making mistakes

Over the past few weeks I have been editing a book manuscript for someone I don’t know. When I grade student essays, I know whose paper is in front of me, which colors how I both read and comment, but this time I am not being asked to teach, only edit. The hardest part, in many ways, is not being able to picture who put down the words that are now looking back at me. Microsoft Word’s “track changes” mode has made the unfortunate choice to use red as the color of the altered text, which I fear carries all the baggage of every corrected essay the writer ever received along the way. I don’t know how she will read the red, my trail of wounds to her words, even as I struggle to find a way to infuse each stroke with some kind of encouragement.

In between editing sessions, I am still reading John Berger, who continues to amaze me. He is writing about being at the National Gallery in London on Good Friday and deciding to draw the figure of Christ in the Crucifixion by Antonello de Messina. He finds the painting, and then realizes he will have to work stealthily around the guards who wander from room to room. Here’s the paragraph that caught me:

I start drawing. Correcting error after error. Some trivial. Some not. The crucial question is the scale of the cross on the page. If this is not right, the surrounding space will exert no pressure, and there’ll be no resistance. I’m drawing with ink and wetting my index finger with spit. Bad beginning. I turn the page and restart. I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll make others, of course. I draw, correct, draw. (52)

As I worked my way through the manuscript, I wished for a better way to explain myself, because I made lots of marks and changes. The commas are scattered across the page like confetti after a parade and I have to help sweep them up. In some places, the writer was so caught up in the emotion of the passage that they lost track of the tense and I had to call them into consistency. Then there were the places where the author moved from A to G or H without showing the reader how to follow, leaving rather philosophical potholes in the middle of the page big enough for said reader to get lost or give up. I recognized the errors because I have made them myself.

I worked in short shifts, seeking to stay fresh enough to be encouraging. I learned from my days of grading stacks of student essays that I had to pause every few pages and remind myself I needed to wield my pen with some measure of gentleness, rather than using the opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. I remembered that some days better than others. The word from which our word error comes meant wandering, as though the idea of an error or mistake carried with it the idea of having wandered off course. As I have been reading, I have carried that image, seeing the author out in the middle of a field, off the path they were shooting for, chasing an idea that had gotten away and dropping commas like bread crumbs, it seems. My choice was between correcting in a voice that sounded like a frightened parent (“Where have you been? You had us worried. Don’t ever wander off like that again.”) or a fellow traveler (“I’ve missed that turn myself; let me show you the way back to the path.”) As I edited, I became aware I was making mistakes of my own. When I got ready to send the manuscript, I spent an evening composing the letter to go with it, making sure the author understood the story didn’t belong to me and that my task was to offer suggestions and create a conversation.

As much as I wanted to throw pillows to soften the blows, I also know there is great value in failure. I took my job seriously and I mean what I wrote as I deleted and added to what had been given to me. Part of the way we find our way back from our wanderings is through those who have the courage to say, “You’ve made a mistake and have wandered off the path.” For the manuscript to be all that it can be, much needs to change. The writer needs to wrestle with what they wanted to say and what ended up on the page for the book to be ready for others to read. I expect to go through it again once the author responds, looking for more ways to improve it. To paraphrase Berger: write, correct, write.

One day, I hope, I will get to meet the author and hear the story behind how the book came to be and, perhaps, how they felt seeing my fingerprints all over their pages. Till then, I hope they can see beyond the red marks and hear my encouragement: the manuscript is worth revising.

Write, correct, write. How else will we learn?

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: good to grow

Sunday night I went over to the Pinhook, one of local bars, for the Fifth Birthday Celebration for Bountiful Backyards, our friends who helped create our little urban foodscape at our house. They do awesome work and I was happy to go and celebrate with them. The other reason for the evening is they are working to raise money to buy land to create a real urban farm in East Durham, one of our poorer neighborhoods. You can read about their Kickstarter campaign here (and chip in, too, if you like).

Besides food and drink and information, the evening was full of music. Midtown Dickens, one of our cool local bands, played along with Phil Cook and his Feat, as Phil calls himself when he is playing solo rather than with his great band, Megafaun. Phil is one of the most talented and genuine people I have met here in Durham, with a smile as wide as his heart is open to those around him -- and he’s a hell of a musician. All those things together make him someone I enjoy getting to be around when I have the chance.

Sunday night I had the good fortune of walking up on a conversation between Phil and one of the guys in Midtown Dickens as they were talking about the band’s new album, which is due out in February. Phil had had a chance to hear the mixes and was quite impressed. He gave wonderful and specific feedback about how the record not only sounded but also how it showed the band’s progression. Then he said, “One of my favorite things in life is when you get to see your friends grow.”

And I thought, “Now that’s a perspective worth remembering.”

