advent journal: moving pictures

For the last several days I have been changing the profile picture on my Facebook page as I shuffled through some pictures of my childhood. I don’t remember all of the situations, or even all the locations beyond a generality, but I do recognize myself in a more profound way than just seeing a younger version of me. Amazing.

moving pictures

I have shed enough skin
to clothe a thousand cobras
forgotten enough memories
to fill a well of lifetimes
and posed for pictures
most all of my years

whether the picture was
taken before or after,
near by or far away,
I recognize myself
like Peter Pan re-
finding the Lost Boys

I have lived enough days
to know I can’t go back in time
what a joyful surprise, then
that memories would come
forward full of grace
and call me by name

Peace,
Milton

little victories

When I was a student at Baylor, most any afternoon after class I made a stop at Baylor Records, a small independent record store barely a block off campus. It was a small rectangle of a room decorated with the obligatory record and concert posters and lined with wooden bins filled with albums separated by plastic dividers with the names of the artists and bands. More afternoons than I should, I came back to my room with records. I listened and I read, for those were the days of liner notes. Man, I miss liner notes. I read about how the records came together, whom the artists wanted to thank, and I learned about songwriters. Thanks to the almost yearly offerings of Linda Ronstadt and Eagles, I came to know Karla Bonoff, Warren Zevon, and John David Souther.

Some time on Friday, I think, I found out J. D. Souther was playing a Sunday night show at The Arts Center in Carrboro, one of the connected towns that make up our rather ungeometric Triangle. He is supporting a new CD, Natural History, that has allowed him to revisit some of the songs I sang along with in college and sing them himself without much more than guitar and piano, which was the way he sang last night. Needless to say, I went.

The evening began with a set by Jill Andrews, who was new to me but quite accomplished. She was in a band called the Everybody Fields, who happened to show up in my Pandora mix the other day and consisted of her and her ex-husband, thus explaining why the band is no more. She was an interesting mixture of Edie Brickell and Kasey Chambers, with lovely melodies, warm and insightful lyrics, and an engaging stage presence. I was struck by her offering of new songs as the opening to an evening of Souther’s well-aged words and music. It made for an amazing evening for the two hundred or so who found their way into the room to hear them.

I love to listen to live music. Part of the reason is there’s always something that happens that makes it a you-had-to-be-there kind of moment. Last night, for instance, in the midst of singing the songs we knew well, Souther sang “Bye, Bye Blackbird” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” He wasn’t just fooling around, either. “Blackbird” –

pack up all my cares and woe
here I go singing low
bye bye blackbird

fell in between “Silver Blue” –

you think you're gonna live forever
and somehow find me there
but you'll be wearing golden wings
and fall right through the air

and “Sad Café” –

oh, expecting to fly,
we would meet on that beautiful shore in the sweet by and by
some of their dreams came true, some just passed away
and some of the stayed behind inside the sad cafe.

As I watched both Andrews and Souther, I realized again the main reason I love to hear and see someone offer their songs live is because it is such an incarnational act of faith and hope. While the world is at war and at odds and at loose ends, we sat in the dark and listen to people sing words they put to music and set free to change the world. Some of Souther’s songs have lived in my memory for years and they were called up for a fresh new moment all because he was willing to play and sing and risk that it all matters once again, even as he sang in a beautiful song called “Little Victories” –

now as we face our uncertain future
looking at uncharted seas
we see the tear that runs along the curtain
you step right through you stand with me

little victories
everybody needs some
little victories

though it hurts sometimes to look around
blindness only keeps you down
the best may lie beyond this present and past
the skies may open the waters part

little victories
I know you need one
little victories
of the heart

Last night, we got one.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: emotional archaeology

I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had been gone a good thirty years, had sold their land to the Wilsons, who in turn had passed it on to the Smiths; but it still the old Turner place, named for someone even the old timers had a hard time remembering.

Ginger and I spent the afternoon with a friend who had come for his daughter to look at Duke. She is a junior in college and beginning to think about where she wants to study. After they had seen the campus, they came to our house so we could go to dinner. Ginger had a meeting first, so I played tour guide to share what I knew about Durham. Thanks to the Neighborhood History Walk our neighborhood association does, tours friends gave us when we moved here, and a little reconnoitering of my own, I can put together a pretty good little tour of our fair city, though, after I talked about the old Erwin Mills buildings on Ninth Street and the old tobacco buildings at Brightleaf and American Tobacco, I wondered if I didn’t sound like I was giving directions to the old Turner place. I was telling history that I didn’t experience as though I knew what it meant.

Pick any church building with stained glass windows over a hundred years old and there will be names most folks in the congregations would be hard pressed to recognize. Within the last year, the last survivor of the German concentration camps died, meaning those chilling stories that compel us never to forget can no longer be told in the first person. As a collective, the human race has forgotten more than it has remembered; there are only so many things we can carry. As a youth minister in the mid-eighties, I remember my shock when one of my seventh graders, who would have been born in the early seventies, picked up a Beatles record of mine and said, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” Alas, the trivial example best makes the point.

emotional archaeology

the bones of a building don’t have
the guts to tell you the whole story
the faded cigarette sign painted on
the wall isn’t the whole picture

I’m digging in the used bin at Offbeat
Records in Brightleaf a tobacco building
turned into a tune shop whose days
are numbered thanks to itunes

the vacant lot at the end of our block
once held the house where John Loudermilk
wrote Tobacco Road and I find myself
hard pressed to sing more than the title

the day is coming I know when someone
will ask about a new place and I’ll say
it’s where the old record shop used to be
mourning both music and memory

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: rhymes and reasons

A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse,” which means the problem is not with the word or phrase in and of itself, but with the fact that it once was so original and true that we used it to death.

