lenten journal: part of the story

Here’s more of Stephen Dunn, once again, from my reading today. These are the opening words to a chapter titled, “The Hand Reaching Into the Crowd.”

We live in a graceless age. Accordingly the word grace (in its various parts of speech) has lost power and significance, though it is frequently used. We have our saving graces, we are graced by one’s presence, we seek to be in someone’s good graces, and sometimes we need grace periods, which instructively, are given these days more by banks than by other higher powers. A recent headline read, Still Cheaper Chicken May Grace Our Menus Soon. The word is nearly unhearable, nearly dead, in that context in which it is familiarly used rarely compel us to engage its meaning. It might be said that all much-used, debased words are looking for restoration, for revivifying contexts.

In its Latin and Old French roots the verb means either to favor or to give thanks. In Modern French it means “to pardon.” . . . The noun’s theological definition refers to God’s free and undeserved favor, at once suggestive of beneficence and selectivity. We cannot earn it; we can only hope for mercy.

When I finished writing last night, I sat down next to Ginger in the adjacent room just to be together for a few minutes before we fell asleep. Between blogging and watching basketball, I had missed who had been voted off of American Idol. She picked up the remote to find the recording. “You can just tell me,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied, “you have to see it.”

What followed was the surprise that Casey, one of the more talented of this year’s crop, came in last in the voting. He was then given the chance to “sing for his life,” as Ryan Seacrest called it, though he was hardly through the first verse when the judges stopped him to say they were intervening to save him from elimination. They have one “save” per season and they were ready to use it. The young man was overcome. In the flood of emotion that followed, I heard him say to the judges, “You only have one save. Why would you use it on me?”

After that, all he could say was, “Thank you.”

Tonight, I sat down to dinner with three of our godchildren (and their parents). Jasmine, who is seven, was asked to say grace. She began a series of sentences, each one beginning with “Thank you, God,” that told the story of her day: what she had done, whom she had seen, what she had eaten, all the way down to our sitting around the table and the empanadas that were waiting to be consumed. By the time she was done, all I could say was, “Thank you.”

Dunn’s discussion of grace was a lead-in to a story and a poem about the aftermath of the 1993 World Series where Mitch Williams, a pitcher for the Phillies, gave up a series ending home run. Reporters descended on him in the locker room to ask the akward and agonizing questions reporters ask in the loser’s locker rooms because it was their job. “If the were better men with better jobs,” Dunn wrote, “they would have put their arms around him, asked how they might be of help.” Then, another Phillies pitcher, Terry Mulholland, reached through the mob of mic holders, took Williams’ hand, and led him away from the assault without saying anything to anyone. “Oh,” Dunn writes in the poem, “the luxury of failing in private.” Then in the next paragraph he writes,

Christianity has given us great stories of pardon and forgiveness, in other words of moral grace, but very few stories about the symmetries and felicities of art. We are our stories, which is why it is useful to know many. The scariest people I know are the ones who avidly subscribe to one story, one version of the world.

Perhaps one sign of our graceless age is fail has come into its own. We use it as almost its own part of speech. Epic Fail. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb all rolled into one. We are all each other’s band of reporters, pushing microphones into one another’s faces demanding to know how it feels to be such a screw up. Private is an anachronism. Context is of little consequence. We are being conditioned to think of life as a sequence of YouTube videos or news segments edited to show our failures from every angle without telling the story.

Jesus met the woman at the well and they talked. She had failure written all over her. She was alone at the well because that was the least painful way for her to get through her day. Jesus listened to her story and told her some of his. When she went back into the village, she invited the people who held the microphones in her face to come back with her to the well to meet the one who had offered her grace. Her statement has always been puzzling to me. She said, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done,” as if that were somehow a comforting statement. I’ve often thought perhaps the gospel writers left out part of her invitation. I want it to read, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done and still loves me.” Dunn’s description of Terry Mulholland leading Mitch Williams out of the ring of reporters gives me knew eyes. Mulholland knew what Williams had done and knew the way to forgiveness, to grace and gratitude. Not only did he know, but he took him there by telling his own story of failure through his actions.

The point of life is not to measure up, or even to get it right. I don’t really know if life has a point anymore than a great story has A Lesson To Be Learned. Every story that moves us, that makes us more human is one of failure and forgiveness, of loss and redemption. Sometimes we are the ones who blew the game standing in the spotlight of the inquisitors. Then there are the stories where we get to take someone by the hand like Mulholland, or awaken hearts with our gratitude like Jasmine, or speak words of healing like Jesus. To be a part of those stories, we have to be paying attention.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: ash monday

Ash Wednesday showed up early for me this year because I was given the chance, thanks to my friends Lori and Terry, to hear Garrison Keillor tell stories. Though I have listened to him on the radio for thirty years, I’ve never heard him live. Monday, he showed up unadorned, without any of his Prairie Home Companion peeps or props, without even an introduction. Promptly at 7:30, he strode onto the stage wearing dark pants, a sports jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie that matched both his red socks and red sneakers, and he began to chant. That’s the best way I can describe it. He told a story with the cadence and melody of a priest inviting congregants to the Eucharist, his rhyme and humor calling us into community. Then, for a little over two hours, he talked of family, faith, love, death, and sex in a more intimate and vulnerable way than I had ever heard him on any of those many nights when he began his tale with, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown . . . “ – a phrase he never uttered in our time together.

