lenten journal: glitches and grace

We have made a quick trip to visit my parents—we being Rachel, Ginger, and me – and I say to visit my parents rather than going to Texas because we are spending the sixty-four hours we are here in the Lone Star State with them. The trip was not precipitated by an emergency. It had just been too long since we’ve been here. The trip is short because these were the days we had to get here. It is difficult to be here and not cast a wider net of friendship.

Our day started this morning about four when we got up to catch a flight that took us from Raleigh-Durham to Orlando to San Antonio to Dallas. Sunday morning, I dutifully set an alarm clock to get up at six so I could save a place in the boarding line. Our printer was ailing, so I just checked in, knowing I could pick up the passes at Southwest when we got to the airport. When the Skycap handed me the passes they were in the last boarding group. She knew nothing of my reservation. Once we got through security, I went to the customer service desk to get it straightened out. I told my story and the woman behind the counter answered, “I have no record of any activity on the account since you purchased the tickets.”

I bristled. “I feel like you’re calling me a liar,” I said and we both kind of squared off, though neither of us lost our composure or sense of tact. She was intractable, other than offering to get her supervisor. I took her up on it and told my story once more. I got the same response. It wasn’t any more helpful than the follow up question: “What would you like me to do?”

In the frustration of the moment, I couldn’t answer well. We got in line and got on the plane. Though I was hardly awake, I began writing to release the tension I was feeling. I made notes for a letter to Southwest customer service to let them know it was the first time I had ever had dealings with them where it left me feeling like they were no different from any other airline. I was disappointed, confused, and, well, put out. Then I wrote in my notes:

I would like to answer your question now. What I wanted you to do was admit your computer had made a mistake. I wanted you to ally with me, to help me feel like you were on my side rather than make it feel like it was my fault. Maybe you were too worried about liability so you spit back rehearsed corporate speak. Maybe someone tries to pull this stunt everyday and I’m naïve to think telling the truth is enough. But what I wanted was for you to be on my side.

I relaxed and fell asleep. I may have even dreamed about sending the email and getting a response. I will have to push myself to really send it because I am not the least bit hopeful when it comes to expecting big companies to act with any humanity, regardless of how they are viewed by the Supreme Court. I kept telling myself I needed to send it because that’s the only way things do get changed, but I get caught in a sort of quixotic resignation that expects little from going through such motions.

We were sitting at lunch in San Antonio when Rachel said she thought she heard our name called over the intercom. Ginger went to check it out at the gate and came back with a smile and a handful of papers. The gate agent told her the people at RDU kept trying to figure out what had happened after we left. They went back through their records and found the glitch that had not only messed up our check-in but had also charged us for the trip three times over, leaving us with bad boarding passes and a bunch of debt. They had gone through and cancelled the redundant charges, made sure the real reservation had not been cancelled in the process, and gotten everything ready for a refund. All I had to do was call Customer Service.

Which I did and they straightened it all out.

The obvious thing to say here is, “Thank you, Southwest” because they turned out to be different than the other guys and they did a great thing. Learning to be an ally on the front side of the issue still needs to be part of their education, and I am grateful for their tenacity. The more obvious thing to say to myself is remember to listen. I know how I felt this morning; I don’t know how the two women on the other side of the counter were. They both seemed defensive and terse. Who knows how much of that belonged to our interaction and how much to someone else. Since I managed to not lose my cool I also managed to be the beneficiary of their continued work on my behalf, even when they knew they would probably never see me again. They managed to make me hopeful when I saw little hope.

I am grateful.

Peace,
Milton

i've got to use my imagination

I’ve been trying to keep up with the news around the Nigerian man who tried to light some type of explosive on a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. I’ve been trying to keep up mostly because I’m getting on a flight to Austin on Wednesday to go to the memorial service for my friend David, and I want to know how much earlier I’m going to have to go to the airport to get through security. Trust me, when they start “randomly” pulling people out of the line for special attention, this man with the shaved head and the earrings is usually one of them.