The problem for songwriters is there are only so many words and so many rhymes. Once a good one is found, it is almost destined to become a cliché – other than my favorite lines from Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”:

I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
Wanna tell her that I love but the point is probably moot.

The great songwriters of the Forties and Fifties could rhyme like nobody’s business (yep, that’s one): inside rhymes, circular rhymes, exact rhymes. Still, thanks to them, no self-respecting songwriter is going to rhyme moon and June with a straight face. It’s a beautiful rhyme, once full of possibilities, and it has lost its originality by overuse. Even though I like Vanessa Williams, her song, “Save the Best for Last,” is a good example of songwriters going to the same well once too often.

sometimes the snow comes down in June
sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon
I see the passion in your eyes
sometimes it's all a big surprise


cause there was a time when all I did was wish
you'd tell me this was love
it's not the way I hoped or how I planned
but somehow it's enough


and now we're standing face to face
isn't this world a crazy place
just when I thought our chance had passed
you go and save the best for last

The melody is romantic, her voice is beautiful, and the song has nothing new to say other than David Foster, who produced the record, knew a hit when he heard one. Of course, there are some songwriters – OK, one: John Prine – who can turn a who handful of clichés into a song by using them on purpose. I give you “Big Old Goofy World.”

Up in the morning
Work like a dog
Is better than sitting
Like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners
Be quiet as a mouse
Some day you'll own a home
That's as big as a house


I know a fella
he eats like a horse
knocks his old balls
round the old golf course
you oughta see his wife
she's a cute little dish
she smokes like a chimney
and drinks like a fish


there's a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it's a big old goofy world


now Elvis had a woman
with a head like a rock
I wished I had a woman
that made my knees knock
she'd sing like an angel
and eat like a bird
and if I wrote a song
she'd know ever single word


kiss a little baby
give the world a smile
if you take an inch
give 'em back a mile
cause if you lie like a rug
and you don't give a damn
you're never gonna be
as happy as a clam


so I'm sitting in a hotel
trying to write a song
my head is just as empty
as the day is long
why it's clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I'd be wise as an owl
stead of stubborn as a mule


there's a big old goofy man
dancing with a big old goofy girl
ooh baby
it's a big old goofy world

Prine’s sense of humor and irony fills the clichés with some new life. There’s more going on than just the words. Long overuse doesn’t automatically turn a word or phrase (or a song) into a cliché. Sing along if you like:

amazing grace how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
was blind but now I see

The rhymes are old, perhaps even obvious, the song used at most every occasion from family reunions to film soundtracks to funerals, and still their familiarity calls up something other than tired; it connects to memory. For most. I’m sure there are those who hear this hymn as clichéd as Vanessa’s song, which leads to my question.

How do we keep the words and phrases that matter to us from becoming clichés?

I should define “we.” I don’t mean it in a giant, cultural, what’s-going-to-go-in-the-dictionary kind of sense. I mean we, as in family, or partners, or spouses, or friends, or congregations. It seems to me that there is a fine line between ritual (meaningful and intentional repetition) and cliché (meaningless from repetition). When we sing, for instance,

praise God from whom all blessings flow
praise God all creatures here below
praise God above ye heavenly host
Creator Christ and Holy Ghost

are we engaging in ritual, or are we repeating a well-worn cliché?

One of the ways the words don’t get tired, I suppose, is to keep asking the question because the answer may not always be the same, even for the same group of people. What do we have to do to infuse the familiarity of our well-worn words and phrases with the tenacity of the truth they hold and the courage and comfort of the faith to which they call us?

I love to tell the story for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest
and when in scenes of glory I sing a new new song
will be the old old story that I have loved so long

When it comes to songwriting lessons, perhaps rhymes do get tired and worn. But then again:

prone to wander Lord I feel it
prone to leave the God I love
here’s my heart O take and seal it
Seal it for thy courts above

Perhaps it’s not so much the words as the hearts and minds that grow weary.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: re-member

I was reminded of a Madeleine L’Engle story last Sunday because Jake, one of our divinity students, mentioned it in his sermon last Sunday. L’Engle spoke of a couple with a very precocious young daughter who was not thrilled at the prospect of having to share the house with a soon-to-arrive baby brother. Soon after they brought the baby home from the hospital, the little girl announced she needed to see the baby – alone. The parents were a bit hesitant, but the girl was insistent, so they agreed, but stood with the door cracked so they could hear what was happening without her knowledge. They listened as she pulled a chair over and climbed up into the crib with the infant, and then they heard her say, “Tell me about God; I’m forgetting.”

Life, faith, and memory are inextricably connected. How, then, do we remember?

Daniel Levitin is making me think. Hard. Our brains, he explains, create frameworks of understanding, or schemas, in order to make sense of the world and to give it some sort of structure and form. Because change is a constant and because our brain is constantly receiving new information, those schemas are always under revision and are an extension of memory: part of the structure the brain creates depends on what it remembers of what happened before. We remember names, dates, experiences, smells, sounds, images – to name a few – and, of course, songs. But when we talk about remembering music, we must also remember:

The most important way that music differs from visual art is that it is manifested over time. As tones unfold sequentially, they lead us – our brains and our minds – to make predictions about what will come next. (125)

As the brain give structure and form to the good vibrations, it has to do so over time, in real time, as the melody unfolds. There’s more:

Most astonishing was that the left-hemisphere regions that we found we active tin tracking musical structure were the very same one that are active when deaf people are communicating by sign language . . . We found evidence for the existence of a brain region that processes structure in general, when the structure is conveyed over time. (130)

Making music in our brain is multi-tasking at its best, as is remembering the songs we’ve heard. Making memories is much like making sense of the vibrations: the brain goes back to put back together – to re-member – what it knew before. Our faith is as old as the songs. We’ve been singing about and to Whoever’s Out There as long as we’ve been able to imagine that there is a God and it’s not us. Faith, like music and memory, is conveyed over time.