Through the course of the evening, he invited a bluegrass singer to join him on stage, and for us to join them in song: Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “It Is Well With My Soul,” and, to close the evening, “Angel Band.” Our voices provided the connecting soundtrack to his stories, which eloquently told how he got from there to here: from childhood to writer, from “sanctified Brethren” to Episcopalian, from son to father, from wherever he was before to our Monday night in Durham, reminding me again of the power and purpose of ritual, or sacred road markers like Ash Wednesday and Lent and Communion that call us to ask and answer the question David Byrne asked best: “Well – how did I get here?”

“We tell two kinds of stories,” Keillor said. “We either tell bragging stories to show we’re better than everyone else, or we tell stories of confession, which are, I suppose, a kind of ostentatious humility to show we’re more honest than everyone else.” From there he meandered into a maze of faith and family, both confessional seed beds, I suppose, commenting almost in passing that Christianity “is a religion of failure.”

With those words it became Ash Monday: Lent began for me.

In the jargon of my students, Lent might be renamed “Epic Fail” – the season of coming up short, the season of stark reality, and the season of forgiveness because it is in failure that both our compassion and redemption take root.

Yes, I know God is both great and good. Yes, I trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Yes, I know we are only weeks away from that Great Resurrection Morning when the stone gets rolled away and up from the grave he will arise to show that Death is not the final punctuation mark on the sentence that is our human existence. Even though Death has lost its sting, our story – all the way to that Land To Which We Go – is marked, quite indelibly, by failure. The tenacious love of God calls us to faithfulness, not success. Jesus bent down to wash the feet of the disciples because, John says, he knew “he had come from God and was going to God, not because it was all a brilliant strategy for success and conquest.

The disciples left the Upper Room and failed epically in the hours that followed their gathering only to find themselves still in the circle, still called, and still loved. For the rest of their lives, they did their best work when they simply told that story. The same holds true for us. We do our best work for and with one another when we tell and listen to our stories – and that thought takes me to familiar words worth repeating: Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As Keillor differentiated between the bragging stories and the confessional ones, he said the confessional stories were the ones you could count on to be “mostly true.” When we come to the place, however we get there, that we share our despair in order to find one another and remind one another we cannot run out of or away from the love of God, we are true – even in our failure. In the longings and the losings of life we come back again and again to stones we have stacked up and songs we can sing together.

when peace like a river attendeth my way
when sorrows like sea billows roll
whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
it is well it is well with my soul


I'm gonna love you
till the wheels come off
oh yeah

I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
ever since I put your picture in a frame

We are not beginning a sojourn to success. When we get to Easter morning, or any other day for that matter, we will still be people of constant failure. Jesus didn’t come out of the tomb to take his place on the medal stand. He went to the beach and made breakfast for his bleary-eyed followers who had failed, once again. He loved them and he fed them. And he told them stories.

May we go and do likewise.

Peace,
Milton

capitulating to can't

During the middle of my junior year in high school, my family moved to Houston, Texas and I became a student at Westbury High School. I knew no one in the building and began as a new student in January. It was the worst transition of any of the several transitions I made from school to school as a missionary kid.

I don’t remember if it was that semester or the next, but I do remember it in was Algebra II where I encountered the worst teacher I ever had. (I also remember her name but am choosing not to write it here.) During the middle of class, as she was explaining something, I raised my hand and asked a question because I didn’t understand.

“I don’t have time for stupid questions,” she said, and went on with the class.

In that moment, I decided I wasn’t good at math. I limped through the semester with a C and, since I had completed my requirement for graduation, never took another high school math class, convinced it was an equation I could not solve. Then came the ACT, which I needed to take to get into Baylor, and the math section. The scores came in the mail, and I opened the envelope to find I had made a 32 on the math section, enough to place out of my B. A. math requirement at Baylor. I never had another math teacher after her and I have spent most of my life convinced I don’t know how to do Algebra, which, for a guy who went on to major in History and teach English, is not the end of the world, but it’s not the truth.

For all the things that teacher did wrong, I have to come to terms with the choice I made under those circumstances. I decided I was no good at math. I capitulated to her bullying, if you will. And I continued to buy the lie, even when more reliable information came in after her time had passed. I’m not sure I would have turned in to the Texan forerunner of Good Will Hunting, but I sold myself short.

As a teacher, I remind myself of her most everyday not only because I don’t want to do the same kind of damage, but also because I imagine what she said to me was an incidental comment. She wasn’t gunning for me; it just felt that way on the receiving end. I know what it feels like to get to the end of the day and feel tired and exasperated, which is actually when I try to remember her most. I won’t feel any less exhausted or exasperated by unloading on one of the young people trapped in the room with me in my hour of darkness. Let it be. let it be.

I teach now in a school aimed at students who, as we say, have not been able to thrive in a conventional classroom. Most of them have either names or letters to identify their learning issues. Sometimes we speak of them in technological metaphors, talking about their processing abilities. The information matters and is often helpful, and I also wonder if it has unintended consequences. Even today, I handed out composition books and asked them to open to a fresh page and free write, as we say in English classrooms.

“I can’t write,” said the young man sitting to my left. And I was back in Algebra.