The latest I’ve heard is the airlines are telling people they can’t get up or have anything in their laps during the last hour of a flight. What I know about what happened last week had to do with something the guy had strapped to his leg that he was trying to light. I’m not sure how telling people they can’t go to the bathroom, watch a movie on their laptop, or read a book would have stopped him or is going to make my flight any safer, other than it helps, perhaps, because we all feel as though the airlines are doing something at least. We stand on the cusp of a new year and we appear to be fueled by the same old fear. As David Wilcox wrote:

you say you see no hope you say
you see no reason we should dream
that the world will ever change
you say that we are foolish to believe
‘cause there will always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream
put the fear back in your life

Not so many nights ago, we sang together, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” and here, on the fourth day of Christmas, even the four calling birds sound suspect. I heard one Senator talk of perhaps “preemptively striking” Yemen since the man on the plane was suspected of going there for training. Forget the calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, and even the partridge; trade them all in for sitting ducks.

Yes, I know it makes sense to be scared. If we look at things rationally, there are people out there who want to hurt us, who want to do harm. Our situation calls for something more profound, more substantive than rationality. The sensible response would be to say we must hurt them before they hurt us, or at least take our pound of flesh for whatever harm they manage to inflict. We are learning from our responses over the last eight years that neither of those rational responses does more than foment both fear and violence. Trying to make them as scared of us as we are of them doesn’t solve a thing, nor does it make us feel any more secure.

Fear may make sense, but it doesn’t make faith, as Wilcox sings:

it is Love that mixed the mortar
and Love that stacked these stones
and it’s Love that sets the stage here
though it looks like we’re alone
in this scene set in shadows
as if night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it’s Love that wrote the play
and in this lifetime Love will show the way

We must move beyond the rationality of fear, or the irrationality of deciding all Muslims are terrorists or the rest of the world is just jealous of us, to the realm of faith and imagination, to a place where we allow ourselves to trust we can expect more from ourselves as human beings than an eye-for-an-eye existence, to a place where choose to respond in love rather than lashing out. Though 2009 appears to be ending on the same note as most of the last decade, the reality that will be 2010 doesn’t have to be pre-determined.

Those of us who choose to call ourselves followers of the One we also call the Prince of Peace would do well to also choose imagination over irony in the days to come. I’m getting on the plane Wednesday morning because I am going to gather with those whose lives were touched by David’s incarnation of God’s love in a way that led us to live imaginatively, believing the truth of our existence lay in something deeper than the reality of the headlines. Davy knew the reality of deep personal pain and yet chose love rather than lashing out. Wednesday night you can find a whole baseball stadium full of those who are both recipients and carriers of that love. Violence, like fear, is a lack of imagination. Peace is not naïve (though I am often told so), it is what love looks like when it is lived out.

I’m going to retell a story. (Hey! That’s new.)

A number of years ago, a missionary to Lebanon spoke at a church where I was serving. At that time, the violence in Lebanon was akin to what is happening in Israel and Palestine. After her talk, one woman in our church said to her, “We will pray for your safety.”

“Please don’t,” the missionary replied. “If you pray for me to be safe, I won’t get to go back because it’s not safe. Pray for me to be faithful.”

Life is not safe; but we knew that. Even on the fourth day of Christmas we know we are already following Jesus to the cross. On more than one occasion, he talked about what our faithfulness would cost us. His love was unflinching, all the way to his death. And his death was not the last word. If we can trust enough to imagine the skies filled with angels singing to the shepherds, or love strong enough to roll away the stone so Jesus could talk to Mary in the garden on that first Easter morning, can we not also imagine we could be faithful enough to wage a peace that would change the world?

Yes, I know out of two thousand years hardly any of those have known peace. Yes, I know those who would hurt us aren’t playing by the same rules. Yes, I know force feels like the only viable option.

