UMC. This man who went on from that Sunday in 1958 to pastor in India, to study with followers of Gandhi, to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to train civil rights activists in nonviolent actions, to ride in the last stages of the Freedom Rides when the early riders had been beaten down, to pastor in Memphis and work with Martin Luther King to organize the sanitation workers stood up today to stand with those working to keep a well integrated and successful school system in Raleigh from being taken apart by forces reminiscent of those who opposed him fifty years ago. He spoke with a gentle and calm authority, not as one who had something to prove nor as a hero in the fading light, but as one who knew how to speak the truth in love and still had some truth to speak.
He talked about how hard it is to read the gospel stories of Jesus because we find it hard to let him be human, to really see him in the stories. “If you want to understand the stories of Jesus,” he said, “read a biography of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.” The fact that we were sitting in a room with no stained glass windows seemed perfect to me in that moment: he was calling us to see in new and clear images.
His words reminded me of something I read in Nathan Brown’s book, Letters to a One-Armed Poet, which chronicles his grief in the loss of one of his best friends. In a piece called “Nip and Tuck,” he writes,
I’ve buffed out so many scratches and dings in the paint of our stories, I now worry about their cosmetic integrity.
At the same time, “the truth” has always felt like salty taffy in my mouth – the way it yanks on loose teeth and takes forever to digest. And “the facts” of any matter seldom make people lean forward in their customary seats . . . seats on the front rows of lives that are filled enough already with the hassle and boredom of “what actually happened.”Right now I’m reading The Great Gatsby
with my American Literature class at school – me for about the tenth time, they for the first. Though I’ve read it with students several times, I’ve also reread it four or five times on my own because I am captured by the writing and the way the story unfolds. No matter now many times I read it, there is always something new to find there. I love to tell the storySo sings one of my favorite hymns. Thinking about what Lawson had to say this morning, what Gatsby thinks about looking across the water at Daisy’s green light, what Nathan meant by “buffing and shining,” I wonder what are the stories of Jesus – the ones with the scratches and dents of humanity and hope?
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest
, and found these words:But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make the afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.
Violent revolution? No. Non-violent revolution? Yes.
Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.
Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.Yes, and we have church buildings and jobs and families and debts and obligations and other stuff we want to do. In the jukebox that is my mind, I cue the Beatles:
you say you want a revolutionMy friend Burt called tonight while I was cooking dinner. We’ve been close friends since college – a long time ago, now. It had been awhile since we talked, so we both had stories to tell along with new scratches and dents to share. When we were younger, we thought we would change the world.
well you know we don’t want to change the world
it is a dark and stormy
night the sky is angry
flashing and bellowing
yet refusing to dissolve
into tears and weep its way
into ushering in the dawn
our middle schnauzer
runs under the bed at the
first sound of thunder
I’m typing in the dark
to better see the light show
trying to beat the deadline
imposed by my itchy eyes
and generic antihistamines
that aren’t keeping promises
any better than the lightning
Peace,
Milton
In the opening lines of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas sings
every time I look at you I don’t understandI’m sure Jesus would have broken the record for followers had he been able to Tweet, though shrinking the parables to one hundred and forty characters would have been a challenge, even for the Messiah. Even if he could have reached the world, the quality of the encounters would have been fundamentally different. Judas criticized him for lack of a plan yet, it seems to me, that is what is perhaps most essential about the gospel stories. The disciples didn’t greet him every morning with a papyrus Day-Timer and say, “We’ll start with healing a blind man after breakfast, on the way to town a woman will touch your cloak, at lunch you’ll feed the five thousand, and then raise Jarius’ daughter from the dead in the early afternoon before you catch the boat for a little ‘me’ time.”
why you let the things you did get so out of hand
you’d have managed better if you’d had a plan
why’d you choose such backward time and such a strange land
if you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation
people in 4 B.C. had no mass communication . . .