He struggles with writing, particularly by hand – that is true. He finds it easier to talk than write. Also true. His handwriting could be confused for hieroglyphics. Oh, yes. But he can write, and write pretty well when he chooses to step beyond belief in the limitations he has been handed. I’m not trying to push him to be a poet, still I don’t want to capitulate to “can’t.”

The other thing I have noticed about my students is they appear to be passionless. I am struggling to find something they are interested in doing, and I don’t mean just in English class. I asked them to fill out an interest survey intended to help me learn how they learn best, and several of them hardly checked off anything.

“I’m not interested in much,” one of them said.

“Why not?” I wanted to reply, but didn’t know how to do it unaccusingly. How can an eighth grader already have the curiosity kicked out of her? How can a ninth grader feel that life at his age has already peaked in interest? I can’t help but wonder if the lack of confidence is connected to the lack of curiosity. In my own experience, we seem most willing to fail at that which captures us.

I gave up on math, but not on writing. I don’t remember any high school teacher gushing over my prose or poetry, but I do remember feeling confident enough to keep playing with the words, asking questions, and writing and failing and writing again. The words mattered enough to me to be willing to fail.

And to find great pleasure.

It’s hard to talk about failure and not talk about the Red Sox. As September comes, those of us in Red Sox Nation stand poised to have our hearts broken once more or to have another story for the ages. This year’s team has been besieged by injuries, the nightly lineup looking more like their Triple-A farm club than their normal roster. Even the young ones know the story, it seems, because they keep showing up and giving their best. Wherever we finish in the standings come the first of October, we will talk about this season and the heart of this team.

And so I point to grown men playing a boy’s game to say to my young students who are old before their time, don’t lead with your limitations; feed your passions; ask questions; fail gloriously, more than once.

And I will listen to my own advice.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: failer

Over the past several days, I’ve only been able to see bits and pieces of the Winter Olympics, partly because of my work schedule and partly because I’ve chosen other things. I’ve let my knowledge of what’s going on be fed, mostly, by the highlight reels and news blurbs. I’ve heard enough of Joannie Rochette’s story to be moved by what I read about her performance, even though I didn’t see it: she skated two days after her mother’s death in Vancouver. Tonight, the over-riding theme appeared to be near misses, or perhaps I would do better to simply say living with mistakes. Sven Kramer, a Dutch skater who set an Olympic record with his speed skating performance, was disqualified because his coach told him to change lanes at the wrong time. The South Korean women’s short track team, who had won four straight gold medals, was disqualified because one of them grazed a Chinese skater – after they had won the race. Lindsey Vonn, an American expected to medal, fell in the Giant Slalom while her teammate, Julia Mancuso, was on the course. They stopped Mancuso in the middle of a great run and made her re-ski; she ended up eighteenth. For every medalist, there are any number of stories of those who fell short of what they hoped to accomplish at the Olympics.

I was back into Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music this morning, reading the chapter, “What Makes a Musician?” The short answer is practice. Though he was willing to admit some of us have more affinity than others when it comes to playing and singing, the way one becomes an expert musician (or anything else, for that matter) is by practice.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – anything. In study after study, of composers, players, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years . . . It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. (197)

No doubt, everyone of the athletes I mentioned above, as well as everyone else out there with them, have put in their ten thousand hours and all the practice and expertise in the world doesn’t guarantee a gold medal, or even a mistake-free performance in the moment when it appears to matter most. As sit and watch their performances, framed by the announcers in a gold-or-nothing value system, its hard not to think of those who didn’t make it as failures. And we mean it as a bad thing. Levitin, again.

We also know that, on average, successful people have had many more failures than unsuccessful people. This seems counterintuitive. How could successful people have failed more than everyone else? Failure is unavoidable and sometimes happens randomly. It’s what you do after the failure that is important. (207)

Though he goes on to make a case for sticking to it, whatever it is, the reality of life is a string of courageous failures does not necessarily end in a triumphant medal ceremony at some point. In one of my favorite movies, Miss Firecracker, Holly Hunter plays Carnelle Scott, a woman in the last year of her eligibility for the Miss Firecracker Contest in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her sister had won it years before and Carnelle is sure she can do the same, even though the odds seem insurmountable. When her name is called, she places fifth. In the midst of her disappointment, she gets up to march in the parade. Her sister condescendingly tells her she doesn’t have to go and Carnelle answers, “When you come in fifth place, you have to march behind the float.” Later, Mac Sam, the come-and-go love of her life says to her, “I’ll always remember you as the one who could take it on the chin.”

Not long after, she says, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.”

“Not much,” he answers with a laughing cough.

“But something,” she persists.

“Eternal grace,” comes the reply.