That doesn’t change my question.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a heart with wings

The first event of my birthday was Ginger giving me a t-shirt that read: “fifty is the new thirty.”

I then had a wonderful breakfast with Ginger and both sets of our parents at Percy’s Place in Plymouth, a wonderful breakfast cafe that boasts the biggest breakfast menu in New England and has good biscuits and gravy (not easy to find in this part of the world). After the meal, I got to open presents. All the gifts were thoughtful and meaningful and made me feel both known and loved. My parents gave me a four-volume scrapbook of my life – a two-year labor of love on my mother’s part. It is truly a treasure.

When we left the restaurant, Ginger drove out of town in the opposite direction of home. As she continued to drive, the road became less and less habitated and I had no idea where we were, but I knew it was going to be good. One of the traditions Ginger and I keep on our birthdays is to do something we have never done before. The something may be big or small, but beginning a new year with a new adventure is our way of looking to the future with open hearts and minds. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, she made one of several turns and we were driving on a road that ran beside the Plymouth airport. As she turned into of the driveway of the Alpha One Flight School, she said, “You’re going to take a flying lesson.”

How we got to that point goes something like this: Ginger was trying to think of a surprise for me when she found a coupon for a one hour flying lesson in the Val-Pac envelope that comes in the mail (see, you knew you ought to open that thing), called them and made the reservation. What the hour involved was about twenty-five minutes of orientation and thirty-five minutes of flying. Jeff, my instructor, was a great guy who enjoyed helping me mark the beginning of my fifty-first year. He walked me around the plane, talked about how to check it before take off, and explained how the different flaps and things worked. Then we got inside the Cessna two-seater and he explained the different gauges, switches, and levers.

The first thing I had to learn to do was steer with my feet. The rudders and the brakes are controlled with foot pedals, which were quite a challenge. We serpentined to the end of the taxi way and then Jeff talked me through turning the plane onto the runway. He raised the throttle and we began to gain speed as we moved down the runway. “Pull back on the yoke (airplane for steering wheel),” he said, which I did and we were airborne. We flew at about 2500 feet over Plymouth Harbor. I could see the beach near our house, which was not far away, as well as Provincetown and the Boston skyline in the distance.

Once we reached the altitude he wanted, he taught me how to gauge how the plane was sitting relative to the horizon and then told me to make a 360 degree turn and come back to where I could see the same view of the bay in front of me. I stepped on the rudder pedal and turned the yoke and the plane banked into a circle. When I made it all the way around, he had me do the same to the right. Then he began to talk about stalling, which he said is what most folks worry about when they get in a small plane. As he talked, he instructed me to continue to climb slowly. He wasn’t increasing the throttle, so we keep losing airspeed. When we fell to forty knots, a small alarm began to go off. He asked me how we could increase airspeed without opening the throttle; I answered by going down instead of up. He told me to lower the nose of the plane and head down, which I did – quickly. For a moment, it felt like we floated.

He smiled. “Most people are a little more frightened of that particular maneuver than you appear to be,” he said.

As we gained speed, he had me make the reverse move to slow us down and I could feel the increase in gravity as we started to climb. I was laughing out loud. We made a wide circle around the airport and came back in to land and I foot-steered us back to the hangar once we were on the ground.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Until today, I don’t remember ever thinking about what it would be like to fly a plane, or wishing for the chance to do so. After my hour in the sky, I’m ready to go again (though flight school is not in our budget anytime soon). The experience reminded me I’m not through discovering or experiencing the wonder of living on earth.

We ate dinner at Cafe Brazil, also in Plymouth, where we were joined by our chosen family members that live in the area, and then Ginger took me into Boston – under the guise of taking Jay and Cherry back to the train – where I was surprised by friends who span all of our time in New England at one of my favorite haunts, The Burren. We laughed and talked until we had used up what was left of my day. Again, I left feeling known and loved.