The Genesis account of how the universe came into being uses a week as a metaphor to say God didn’t just belch us into being, but took time to let the oceans flow, the mountains rise, the creatures find their places, and the sun to set. And it was good. Jesus didn’t drop into the world as a fully formed Messiah, but came into the world as a baby born in a barn and grew up over time. On the night he was betrayed, he ate with his disciples and said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” And then they sang a song together.

How, then, do we re-member who God is? How do we put things back together over time?

A number of years ago, Ginger and I got to go to Israel and Palestine. The Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives was one of the places where our guide said we could be sure we were walking where Jesus had walked. (Some of the other sites were not so verifiable.) The root systems of the olive trees there go back to Jesus’ time. I had recently been in a production of Godspell, and as I sat in the garden I remembered one of the songs I had sung:

on the willows there
we hung up our lyres
for our captors there
required of us songs
and our tormentors mirth
saying sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
but how can we sing
sing the Lord’s songs
in a foreign land

The Israelites held captive in Babylon couldn’t imagine how to re-member their songs and their faith when they were so far from home. How could they put the structure of their lives back together when they were far from what they knew to be safe and secure? But that is when we need to sing most, for it is the songs and the repertoire of memories they carry in their melodies, that help us re-member ourselves, re-member our faith, so we can do what all the king’s horses could not.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music. (166)

Over all the years of youth camps I have done, Communion has been a last night tradition. One year, Ginger and I were at camp with John Brashier and, as we finished Communion, I put Sarah McLachlan in the CD player:

I will remember you
will you remember me

The emotion in the room was palpable. “That song is full of memories,” he said.

“It seems like a good time to unpack them,” I answered. We stood and watched as the memories rode in on the words and music and the individuals in the room re-membered themselves and put themselves back together, again.

Come, tell me about God. I keep forgetting. Let us re-member together.

Peace,
Milton

old friends

Ginger and I have spent today unpacking.

Yes, I know we’ve been in Durham for a year and a half, and in our house for over a year. But we’ve had a stack of boxes sitting in the shed in the back yard all that time waiting for us to make room: boxes of books and CDs and the stuff I have to paint with and to make cards and candles. Now things are out of the boxes. The books and such have found shelves on which to sit, but the studio/office is filled with stacks of papers and boxes of paints and paper scraps. And then there are the boxes of photographs and affirmation cards – the real treasures.

In the summer of 1983, I went to youth camp with First Baptist Richardson, thanks to my friend, Gene Wilkes, who was the Youth Minister. The first morning of camp during the Sunshine Show, which was thirty or forty-five minutes of music blared across the camp to let everyone wake up after breakfast, the kids began to gather in the worship area and several of them went to the microphones and began calling names for mail call. The cards they were handing out were “affirmation cards,” notes they wrote to one another with messages of encouragement, hope, and friendship. When I moved on the be Youth Minister at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, I took the practice with me, and then on to churches where Ginger served in Winchester and Marshfield, Massachusetts, and my last stint as the Youth Guy at First Congregational Church in Hanover.

And I think I’ve hung on to almost every last card that I received. If I don’t have them all, I have most of them. I know. I found them again today, along with stacks of pictures that flooded my mind and heart with stories and memories.

And music. Along with the pictures, I found some CDs, among which was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends:

A time it was
It was a time
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you

When we studied the grief process during my CPE days, they told us a normal grief cycle lasts eighteen months to three years. Though we landed in Durham doing about seventy-five miles an hour, both starting work within forty-eight hours of driving into town, and finding ourselves in a place where we feel a great deal of resonance and acceptance, we left behind almost two decades of friends and memories in Massachusetts, which is where we had spent all but about three months of our married lives. Perhaps the boxes had to sit in the shed until we were ready to unpack the last -- and some of the most self-defining -- things we own.

I’m not sure we could have gotten to it any sooner. And we tried.

Thumbing through the pictures and affirmation cards helped me realize what has replaced the grief is gratitude. I still miss Massachusetts. This week, after reading Facebook notes about old friends heading to camp again, I still miss it. It’s not so much that the yearning for disappears as, it seems, the grief is replaced by gratitude for the tether of love and memory. In the face of the hard realities that we cannot all be together in the same place and life moves on just as we do, I find myself sitting with stacks of colored index cards and photographs that remind me there is a dimension to our existence that runs deeper or wider or higher or whatever word would describe a direction we cannot completely comprehend that lets those words and images that are now years old still have life. Real life in real time.

One of our new favorite TV shows is In Plain Sight, which centers around Mary Shannon, a US Marshall who works with the Federal Witness Protection Program. It is a show about people who have to move without being able to take their memories, or anything else for that matter, with them. A couple of weeks ago, the show ended with this paragraph of monologue that has stayed with me:

Before the Big Bang, before time itself, before matter, energy, velocity, there existed a single immeasurable state called yearning. This is the special force that on the day before there were days obliterated nothing into everything. It is the unseen strings tying planets to stars. It is the maddening want we feel from first breath to last light.

I’m grateful I am able to miss those with whom I used to share laughs and tears, meals and movies and the strange rituals of friendship. I’m grateful for the yearning to be with them again, because the creative power of that love is stronger than the grief that comes with loss, strong enough to let me unpack those memories in my new home, my new place, and begin to write new messages of love and hope to the people who surround me here.



Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: looking through some photographs

For many of the years we lived in New England, we shared our Charlestown neighborhood with the USS Constitution, which was docked in the Charlestown Navy Yard. I even got to ride on it one Bunker Hill Day (that’s June 17 to those not from Boston) on its turn around cruise in Boston harbor. It is still the oldest commissioned vessel in the Navy. One of the things that means is the Navy can continue to repair it. Once a ship is decommissioned it loses its historical authenticity if anything is altered, but a commissioned vessel can be changed and kept up. The Constitution, as it is today, is only about ten percent original material, even though it is still recognizable and considered to be the ship it has always been.