If we could all sit down together and share, each of us would have some sort of “what if” or near miss moment that felt as cataclysmic as life looked to those failing Olympians we saw today. Looking back, perhaps, some of those moments proved to be life-altering and some didn’t. Tonight, though, I’m thinking more about the little failures and defeats that wear away at us the way feet have worn down the stone steps of the Boston Public Library over the years: the daily wear and tear that makes life feel as though that’s what life is. Mary Oliver says it this way in her poem, “The Wild Geese”:

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Yes, it does, and it calls us not to be defined by the little collections of failures anymore than we want to be remembered by our big mistakes. Everyone of the failers tonight in Vancouver had someone they went to, someone who held them, or cried with them, someone who reminded them they were not alone. My lead in to the Olympics was Patty Griffin’s song, “Little Fire,” from her new album, Downtown Church. At the end of a day that held a failure or two of my own, I’ll end it with her words and music.

my friend come and stand beside me
lately I’m feeling so along
a flood came and washed the stones of the path away
and a hot sun turned the mud to dust


calling the sheep in for the evening
there’s a voice that calls above the howling wind
it says come rest beside my little fire
we’ll ride out the storm that’s coming in


my friend you know me and my family
you’ve seen us wandering through these times
you’ve seen us in weakness and in power
you’ve seen us forgetful and unkind


all that I want is one who knows me
a kind hand on my face when I weep
and I’d give back these things I know are meaningless
for a little fire to warm me when I sleep

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

grade and grace

Two things have spoken to me this week: music and muffins.

As I’ve mentioned before, part of my daily ritual at the restaurant is to make the English muffins that serve as the buns for our hamburgers and shrimp burgers. The recipe takes time, so as I’m walking in at eight each morning I start picking up bowls and whisks and measuring cups so I can get the dough going immediately. The recipe breaks into five periods of activity, with corresponding periods of waiting:

I mix warm water, yeast, and honey; then mix in four cups of flour and then two more; then I mix together the eggs, salt, and oil and add that to the flour mixture; then I mix in another cup and a half of flour.

Then I wait for about thirty minutes until it gets bubbly.

The second period of activity involves adding five more cups of flour and stirring for about three minutes (to activate the glutens).

Then I wait until the dough doubles – also about a half an hour.

Stage three involves kneading the dough, which includes probably adding another four to six cups of flour and working the dough for five or six minutes.

Then I wait until the dough doubles again, also about thirty minutes.

The next step is to roll and cut the muffins and put them on baking sheets.

Then I wait about fifteen minutes to let them rise again.

Finally, I toast the tops and bottoms of the muffins on the flat top (with a bit of butter) and put them in the oven for about eight minutes. If all goes well, the muffins are ready when the kitchen opens at eleven for lunch. Though the recipe is clear, each stage calls for choices. I have to decide when the dough looks and feels right; when I stop mixing or kneading has an effect on the final product. This week I have paid particular attention, trying to make the muffins better. Yesterday and today I achieved a muffonic convergence, as I like to call it: pretty damn perfect muffins.

“This is why I love this job,” I said to my cooking partner, Cort. “You get to feel like you’ve done something well and then move on to what you need to do next.”

Even though the art I create is incredibly temporary – I put the plate together and you eat it, all in the span of minutes – it is also incredibly gratifying because it is quantifiable: I know what a great plate of fish tacos ought to taste and look like (in that order) and, even though I make about twenty taco plates everyday at lunch, each one requires attention as its own unique creation.

I work in a kitchen, not on an assembly line.

As I’ve also mentioned before, much of our non-culinary conversation during the day swirls around music, either bouncing off the songs playing on the boom box, or rising up out of our past experiences. Somewhere in the course of the day, Billy Joel took his turn as our topic and about the time I was going to say that my brother, who is a musician, said way back in the early eighties that he thought Joel’s music would be enduring, Dave said, “You know the reason he keeps touring and trying so hard is he’s pissed he’s never gotten the recognition as one of the great guys of rock and roll.” (Which makes this clip interesting.)

I never told the story about my brother. I spent the rest of the shift thinking about Billy Joel feeling as though he has somehow come up short. I thought about his song, “Angry Young Man”:

I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too
I had my pointless point of view
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right

And there's always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he's never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can't understand why his heart always breaks
And his honor is pure and his courage is well
And he's fair and he's true and he's boring as hell
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man

OK, one more thing I’ve mentioned before in this blog: I live with my own sense of worthlessness, with not feeling as though I’m enough. One of the big reasons I’m no longer a high school teacher is I hated giving grades. The essential element of teaching, for me, was the relational connection I made in the classroom. I asked the kids to take risks, to be themselves, to trust me.

And then I gave them a grade: “Thanks for trying; you get a C.”

I couldn’t do it because of the way I internalized the grades I received along the way – and I do mean I received: they weren’t grading the paper; they were grading me. Cooking is different for me. I realize those for whom I cook may not like everything, but they aren’t grading me. The payoff, for me, is in the creation and presentation of the dishes (when I’m at work) and in the sharing of the meal as we sit together around the table when I’m at home.

The difference is as subtle and as profound as my typing grace when I meant to type grade in the previous paragraph. One letter changes everything.

Everything.

The grace is find in my job comes from being able to claim my competence, to to grow and learn, and to both flourish and fail with abandon. It not that failure is without consequence it’s that I’m doing what I love, so I can weather the storm. And so I heard Dave’s words about Billy Joel with sadness because he’s doing what he loves and lives with grades more than grace. In his biggest hit, Joel wrote:

Don’t go changing to try and please me
You never let me down before . . .
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I love you just the way you are

Billy, if you’re listening, you’ve given some of the best words and music to the soundtrack of our lives. Your songs are alive at our house in ways I can’t even begin to tell you. I hope you can get from grades to grace.

Me, too.