as I write, Ella,
our Schnauzer
is stretched out
on the bed barking
at the sound of
our neighbor rolling
his big trash cans
out to the curb
she cannot see him,
only hear the rumble
of the plastic wheels
and she is convinced
her sound makes a
difference even though
he doesn’t stop
rolling along and
no one inside
of our house has
made any move
other than to say,
“It’s the guy next door”
and I think about
my barking at the
two boys after lunch
who wouldn’t clear
the tables because
the trash wasn’t theirs
and I wonder if
Ella and I share
something in common
in our futile attempts
to get someone to
keep the world from
filling up with garbage
Peace,
Milton
The Fifth of April is an unusual first day of school, but today was just that for my students and me as we began our new chapter and sat down together for our first class in our new building. In each of my three English classes, we were also beginning novels. Here are their opening lines:
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.(I’ll post the book titles a bit later; see if you know them.)
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. (Paul Clifford, 1830)In 2010, this sentence won the prize:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.Speaking of bad beginnings, as I write my beloved Red Sox, picked by many to win the AL East if not the World Series, lost another game, which means they are now 0-4 to begin the season. All of us good Sox fans are quick to lean into what the old song says, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”
And I’d’ve liked an ending more like Butch and Sundance –
revolvers firing and flashing as we strut and fret our way out into a certain, yet glorious death.
But the disease forced you to follow the script, even though none of the actors in the screenplay liked it.
So, we played our parts. . . planted our poems like literary landmines in the red dirt and brimstone of the Southwest . . . until . . . your hour upon the stage was up.Sometimes the endings aren’t what we hoped either – and often for reasons beyond our reach.
Today is the future
if tomorrow never comes.
Why not insist onWe have moved far enough into Lent for Ash Wednesday to be a memory, yet Resurrection Morning is still several sunrises away. This is gut check time for me in my journaling: am I going to keep my promise to write every night? In this particular venture, I don’t get a shot at a make up. Either I wrote every night or I didn’t. Granted, there’s not a whole lot riding on my writing, other than my promise to God and to myself. Still, the exercise and discipline has far reaching implications, should I be willing to lean in and learn, or re-learn, I should say. Every beginning has a back story, every ending a trail of preparation. In the middle is what makes all the difference.
a few interesting moments
every
day?
. If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.
One hour.
Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.
One hour. Two pages. Coffee.After my new first day of school, I went to get my prescriptions refilled, got some milk at King’s Red and White, happened upon my friends Mike and Becky and their new “Pie Pushers” pizza truck and got to see what it looks like in person, and then picked up my father-in-law from the Senior Center where he goes during the day as his Alzheimer’s continues to disappear him a little at a time, and then came home to cook dinner. The day held beginnings and endings, pasts and pendings, hopes and hurts and home, like most any other day in the middle of my life as far as I know.
allergies are never mentioned
in any of the gospel stories
no one called out to Jesus
to ask for sinus relief
even in the desert’s dust
with my head as stuffed
as a dorm dirty clothes bag
and aware of the gathering
pollen storm I understand
the question – who sinned that
this man should be this way?
Peace,
Milton
John 9 tells the story of a man born blind whom Jesus healed by spreading mud on his face and telling him to and wash. Though Jesus is clear that the man was not the cause of his blindness, I was struck by the unwillingness of others to see him as anything other than blind, even after he said he could see.
sunday sonnet #24Peace,
Jesus saw a man blind from his birth –
the disciples wondered who had sinned;
Jesus spit to make mud of the earth
and said, “Go and wash to see again.
The man went to show he had been healed,
the priests and people cut him down to size --
new eyes weren’t something that could be real;
one who saw they did not recognize.
As metaphor the tale hit home most true:
how am I one who lives without sight?
Am I blind to what God has that’s new?
Will I go and wash without a fight?
Better remembered for my kindness
than be recognized for my blindness.
Tomorrow, April 3, marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech to the Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 -- his last speech before he was assassinated. After spending the morning talking with some church friends about what it means to be a peacemaker, I offer his words tonight, which read as strikingly current in light of the unrest around the world as people rise up to claim their freedom.
A complete video of the speech does not exist. I've included what I could find.
Peace,
Milton