Tonight, at the end of a day that included working an extra catering shift to serve lunch to 330 people in the halls of Cameron Indoor Stadium to sharing another round of oysters with my friend Terry to wine and cheese with new friends, Ginger started thumbing through old photo albums getting ready for some cleaning and arranging we have to do tomorrow. As she turned pages, I saw myself as I have not seen myself in years; I, too, it seems, am about ten percent original material.

And still in commission.


About the time this picture was taken, Jackson Browne released what is still my favorite record of his – and it was a record: Late for the Sky. The second track, “Fountain of Sorrow,” begins

looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
there were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more
but they didnt show your spirit quite as true

you were turning round to see who was behind you
and I took your childish laughter by surprise
and at the moment that my camera happened to find you
there was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes

fountain of sorrow, fountain of light
youve known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight
youve had to hide sometimes, but now youre all right
and its good to see your smiling face tonight

Some of the pictures brought back very specific memories. I could remember when it was taken, what was going on, even details down to smells and sounds and feelings. Others were harder to place. Then there were inadvertent series: Ginger and Milton hugging each other over the years; Milton in the kitchen; Schnauzerfest. Since organization is not our strong suit, some albums had pictures from different years sitting next to each other, making me wonder how I got from one to the other.

And how I got from there to here.

I’m the liturgist for worship this Sunday. The gospel passage is from John 3 – the last half of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. Though the reading doesn’t begin until Jesus starts talking about snakes on a stick, I can’t help but notice Nicodemus’ bewilderment at having to be born again. Perhaps he had a hard time because he knew nothing of photographs (or Jackson Browne, for that matter). He had no albums to thumb through, calling him to remember his wonder years or what life was like in Pharisee School. As I turned pages, I saw myself born again and again, the photographs morphing from mounds of memories into gatherings of gratitude.

It has been good to see my smiling face tonight.

Peace,
Milton

finding my roots

It’s been a long time since I was an English teacher, but I am still capable of correcting mistakes, being bothered more than most by ones we, as a society, have chosen to let slide. “First Annual . . . ,” for example; it can be the first, but it can’t be annual until there is a second one. One-time happenings do not a tradition make. They may make us hopeful that we’ve started something, but the roots of tradition take time to grow.

That said, I’m hopeful I’ve begun a new tradition. Actually, the tradition already exists, I’m just hopeful I can become a part of it. Fishmongers, a local seafood institution, has a tradition of an oyster special on Friday afternoons: seven bucks a dozen. My invitation to join came when my friend Terry called yesterday afternoon.

“What are you doing?” he asked, which was an introduction to the more important question: “Would you like to go to eat some oysters?”

The answer to the second question was an unequivocal YES.

He picked me up a few minutes later, and before long I was digging into my first dozen, accompanied by a Newcastle Brown Ale. As luck would have it, Ginger was out walking with Lori, Terry’s wife, so I called them to inform them of our plans and they changed their walking route to meet us at the restaurant. The four of us had a great time together, and then the women headed off to finish their walk and Terry and I stayed to finish our beverages and continue our conversation. I came home happy and hopeful that it was only the first of many of my Fridays at Fishmongers.

I can feel my roots beginning to grow.

Two or three songs into the show last night, Joseph Shabalala, the founder and leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, spoke to the sold out auditorium about music and tradition. Ladysmith has been singing for forty-eight years, taking the harmonies that grew out of the suffering and hardship of the mineworkers and giving it life as a healing force.

“Tradition is like a tree,” he said; “the deeper the roots grow, the stronger the tree becomes, and the wider the branches.”

They sang songs with roots that grew deep, going back beyond the destructive violence of apartheid, back beyond the mines, back to Shaka Zulu, to what it means to be African, to what it means to be human. I thought about the tree that fills our front yard, which must be eighty or ninety years old and is the same tree that was planted even though it’s own existence is testament to all its changes. Whoever planted it all those years ago hardly could have imagined how it would tower over our little house any more than Shabalala could have imagined his singing group would grow to sing at Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Prize ceremony, or tour the world, or end up singing with Paul Simon. When they sang “Homeless” last night, they talked a bit about the collaboration, now over two decades ago, and then introduced the song by saying, “We are all homeless.”

And yet their songs called me home.

My deepest memories of Africa are musical ones. Sundays, as a boy, meant meeting at Matero Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. The harmonies the guys brought to the stage last night were the same ones that sprang from our congregation each Sunday: rich, rhythmic, and relational. As they sang, I found roots I didn’t know I had, roots that run deeper than all the moves I’ve made, all the disconnects, all the rootlessness and homelessness I feel. As they sang, I could see faces – Wynnegood, Norman, Rebecca, Lazarus -- and smell the dust that swirled around the church, feel the breezes that blew through the open windows, even hear the rain on the corrugated tin roof that made it almost impossible to hear on stormy Sundays.

After all of these years, Africa has not let go of me. My roots, withered as they seem, remember with resilience and I find myself feeling like a prodigal reclaimed. In the same evening, strangers with songs and a new friend offering oysters both came to say I belong, which is a message I crave, over and over again.

The climatic scene in the movie Ratatouille comes when the grizzled old food critic tastes the little mouse’s signature dish and is pulled from his cynical self all the way back to the hungry hope he knew as a child that was satisfied by the same dish at his mother’s table. In a similar way, the harmonies took hold of my heart and pulled it across oceans and continents to a place in my childhood full of meaning and emotion. Though Zambia is not my home, I was reminded that I felt at home there and it has not let me go. It was less about remembering a place than it was remembering who I was. Who I am. My roots are deeper than I ever imagined; my branches wider.