Peace,
Milton

coming up short

The assignment was simple: meet at the catering shop to pick up the food and then go to the site to cook dinner for eight people:

Appetizers:
curried crab cakes with cucumber yogurt dipping sauce
endive leaves with roasted beets and bleu cheese

Salad of pea shoots and mixed greens with dill, chives, and mint with a sherry vinaigrette

Pecan crusted loin of lamb
Potato and artichoke gratin
Asparagus, roasted peppers, and pearl onions

Strawberry shortcake with vanilla ice cream and strawberry sauce

The way things are supposed to work is the folks at the shop prepare as much as they can ahead of time and then pack up the stuff I will need to do on site. What I assumed that meant was the potatoes would be done and simply need to be reheated and the lamb would be about halfway done and need to be finished.

I was wrong on both counts. The problem was I didn’t do enough checking beforehand and was, therefore, also late getting the meal out because things weren’t ready when I thought they would be. On a night when the task was easy and I should have done well, I turned in an average performance. We got the meal served and I think those who ate it were OK with things, but I felt like my performance was substandard. I did less than my best. Whatever the shop might have done differently, I didn’t do my job well tonight. And I don’t do well when I feel like I haven’t done my best.

It derailed me. I could feel it happening. I apologized to the staff that had to serve the meal. I could hear myself continue to say, “I’m sorry I didn’t do well tonight.” I know part of that was longing for someone to say, “It’s not the end of the world.” No one did. I could feel the grace leaking out of the room, being replaced by the suffocating sense of my unworthiness, which is all too familiar. Can it be that my self-worth swings on whether or not the potatoes are cooked?

Short answer: yes.

I’m a good cook. I’m a passionate cook. I’m intentional when I’m in the kitchen and I work hard. Tonight, I didn’t do well. I missed some things I should have caught and put out food that was less than what I want to present and all of a sudden I feel as though I’m only judged by that damn lamb and those crunchy potatoes. I felt devastated, defeated, depressed.

As I drove back to the shop to drop off the dirty dishes and leftovers, I began trying to talk myself back into sanity. Wynne and Glen were at the shop. Wynne is the pasty chef at the restaurant and someone I’ve gotten to know a little; Glen is the guy who smokes all our meets and makes the sausage and is someone I’m just getting to know. They asked how the evening went and I told them. They both did a great job of listening and helping me find a sense of myself again. I made some movement, but the real progress was made on the walk I took with Ginger and Ella once I got back to the house. Ginger listened well and asked great questions and, as we turned from Broad Street on to Knox, I could feel my feelings beginning to shift. Part of what helped was being able to articulate what I learned tonight that will help me not make the same mistakes again. The other part was simply getting enough distance from the event to realize the dinner may not have been the best, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It was then I remembered one of the staff had responded when I had apologized for my cooking tonight. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get another chance.”

She’s right. I cook again Friday night and twice on Saturday – and that’s just this week. I don’t get tonight’s lamb and potatoes back, but I can also let them go. (And I wrote those sentences as if the present realizations that are easy for me to incarnate.) A half a century into my life and I remain encumbered by a sense of self-worth that is inextricably tied to my feeling useful. For Descartes, it may have all been in the thinking, but for me, “I do, therefore I matter.” I desperately want to trust that I matter, by the grace of God, because I’m breathing. I certainly believe that’s true for everyone else. Yet, one botched meal and I feel like a failure, two or three days without posting and I think people will quit reading.

I grew up being taught that we are all headed for judgment before God. The image that has stayed in my mind is standing next to God while we watch a movie of my life and the whole time God is groaning and taking notes making me question whether or not I would get out of that room and get to heaven, whether I would measure up or be enough.

Judgment has become far less significant in my understanding of God over the years, though the scene above still has its hooks in me. When I’ve tried to picture it differently, I’ve often moved to a scene where God says, “Good job,” or something similar, but that doesn’t really make it any less about being enough or measuring up. In my breakthrough moments, I picture Jesus meeting me and, opening his arms, simply saying, “Welcome, Milton.” No measures, no tallies, just welcome. As if I belonged.

I want to believe the last scenario. Lord, help my unbelief.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what I remember

A new acquaintance opened a door to some old memories for me this evening.

Thanks to the connections at CCBlogs, I found Peculiar Preacher, who turns out to be someone with whom I probably share any number of mutual friends since we both attended Baylor and spent a good deal of time in Texas. He wrote about going to see a new production of Man of La Mancha in Fort Worth and his dissent with the area theater critics about the quality and impact of the production.

My family was traveling between Africa and America (my parents were missionaries) in 1967 or 68 and we stopped in London for a couple of days to rest. My parents took my brother and me to see Man of La Mancha and we saw a rather legendary performance (I know now). It was the first time I had ever been to a stage production of that magnitude and quality. I was mesmerized by the experience and moved by the story. The Cervantes/Quixote character burrowed deep into my young heart and has never forsaken his residence there. I remember hearing “The Impossible Dream” before it became a lounge lizard anthem:

and the world will be better for this
that one man torn and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star

It’s hard to get a clean hearing of the song now.

My favorite character in the show was not Quixote, but Sancho Panza, his sidekick. In one of the final scenes, Quixote is dying and has allowed himself to believe his life has been a failure. Sancho refuses for that to be the last word. He begins to sing to the song to his dear friend and master, saying, “Don’t you remember? You must remember.” Quixote then revives to sing with his companion once more and then dies without taking the sense of failure with him. Such is the power of friendship.