All of my life, my birthday has been on the way to Christmas. When I was a kid, my parents didn't decorate until December 13 so I wouldn't feel like my birthday got swallowed up by the holiday. Becoming intentional about observing Advent has meant erasing that line, but my day has only grown in meaning. The photographs in the scrapbooks stack up like stones in an altar to show me a picture of the “me” it has taken fifty years to build. My family and friends gathered remind me that the building project has been a community effort: they are helping me to become who I am, just as I am a construction worker in their lives. Ginger, who has been a part of almost half of my history, stokes my dreams into a blaze of imaginative possibilities that give my heart wings. We drove home tonight under a starlight sky and she reached across and took my hand, as she has done countless times before.

I trust there are still countless times to come.


Peace,
Milton

random notes

Farrier was the word on the way to Birmingham; pedorthics was the word on the way home: “the art concerned with the design, manufacture, fit, and modification of foot appliances as prescribed for relief of painful or disabling conditions of the foot.”

On the flight from Atlanta to Manchester, I sat next to a woman who is a cobbler and had been at a pedorthics symposium to learn more about how to help people with their feet. Much like the guy who shoed horses so they could feel healthy, this woman did the same thing for humans. They also shared a love for their work. I came away amused that my trip had been bookended by feet.

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Ginger doesn’t come home until tomorrow night, so I stopped at Blockbuster to pick up a movie to pass the time and ended up taking an unexpected journey. Kevin Wilmott wrote and directed The Confederate States of America, a mock documentary history of our nation as if the South had won the Civil War. It has the look and feel of Ken Burns’ work, using some original footage, along with old newsreels and educational films, and peppering it all with some bitingly satiric commercials.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when it started. I was half prepared for a very anti-Southern diatribe, which it was not. It was much more about “us” as a nation rather than “them” as the South. Wilmott does a wonderful job capturing our personality as a nation and resituating it in the changed outcome of the war; he also has a keen eye for what the consequences might have been. The most disturbing thing is some of them are not that much different than what life looks like in America today. It’s worth watching – and watching with some folks who can talk about it afterwards.

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My father-in-law had a good weekend for the most part. There was obvious evidence that his short-term memory is fading and the family reunion offered him the chance to relish in the times he remembers with astounding detail. He’s a good storyteller and he’s got some great stories to tell. My favorite moment of the weekend came I was getting ready to fix dinner Friday night. Soon after Ginger and I met, I told her one day the difference in our families’ attitude towards food was when my family ate it was an event; her family ate so they didn’t die. Neither of my in-laws feel compelled to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

“What are you fixing for dinner?” my father-in-law asked.
“Pot roast,” I answered.
With a mischievous look in his eye and a gentle smile aimed at his wife he said, “Pot roast – what’s that?” And then he laughed. We all did.

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One more movie note that’s just too good to pass up. When I clicked back to the TV after the CSA movie was over, Cool Hand Luke was on. Paul Newman is the coolest guy ever. For no other reason than the scene just grabbed me, here is Luke’s prayer in the closing scenes of the film:

“Anybody here? Hey, Ol' Man, You home tonight? Can you spare a minute? It's about time we had a little talk. I know I'm a pretty evil fella. Killed people in the war and got drunk and chewed up municipal property and the like. I know I got no call to ask for much but even so, you gotta admit, you ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. It's beginnin' to look like you got things fixed so I can't never win out. Inside, outside, all 'em rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Just where am I supposed to fit in? Ol' Man, I gotta tell ya. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it's beginnin' to get to me. When does it end? What do ya got in mind for me? What do I do now? All right. All right. (He kneels on his knees and cups his hands in prayer.) On my knees, askin'. (pause) Yeah, that's what I thought. I guess I'm pretty tough to deal with, huh? A hard case. I guess I gotta find my own way.”

A few police cars drive up in front of the church. Dragline calls out to his friend from the church door: "Luke?"

Luke looks up and addresses an aside to God: "That's your answer ol' Man? I guess you're a hard case too."

Peace,
Milton