William Cowper wrote

sometimes a light surprises the Christian when he sings
it is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings
when comforts are declining he grants the soul again
a season of clear shining to cheer it after rain

“I had a farm in Africa,” Isak Denisen began Out of Africa. I had several houses there myself, which I left long ago. But last night, Africa came and found me with melodies that broke my heart and healed it again, even as I walked out of the room resonating with memories and into the cool night of my new town.

Terry says Ladysmith comes around almost every year. Whether last night was a first annual event, I don’t know; I can tell you by the next time they come I will have eaten an awful lot of oysters.



Peace,
Milton

memorying

it was a short note
an old friend wrote
all he said was
he was “vinlying”
John Denver records
that’s all, yet
the mere mention
of the melodies
sent me “memorying”
across layers of time
to long ago nights
when we played
and sang and talked
of poems, prayers
and promises
and things that
we believed in
I still know the chords
and the words
and the feelings
they have aged
right along with me,
as have the friends,
and I’m grateful
for them all



Peace,
Milton

(Thanks, Davy)

tell me a story

I come from a family of storytellers.

Actually, I come from a family of slightly exaggerated storytellers. We tell good stories and we feel free to alter the details to spice it up a little, too. I love to listen to a story, or read one, or even watch one, almost as much as I like to tell them. A great story leaves an indelible mark on our hearts. Like a great melody, it inhabits and haunts and pulls up feelings with a simple phrase, reminding us we have been changed by our listening. We are no longer the same.

Today was “Mountain Sunday” at our church (as well as Stewardship Sunday and Thanksgiving Sunday and the Last Sunday in Ordinary Time). The title refers to the music we sang and heard today, which came mostly from Appalachian and gospel traditions, both of which know of and speak from a deep acquaintance with both suffering and gratitude. And so, our service began

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
traveling through this world of woe
but there’s no sickness toil or danger
in that bright land to where I go

From there we wandered across rivers and up and down mountains through our songs and scriptures, until it was time for Carla, our associate pastor, to preach. She began her sermon by talking about stories and then saying she was going to tell part of hers, I leaned in. She told us about how her family settled in Charlotte and survived the coming and going of the textile mill, and how they built homes to be close to one another. As she talked about their Thanksgiving traditions, she told of one tragedy that had befallen the family – the death of a child – and how that marked the holiday for all the years after. As she described one of her relatives, she used a descriptive phrase that turned the story from information to incarnation as she spoke of the “sacred sorrow so bound up with his gratitude.”

Her words landed on me with resonance and power. In the same moment, I knew she was right and I wondered how it is the two are so inextricably tied together. From my English teacher days I remember a story needs conflict or suffering to move it along and to move it toward redemption or reconciliation or even disappointment. What the stories tell us is we were built to learn from our suffering, not simply to endure it. Perhaps that is how stories were born in the first place – the good ones, anyway. Carla had a phrase for that as well: good stories are those that shape our souls into vessels to hold our gratitude.

Her words made me wonder what kind of story I’m telling and how well the stories I hear and tell mold my soul into a thanksgiving tank, if you will. So many of the gospel hymns tell stories of heaven. We even closed our service with a rocking rendition of

some glad morning wihen this life is o’er
I’ll fly away . . .

Many of those songs were born out of suffering, yet their response is more than asking for relief. It’s not about getting out, it’s about getting through. Gratitude grows when we trust that suffering is not the last word.

The story is not yet over.

Suffering that doesn’t breed thankfulness turns to despair. Gratitude that is not informed by grief may quench our souls only briefly, but quickly evaporates. Memory – remembrance is the thing that binds the two so essentially and stories remind us to remember, as the saying goes, who we are and whose we are.

And I remembered this morning, thank you.



Peace,
Milton

thank you, mama africa

I turned one year old on a ship sailing across the Atlantic Ocean for Africa.

My parents were going to be missionaries in Southern Rhodesia and I was along for the ride. In 1957, the only way to get from Texas to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia was by ship, and then car. We were thirty-two days at sea, leaving New York harbor and stopping only once on the island of St. Helena before docking in Beira, Mozambique. Somewhere in the open water I celebrated my first birthday.

The first task of a missionary in those days was language school. Sindabele was the native tongue (one of the Bantu languages) and my parents were told that the first six weeks of their new life would involve nothing but language classes. They hired a woman named Salina to stay with me while they went about their lessons. One of the favorites stories my father tells is getting one of their first vocabulary lists and finding the word “isikwapa” and it’s translation: armpit. My father was livid and said, “I came halfway around the world to tell people about Jesus and the first word you teach me is armpit!”

Fifty years on, it’s the only Sindabele word any of my family remembers.

Sindabele is one of the “click languages,” meaning there are actual clicking sounds connected to the consonants. You don’t just say the letter, you pop your tongue in one of several ways to make the sound. As a little one, who learned the language faster from Salina than my parents did at school, I couldn’t say the word and the click, I would do one and then the other. No wonder I was fascinated when Miriam Makeba recorded “The Click Song” just a couple of years later.

I tell that story because Miriam Makeba died today at 76. Beyond “The Click Song,” the woman known as “Mama Africa” was one of those voices of freedom that has resonance across generations. She is South African who lived through apartheid and saw her Nelson Mandela become president. She died after singing a concert in Italy in support of another artist taking a stand for what matters. She had a long and full life, far beyond what I knew about it. I didn’t follow her career or know too much more of her music than the song that captured me as a child. And that connection is enough to stop, take notice, and give thanks she sang as she did.