I find myself in both men. I understand Quixote’s feelings of worthlessness when he is told his life has counted for nothing but tilting at windmills. Yes, I know the last sentence is a bit overly dramatic and I don’t know another way to say it. Part of what it has meant to be Milton over the years is feeling less than enough and always at least an arm’s length from whatever the dream might be. Those feelings didn’t consume all of my days, but they have been part of the package. I think those feelings have led me to live a lot like Sancho: I’m a good sidekick. I like being able to help those around me reach for their stars, feel like enough in their story, or simply live through to the other side of failure. Somewhere in the interchange, I get to feel like I’m enough as well.

Since I worked brunch today, Ginger and I both got to be home together tonight, each at our respective MacBooks writing away. I plugged the speakers into mine and turned on Gavin Bryars’ recording, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which is a classical piece built around the singing of a London street person. Here is Bryars’ description:

In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.

When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.

I was puzzled until I realized that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp's nobility and simple faith.

For all of our preparation during Advent, it’s difficult for us to access or replicate the desperation of the Incarnation on both sides of the equation. The second Broadway show I ever saw was Fiddler on the Roof. When the Russian soldiers come to tell the Jewish people they have to leave, one of them says, “Rabbi, wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?” We tell the story and light the candles and sing the songs in ways that are meaningful and moving and full of good things, but rarely do we come to moments when we grab one another and say, “Don’t you remember? You must remember.” The divine desperation of the not-so-impossible dream that stands behind God putting skin on asks the same question: don’t you remember?

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.

A voice cries: "In the wilderness,
prepare the way of the LORD;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

A voice says, "Cry!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
“All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.”
(Isaiah 40:6-8)

We must remember.



Peace,
Milton

a day of peace

Thanks to Tess at Anchors and Masts, I saw the video below and learned about the work of Peace Direct and that today, September 21, is the United Nations International Day of Peace.



At one point in the short film, as Gill is putting on her artificial legs, the text reads, “Gill believes in the power of the individual and that everyone can make a difference.” What struck me as I worked on this post is the strength to be peace builders comes not from individuals, but individuals committed to community. I’ll demonstrate what I mean.

As I said, Tess led me to Peace Direct and to the UN Peace Day site. In a parallel journey, Randy’s post on scorn led me to Bill and Grant’s words on the same subject, all of them speaking in their way to what it means to learn to wage peace. Bill defines scorn as the feeling or belief that someone or something is worthless or despicable; the verb, is to feel or express contempt or derision for someone or something.

Randy confesses:

It is all too easy for me to take a position of scorn relative to someone else. If I think he is dumb, I express scorn. If I think he is obtuse, I express scorn. If he doesn’t agree with me, I express scorn. If he doesn’t drive like I want him to, I express scorn. If he makes my job more difficult, I express scorn. If I don’t like the way he looks, I express scorn.

Scorn makes me ugly.

Me, too. As long as I was dealing with definitions, I looked up peace and was struck by one word in two of the definitions:

• the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world;
• the normal freedom from civil commotion and violence of a community.

Peace as normal. What a concept.

Again, still dealing with words and borrowing ideas from those around me, I remembered my friend Don pointing out in a Bible study that our words listen and obey come from the same root.

c.1290, from O.Fr. obeir, from L. oboedire "obey, pay attention to, give ear," lit. "listen to," from ob "to" + audire "listen, hear" (see audience). Same sense development is in cognate O.E. hiersumnian.

I’ve also been reading the blog of a former student who is enrolled in the University for Peace in Costa Rica.

I had just sat down to write this morning with peace swirling all around me when the wheels fell off. We got word that our realtor had scheduled two home invasions (as I like to call them), one today and one tomorrow. She also suggested we rearrange the furniture in the large room that is both our living and dining area because the way we have chosen to live is “too unconventional” for most folks who are looking to buy a house.

I knew nothing of these people who are looking for a new home, but I felt scorn nonetheless. I felt better than them. We walked into this house seven years ago and it was a mess. The colors were atrocious, the house was a mess, and there were holes in the kitchen floor dug by the two large dogs who lived here along with the woman who owned it. To even think about buying it required at least enough imagination to see beyond her living in the space. And now our house won’t sell because the dullards who are looking can’t get past the dining table and the couch being placed in a less than conventional manner?

Screw peace. I wanted to open a can of whupass on somebody. It was time to beat some imagination into these idiots. (Now I understand why realtors don’t want you to be home when people come by.) When we got through moving the furniture, I came back to the computer to find all the peace links I had already saved in preparation for writing. I read what Randy and Bill and Grant and Jane and Tess had to say. I watched Gill climb up on the block seat and attach her artificial legs. I looked into what is now the living room to see Lola climb up in her usual perch on top of the couch cushions, nonplussed that she had been moved. And I felt silly, small, and sinful.