I spent a good part of the last couple of days writing up interim reports on my students to send home to parents the end of the week. These reports, different from the semester grades, have a narrative component where we have a chance to write a short paragraph about what we see happening in the lives of our students. For whatever reason, the inclination in writing such things always seems to tilt towards where the kids are falling short. Some of that is necessary. After Phil’s comment, I found myself working to find ways to invite the parents to see how their son or daughter was growing and learning. In some cases, that was quite a challenge. I do well when I can approach of my classes much the same way I go out into our bountiful backyard to see what is growing and blossoming, and what needs some extra care.

Since Sunday night, as I have ruminated on Phil’s words, I have given thanks for friends over the years who have expected, and continue to expect, me to grow. As the years go by, it is perhaps harder to find those friends and to be one of them as well. When we were kids, we marked our growth on the door frame. When we were students, we counted out life in semesters and degrees. When life moves on beyond semesters and course work it doesn’t appear to offer as many benchmarks to measure our progress. Part of it is, perhaps, there aren’t as many. For my high schoolers, every year means a new name – sophomore, junior, senior – even as specific ages offer their own sense of accomplishment: eighteen, twenty-one. Midlife sort of lumps the years together. We make the most out of the decades, but mostly to tell each other we are getting older as though getting there was achievement enough. We too easily let it slip from our mind that we would do well to encourage each other to grow.

One of the great things about life is that we get to do things more than once. Yet, phrased another way, life can become repetitious, sometimes deadeningly so. (Did I just make up a word?) We have Communion the first Sunday of every month at our church, for instance. What determines whether our ritual is a way to mark time or is our simply going through the motions? The answer might lie in Phil’s words. As we come to do again what we have done before, do we expect one another to have grown? Even if we repeat the same words and actions, we are not the same people we were a month, a year, a day ago. As we break bread and pray and sing together, let us take time to notice and appreciate how one another has grown.

As we draw closer to Bethlehem, let us take stock not of how we have aged, but how we have grown, even as we come expecting Jesus to do more than be the baby in the manger.

Peace,
Milton

on the road to find out

Even though I went back to work on the second day of Christmas, I’ve been thinking more about what Christmastide means. Once we get to the manger, it seems, we find it hard to stay for very long. As far as the culture goes, our economy can’t afford for us to have too long of an attention span: the Valentine’s Day decorations are already out. We can’t spend money and take time to reflect. Those of us in churches that celebrate Advent do a better job waiting and preparing than we do once the baby arrives. Perhaps we are so tied to the culture that we move on, whether we intend to or not. Or, perhaps, we don’t know how to be patient and let Jesus grow up.

The gospel writers skipped from birth to one preadolescent story to Jesus being baptized. None of them intended to write full-fledged biographies, so the gaps are understandable, yet I still keep coming back to the idea that Jesus didn’t come into the world fully formed. Mary laid the babe in the manger that night and three decades later he began his ministry. It took almost eleven thousand days after his birth – eleven thousand breakfasts and dinners and dusty Nazareth afternoons -- for Jesus to incrementally become, well, Jesus.

Maybe the idea has stuck with me these past couple of days because I feel some disquietude in my life (and that’s a good thing) that leaves me wondering what is on the horizon. Here I am fifty-three years on (that would be over nineteen thousand days) and I still have a sense of becoming, as though had I continued to make pencil marks on the spiritual door frame of my life I would find I was still growing after all these years. I hope so, anyway. One measure I have had of late is this blog. Today marks the fourth anniversary of don’t eat alone. The nine hundred posts do resembled marks of a sort, indications of where I found myself on the journey on a particular day. I feel safe in saying I am not at the same place I was four years ago. And I am grateful for both the growth and the journey. Like Cat Stevens sings:

so on and on I go
the seconds tick the time out
there’s so much left to know
and I’m on the road to find out

Here’s to becoming, together.

Peace,
Milton

this day after

It was some time after seminary
my best friend, Burt, got married,
and then a few more years before
they had a child. I remember
calling one day; he answered,
saying he was lying on the bed
looking at the baby. I asked,
“Do you ever look down and say,
‘You’re going to stay here?’”

Something about this day after,
this morning beyond the manger,
that reminds me God chose to
come into the world not fully
formed. Jesus looked up from
the straw much like Burt’s baby
from the bedspread, more
enchanted, perhaps, that he
could chew on his toes than

Who he would grow up to be.
I was two weeks old my first
Christmas; a half century of
Decembers have since passed
(twenty more birthdays than
Jesus had) and couldn’t have
imagined that I would take
over fifty years to get from
Corpus Christi to North Carolina

Jesus considered lilies, cleansed
lepers, and chastised leaders who
thought they’d cornered the truth,
but not before he’d been a boy,
a teenager, a young man; not before
he had increased in wisdom and
stature. But that first morning,
Mary might have looked and loved,
and said, smiling, “You’re staying.”

Peace,
Milton