Peace,
Milton

my back pages

It would be interesting to trace the transformation in American society that broke the link between popular religion and high intellectual achievement, between religious enthusiasm and generous and transformative change. In my experience, many of the schools in the old abolitionist archipelago are entirely forgetful of their history, or are embarrassed by the little they know about it, in most cases because they are very progressive and enlightened and therefore do not wish to trace their paternity to a clutch of fiery preachers, and in some cases because they are piously conservative and do not enjoy association with a clutch of New England radicals.

Marilynne Robinson, "A Great Amnesia" in Harpers Magazine, May 2008

Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"

I do wonder how you went from ministry at Pecan Grove, Texas to the UCC church and working as a chef, but maybe that is a long story?
It would be fascinating if you are ever in the mood to tell it.

Brenda, in an email to me

I’ve been turning Brenda’s request over in my mind for several days. I wish I knew a way to tell a short version, or to tell one in which I didn’t feel like I was leaving out major chunks, or running the risk of being misunderstood. That said, the practice of trying to tell the story has been an important one for me, so it feels worth sharing.

One more thing: this version is more of an emotional landscape than a chronology or even autobiography. I tried to find the line that runs from the God I first knew as a little boy to the God I trust now.

_________________________________________

I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know that God loved me. I was born into a strong Southern Baptist family where my parents sang hymns to me to put me to sleep (many of which I still know). When I was five years old, I gave my heart to Jesus. I wasn’t converted. I’m not sure I became a Christian in any understandable sense. I didn’t turn from a life of sin and sex and drugs. I did what a five year old would do: I gave my heart away. Then I told my three-year-old brother he was going straight to hell if he didn’t give his heart to Jesus. Ah – memories.

As much as I knew God loved me, I’m also pressed to remember a time when I didn’t feel like that love (or anyone else’s) had to be earned, or I had to prove myself worthy of receiving it. As far back as I can remember being loved, I can also remember not feeling like I was enough, in most any sense of that word. I worked hard to be good, to be best, to be at the top of the heap. It wasn’t a competitive thing for me, primarily; I just wanted to prove myself. I was a fairly compliant teenager. I didn’t get into a lot of trouble because I was mostly worried about disappointing my father, the preacher. It was many years before I realized I had had a hard time figuring out where God stopped and Dad started. The good side is that dynamic kept me out of a good bit of trouble. The downside is I defined myself by who I thought people around me wanted to be. I took my cues from them.

I went to Baylor University primarily because that was where all of my family had gone. I didn’t even apply to another school. I “surrendered for ministry” (an interesting Baptist phrase) primarily because that was the family business. I started pastoring (at Pecan Grove) at the end of my junior year because a family friend who had pastored there called and said he thought it would be a good match. I graduated from college and moved up I-35 to Southwestern Seminary because that’s where everyone else was going. Again, I never thought to look anywhere else.

All of them were good experiences. (OK – the group of us who hung together at Southwestern to survive were worth remembering; I have done my best to never step on that campus again.) I pastored that little church for four years. I loved my time at Baylor, even though I feel far from the person who walked that campus. Even as I was doing all the right things, my inner contradictions were breaking the surface. At the end of my first semester of seminary, and after Alabama had drubbed Baylor in the Cotton Bowl, I stood on a table in George’s, a legendary bar in Waco, after way too many beers and sang, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Most of the crowd knew the words and sang along. I didn’t know what to do with feeling somehow at home in that bar, even as I felt at home at church.

I don’t want to over-romanticize the moment. I was dead drunk and making a fool of myself. My internal conflict lasted long after the hangover was gone, however. To speak in the terms of the emotional landscape I mentioned at the first, the way my heart has housed my insecurities has always pulled my gaze to the margins. I’ve never felt as though I had a guaranteed place in the in-crowd, so I’m drawn to the others who stand outside the circle, for whatever reason.

The fundamentalist overthrow of the Southern Baptist Convention began while I was in seminary. The fight was then, and continued to be, much more about politics and power than it ever was about theology. The push to get everyone in lockstep let me know I was quickly becoming a Baptist at the margins of the denomination.

After seminary, I moved east from Fort Worth to Dallas, at the suggestion of one of my professors, and completed eight units of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), which was sort of like emotional surgery without anesthetic. The premise of the program is you learn who you are by examining what you say and do – scary stuff for a guy like me who didn’t know how to integrate the various faces I presented to the world around me. Needless to say, I found my way to therapy. From there, I found my way into youth ministry, in large part because I had been doing youth retreats and people told me I was good at it.

I was the Minister to Youth/University at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas for six years. I was good at it. I loved working with junior high and high school kids – their lives were at the margins. My memories of high school were mostly of wishing I could have been anyone else but me. I knew their pain, I took them seriously, and I loved them. It was good combination. As the eighties drew to a close, the denomination I knew was falling a part. The hardliners were vicious and tenacious and those who saw themselves as moderates had been caught by surprise and were left to define themselves by who they weren’t rather than who they wanted to be. (I understood the dynamic quite well.) It all served to make me mad.

One of my former professors told me he thought I should start working on a PhD in New Testament at Baylor, so I did. I drove from Fort Worth on my day off and took two seminars that fall. In January I met Ginger and, for the first time in my life, felt unconditionally loved. By the end of the spring semester, I decided I wanted to be in love with her more than I wanted a doctorate, so I withdrew from the program. We married in April, 1990. Though I was happy in my work, we were both feeling more and more alienated from Baptist life. We needed to be in a more open place. A perfect storm of a new pastor at UBC who wanted to see me leave, a realization on my part that I was going to explode in anger if I didn’t get out of Texas, and a chance to go to Boston to try and start a church led us to move to Charlestown in August of that year.