My anger is about being displaced. I don’t get to live in my home anymore; I live in a house that’s for sale. I don’t get to feel settled anymore because we are moving. The apparent lack of imagination that exists in the minds of today’s homebuyer is not the source of my rage, just an easy target. If I’m going to be a peacemaker, then easy targets can’t be a part of the equation. It can’t be about targets at all. Somehow, it’s about moving beyond the scorn and the rage and all the types of violence that pervade my life and listening to the solidarity of our humanity. Rather than seeing them as idiots, I’m called to listen and learn to see those folks who will walk our floors this afternoon as people traveling the same road we walked seven years ago and will walk again across floors in Durham in the weeks ahead. I’m called to listen to a larger world where my sense of displacement pales by comparison with those in Sudan and Iraq and Gaza and Indonesia and Burma and New Orleans who have been cut off from home and history by violence I know nothing of on a personal level. If I listen well, my rage can become resonance, which is something peace can be built upon. Bill quotes Paul from Philippians 4:8:

Summing it all up, friends, I'd say you'll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.

In the Peace Direct video, the text says, “For us, peace is about strength, courage, determination, and action.” We are all crippled by the violence done by and to us. Everyday, it seems, feels like International Violence Day. We were not created to destroy one another, but to listen and to love, which both matter most in the most basic of relationships.

I heard the call to peace today while reading blogs and moving furniture. I’m praying for the courage to listen and obey.

Peace,
Milton

the rest of the story

There’s always something new to learn.

As many times as I’ve either heard or read the parable of The Good Samaritan and the story of Jesus’ visit with Mary and Martha, I’d never thought about the two being connected until Ginger mentioned it in her sermon last Sunday. Both are stories about people stopping along the way and, I suppose, about people who don’t stop.

The parable has always been the easier story for me to take because I can more easily put myself in the role of the guy who stops. I’ve always been attracted to the people at the edges, the ones who feel left out; they are the ones I gravitated to as a youth minister, as a teacher, and in just about any other situation. But Jesus’ visit to the sisters is more problematic. When our house fills up with company, I’m the one in the kitchen while most folks are on the couch talking. I’m not necessarily alone in the kitchen, but I’m working hard to make sure everyone is fed. And I love it. I like swirling around making sure bowls stay filled, food is served hot, and people don’t go away hungry. When I do stop to talk, I always have one ear listening for the timer so I don’t burn whatever is coming out next.

I’m also not much of a meditator. (Is that a word?) If I sit quiet and still for twenty minutes, I fall asleep. I’m thoughtful and reflective, intentional and focused, but I’m not particularly quiet. I think if Jesus stopped by here, I’d be most likely to say, “Come talk to me in the kitchen while I finish the crab dip.” (That’s Ginger’s favorite; I figure he’d like it, too.) So the way I read Jesus’ admonition to Martha is less about her doing and more about her complaining that Mary was just sitting around. Martha doesn’t sound particularly joyful in her hospitality, I must say, in the same way that the religious leaders in the parable were so consumed with duty or privilege that they couldn’t afford to be compassionate. It wasn’t on the schedule.

Garrison Keillor is hitting home runs over at The Writer’s Almanac this week. Today’s poem was by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, whom I’ve quoted before. It sounds like something Jesus might have quoted right alongside of his words in Luke 10.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

I looked back at the two stories in Luke and noticed that both are somewhat unfinished. We never hear from the lawyer after Jesus says, “Go and do likewise”; we never hear what Martha says or does after Jesus tells her, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

At Vacation Bible Camp, Ginger was taking prayer requests from the kids one day when one girl asked that we pray for homeless children. Ginger agreed and talked about how some children live on the streets or in cars. Another little girl said, “People live in their cars?” She was incredulous, so Ginger talked about it some more with the hope that the seed planted in our prayer time would grow kindness in her heart. Certainly, the lawyer original question was intended to be more quiz than conversation. What I hope is he realized he was the guy in the ditch who needed a neighbor as much as anyone. Naomi is right: kindness grows out of sorrow.

My image of how the day was going for Martha when Jesus arrived is she had to improvise. I don’t think they were expecting him, since I don’t imagine he was on a specific itinerary. Based on the tone of her comment about her sister, I also imagine whatever she was preparing to feed Jesus wasn’t going well. Maybe she burned the pita bread or the hummus was runny. Maybe she cut her finger or burned her arm pulling something out of the oven. Maybe she was pissed because she was the only one who knew she was having a hard day. Maybe Jesus was saying, “Why are you taking your stuff out on your sister?” Martha had not yet been able to see, as Naomi says, “the size of the cloth” of kindness.

Jesus counted Mary, Martha, and Lazarus as friends, so I have to believe the conversation didn’t end at the height of the tension where Luke stopped his story. Jesus touched a raw sibling nerve with his words; there was more to be said.

I tried writing a couple of endings and everything I came up with felt forced or trite. What I see as I write is I have a lot at stake in Martha finding some redemption. I know her well; I need for her to come off better than she does. No, it’s not so much about how she appears as needing her to find some healing in the story because I think Jesus’ words must have hurt. She was trying hard and came up short. Somehow, I think that feeling was not unfamiliar to her. Whatever happened, I know Jesus was kind and found a way to say she was the one he was looking for and he needed her to stop just long enough to understand.

Peace,
Milton

what's cookin'

I went looking for a job today.

I’ve made only a marginal effort since I was fired from The Inn because I knew I was going on mission trip and had a couple of other things on the calendar and I couldn’t see starting a new gig by saying, “Oh – and I need the next two weekends off.” The summer stretches out from here, however, and it’s time to get back to work. My first stop was a small pub in our neighborhood that had been recommended to me by a guy who used to tend bar at The Inn. I talked with the owner and left a resume, but he said the kitchen was staffed right now.