For four years we worked to start a church in our neighborhood. We both had to get other jobs because of the way the whole enterprise was funded. Ginger managed a group home for troubled adolescents and I got a job substitute teaching. The church didn’t take. We realized we weren't evangelists. Ginger moved to a job as the youth minister at First Congregational Church, Winchester. She went on to transfer her ordination to the UCC (boy, is that the short version!) and we found a home at the church there. I was raised – well, I think -- in faith by a very conservative denomination and found a home in the most liberal mainline Christian denomination – “the last house on the left,” as they say. And I am at home here.

I went back to school and got my teaching certification and my masters in English because a position opened. Once again, I loved being with the kids. Ten years of bureaucracy and the coming of standardized test took their toll. I also struggled with grading. I hated it. For me, good teaching meant inviting the students into an honest relationship of trust and sharing. I wanted them to feel safe enough to risk and grow. Then came the end of the semester and I betrayed the whole enterprise by saying, “Your life is a C.” At least that’s how it felt to me, the one who felt as though he wasn’t that good at making the grade.

When we moved from Winchester to Marshfield, I stepped out of the classroom and fell off into the bottomless darkness of depression. Looking back, I can see where it also showed up along the way, but for about eighteen months all I could do was get out of bed, walk the beach, and try to write poetry. Early in May eight years ago, Ginger said, “I know this has been hard, but you have to make some money.” I spent the next week driving all around the South Shore trying to figure out what I wanted to do. For the first time, I was looking for a job based on what I wanted to do, not because someone told me I was good at it.

I came home with two jobs. The first was a part-time gig at the South Shore Music Circus, a summer open-air music venue. I went in to see about a stage crew job and got hired as security, thanks to my size and my shaved head. The other was a cooking job. I knew the kitchen was a depression free zone for me, so I thought that might work professionally. I talked my way into a job at a small place that was just opening. By the time the restaurant did open, I had to take time off for a church mission trip. I got back to find the chef and the owner had gotten into a big fight the night before and she had fired him. I was the only one in the kitchen who spoke fluent English, so she put me in charge. Joao and Carlos, the two very capable Brazilian cooks taught me how to do my job. The restaurant didn’t last but six months, but I’ve been cooking ever since.

When we moved to Durham, I moved as a chef. Fifty-one years on, I’m doing what I most want to do: cook and write. I’m a member of a church of ”extravagant welcome,” which comes through in what we say each week: whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here. I have dear friends who have stayed in Baptist life. I couldn’t do it. My anger would have gotten the best of me. I don’t do well when people are drawing lines to decide who is in or out, who is acceptable or not. (I make that statement to say more about me than them.) I’m a part of a people who ordained a black man to pastor an all white congregation before the Civil War, who ordained women sixty years before they could vote, and who ordained the first openly gay man as pastor in the seventies. I belong to a church that looks to see who is standing at the margins and brings them in. I belong here.

I’m almost halfway to fifty-two and I still can’t remember not knowing that God loves me – that hasn’t changed. What has changed is I’m better at trusting that God loves me because I’m breathing, because I’m here and created in God’s image. That’s enough.

Peace,
Milton

living history

We stepped back into the history of our church today for our annual worship service at O'Kelly Chapel, the birthplace of our congregation (as explained by this plaque):


We had an amazing cool, sunny spring day for our gathering, which included dinner on the grounds following worship.










We used the old hymnals, which meant we got to sing a lot of old gospel songs I grew up with, using the old pump organ and the piano in the chapel, niether of which had been tuned in some time. We augmented the accompaniment with fiddles, guitars, and harmonicas.

Being in that wonderful old wooden room with the gentle breeze blowing through the open windows made me want to know more about how we got from there to where we are now. If you come out of the chapel grounds and turn left on Highway 751 all you have to do is stay on the very same highway until you get into town and come to Pilgrim UCC on the right. The spiritual journey of our congregation is more complicated and interesting; the path is not quite so direct. Most any faith journey is full of twists, turns, and surprises.

To stand knee deep in a history I don't know was fascinating to me because I found much there that felt familiar. The old hymns were the same ones I grew up singing in the Baptist church. The old wooden building was much like my seminary pastorate in central Texas. But I felt something more profound than my personal connections. I caught a sense of the line of faith that connects us all across the ages; our church history doesn't end at O'Kelly Chapel, but runs through it instead, one thread of a web of grace and love that has caught us all.

Like the old song says:

All glory and praise
to the God of all grace,
Who has brought us and sought us
and guided our ways.

Hallelujah! Thine the glory
Hallelujah! Amen.
Hallelujah! Thine the glory
Revive us again.

Peace,
Milton

cheese plate communion

It was a perfect night.

The four of us sat around the iron table on the patio of La Hacienda and shared an evening filled with wonderful Mexican food, frozen margaritas, friendship, laughter, and stories – all a part of our celebration of Ginger’s birthday. It was not the only food of the day. During our time in New England, one of the rituals for Ginger’s birthday was a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to wander and wonder among the paintings and then to share the cheese plate in the museum café. We didn’t make it to an art museum yesterday, but we did end up at Six Plates, a wine bar owned by a new friend here in Durham, that has a great cheese plate to keep up our birthday tradition. My girl likes her some cheese.

As Ginger told of our travels from cheese plate to queso and chips, our friend Lindsey said, “You all are such creatures of ritual.”

Yes, we are.

Ritual is best defined as “meaningful repetition” – repeating those things that help you remember, as the old saying goes, who you are and whose you are. So we end up in a Hard Rock Café on our wedding and engagement anniversaries, we chase down a good cheese plate on Ginger’s birthday, and we keep repeating any number of little sayings and actions that remind us of the promises we are committed to keeping, transforming daily doings into something sacred.