“But you never know in this business,” he said and laughed.

My second stop was a high end restaurant on the other end of town. When I was laid off back in January I had a promising conversation with the chef there and almost went to work for him, but then The Inn called me back. I entered through the kitchen and asked to if Chef was available. The guy cutting the swordfish went to check and then said, “He’s busy. You wait three minutes.”

The chef I met back in January was not the guy who came to find me, but he was someone I knew. Two summers ago, when I was working in Kingston, he was the sous chef, biding his time until he could open his own restaurant in Cambridge, which he did. He got good press, took his best shot, and ran out of money. The former chef moved to a local country club and this guy took over. I told him what had happened to me and we had a good chat. If nothing else, I think it will turn into a weekend gig. We’ll see.

Someone told me once that there are a handful of people that staff the kitchens of restaurants on the South Shore and they just keep trading places with each other. After today, I’m willing to give that theory a little more credence. And I’m thankful that’s how life is here. Selling myself is hard for me to do, much less making cold calls. I got my other restaurant jobs because Chef called and said, “Come work for me.” This time, I on my own, marketing my skills, acting like I know what I’m doing. Though I’m confident when I’m cooking, I’m much less so when I’m job hunting. Flirting with rejection is not much fun. It's easy for me to hear "We don't need anyone in the kitchen right now" as "I'm a failure." I know better, but I have to consciously work not to let my insecurities get the best of me. After all, the New Chef took a shot at his dream of owning his own place and failed gloriously.

"Hey," he said smiling, "that was the first one."

He wants his own place more than anything and enough to know it's going to take some time and a lot of patience. For now, he's continuing to hone his craft and nurture his dream. His day will come.

Mine, too. (I'm saying that mostly for my benefit.)

I know enough about how the business works to know I’ll need to go back again on Thursday afternoon and “check in.” I will either walk out of there with a job, or I’ll come home and print more copies of my resume and try again next week.

That’s what’s cookin’.

Peace,
Milton

how would jesus fail?

I ate all three meals alone today.

Well, I was accompanied by the Schnauzers, so I suppose that’s not completely true. Ginger has gone to see her folks on the way to our adult mission trip to Biloxi and I had things to do around the house, so it was a fairly solitary day with the exception of my trip to Weight Watchers for the weekly meeting (I lost two and a half pounds!). As I have mentioned before, I’m close to being a serial weight watcher and my downfall the other times was deciding I didn’t need to go to the meetings to lose weight: I could do it on my own.

That has proven to be untrue over and over. I can’t lose weight alone.

On more than one occasion, I’ve thought the weekly communal weigh-ins are a pretty good metaphor for church: the accountability, the community, the shared purpose, the encouragement. Faith is not a solitary endeavor. The connection crossed my mind again today because Rita, our group leader, talked about dealing with failure, a familiar word for anyone who struggles with his or her weight. Hell, for anyone who is alive.

Part of what the pups and I did this evening was watch the Red Sox, who are playing incredibly well right now. I’ve been a Sox fan for as long as I can remember and they have taught me a great deal about failure, from waiting eighty-six years between World Series wins to just playing the game on a daily basis. Kevin Youkilis, one of my favorite players, is on a roll right now. He has hit safely in twenty-one games and had more than one hit in nine straight games. He is second in the league in batting average, hitting .358. Yet, even as well as he is hitting right now, he doesn’t get a hit almost two out of every three times he comes to bat. Most players are lucky to get a hit one out of four times at the plate. That’s not the way baseball teaches us to interpret the stats, however. They talk about what he’s accomplished, not how often he fails. There’s a metaphor the church could use more often.

Paul understood what baseball knows when he wrote in Romans, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Not hope in the sense of “I hope I do better next time,” but hope as informed confidence in our Creator for whom failure is never the last word. God is personally acquainted with failure, I think – as strange as that may sound – because of God’s relationship with us. From wondering why Adam and Eve didn’t show up for their evening walk in the garden, to see Abel’s blood in the dirt, to telling Noah to build the Ark, to the people wandering in the wilderness, to Peter’s denials and Judas’ betrayal, all the way down to some things I’d prefer not to share, I don’t think the world has gone quite the way God imagined it when God looked at things and said, “That’s good.”

God is acquainted with grief, with failure. If that were not true, the hope we’ve been promised could not hold the weight of the world. Redemption requires a Redeemer who abides on both sides of the equation.

To know God knows what failure feels like strengthens my faith because I’m reminded that what lies beyond failure is love rather than success. I’m always going to strike out more times than I hit it out of the yard. What will keep me swinging for the fences are the folks in the dugout who go out for beers after the game regardless of the score or my batting average. The meetings matter at Weight Watchers not because we all lose weight every week but because we keep showing up and pulling for each other. When you gain weight (like I did last week), the primary message is keep trying and come back next time.

Jan pointed me to this song by The Gena Rowlands Band that says what I’m chasing in both clearer and coarser terms (parental discretion advised). To live as Jesus calls doesn’t mean to live perfectly but to fail brilliantly – “lose your life to find it” is the way he said it. Then get up and go again.

No one is keeping score.

Peace,
Milton

PS -- there's a new recipe.