The repetition is a stacking of time, each experience laid one on top of the other, so that when we return to repeat it again we do so from a new perspective. All the years of cheese plates give us a different view of what it means to be together, to be alive in this world. One of my favorite stories is Joshua’s telling the people of Israel to stack up the stones after they had crossed the Jordan so that when the children asked what the stones mean they could tell the story of their deliverance, over and over again.

If ritual is meaningful repetition, habit is the opposite – repetition that grows out of convenience, compliance, or just because: unexamined repetition. Where habits grow like kudzu, rituals have to be cultivated and nourished. We have to keep stacking up stones and slicing cheese if life is going to mean something.

When Jesus first passed the bread and wine, he said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” As a chef, one of the ways I like to interpret his words is to think he was not so much envisioning a Communion service at church as much as he was talking about meal time in a more general sense: every time you break bread together, remember. Let our meals be rituals and not habits.

Soon after Ginger and I started dating, I cooked dinner for her. I sautéed some chicken with pasta and alfredo sauce. She loved it and it became one of our ritual meals, which we call Saturday Night Chicken, since it was a Saturday night when we first had it together. Now it’s a meal I prepare, particularly when we have gone through a busy or stressful time and I want to reconnect. All the meals over the almost twenty years since I first served it to her stack up to give a great view of who we are and where we have come from together because we eat and remember.

Rituals are the raw material from which we can build of our lives a mountain of memories, offering us the chance to see that we have come from God and we are going to God, that we are inextricably connected to one another by the grace of God, and, even in the scope of so grand a universe, it matters that we celebrate with cheese plates, over and over again.

Peace,
Milton

underneath the satellite sky

Ever since I wrote the post on memory the other day, I’ve had the Hubble Telescope on my mind (which may explain the headaches). I don’t know much at all about the giant flying machine except it is discovering all kinds of things about our universe and sending back pictures that are absolutely amazing. When I went to the website today, I found this image of an Einstein Ring


and this explanation:

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. This very rare phenomenon can offer insight into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and even the curvature of the universe. The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are exactly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an "Einstein ring," around the foreground galaxy. If another background galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear. The massive foreground galaxy is almost perfectly aligned in the sky with two background galaxies at different distances. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away. The inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 billion and approximately 11 billion light-years. The odds of seeing such a special alignment are estimated to be 1 in 10,000.

What I understand about those words is what looks like a single image to me is the alignment of light particles just now getting to where we can see them that range from 3 to 11 billion light years away and the chance of them lining up as they did is better than the chance of me winning the state lottery.

Here are two other images I saw (took) today:













Ginger and I participated in Durham’s Annual Martin Luther King Celebration March and Rally with several hundred folks who walked side by side through downtown and ended up worshipping together (more than rallying) at First Presbyterian Church. This is my first experience living in a town so directly affected by King and all of the Civil Rights Movement. The history I had been taught second hand, the experiences I had growing up in Africa, the way Martin’s words and writings have influenced me over the years, and the spirit of those with whom I walked today aligned to give me my own little Einstein Ring, I guess I could say, bending the light and dark of all these experiences into a picture I had not anticipated.

You see, the reason Hubble had been on my mind is I’ve been thinking about all the things it had gone past. The pictures get cooler and more amazing and the gallery gets larger and larger and stuff gets left behind. (My metaphor breaks down a bit here. Hubble is actually orbiting the earth taking pictures deeper and deeper into space; I didn’t know that when I was thinking about this stuff so bear with me.) Hubble was launched in 1990, the same year Ginger and I married. In the same years that it’s lens has been pointing deeper and deeper into the universe, my focus has not been quite as singular. I’ve been a youth minister, a Blockbuster video guy, a substitute teacher, an English teacher, a concert security guy, and a chef – and that’s just the jobs. I’ve made candles and handmade cards, painted with watercolors, learned to write icons, written songs, wrote the draft of a novel, am trying to put together a book of poetry and recipes, and written this blog. I’ve lived in four towns, five houses, and had six schnauzers. I’ve worked on Habitat projects, written letters for Amnesty, cooked who knows how many church dinners and breakfasts, had three foster kids, and probably lost track of more stuff than I’ve hung on to. Whether I’m in orbit or hurtling through space, stuff – even important stuff – has gotten left behind.

Yet, when I read about the Einstein Ring, which I found by accident on the Hubble site as I went to find the link for this post, it gave me a different way to think about it. When we say a star is three billion light years away, it means the light we are seeing is three billion years old: that’s how long it took to get where we can see it. Sometimes the light from things long ago takes a while to get here and, when it does, it shines in such a way to make connections we had not seen before. Sure, some stuff stays behind us (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing) and there are things we will not understand until the light of both the past and the present hits just right.

Ginger came home from another MLK service this evening and, in the course of our conversation, said, “You know, the world is really different than it was forty years ago.”

Yes, it is. We can see that now.

Peace,
Milton

try to remember

One day during the last couple of weeks, I heard a story on NPR about a guy who is documenting his entire life – every email, every event, every just about anything – on his computer, and has been doing so for several years. I can’t remember which NPR program aired the segment, so I can’t offer a link. The conversation centered around how or if we are changed as human beings if we don’t forget things, or at least remember selectively.

I remembered the story this morning when I read this poem at The Writer’s Almanac:

Nothing Is Lost
(Noel Coward)

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

One of my favorite novels is Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, in which the author imagines the dreams the budding scientist had when we was still working as a patent clerk in Vienna. Each chapter recalls a dream about the same village and a different concept of time. In one dream, no one has the capacity to remember anything but the day they are living, so people spend the last couple of hours of the day writing down what they want to recall about the day and then the first few hours of the next morning reading their books to remember who they are, who their family is, what they do, and what has happened to them. It doesn’t take long before there isn’t enough time in a day to go back and read everything they have written, so they have to be selective about what pages they peruse and let some go unread.

However diligent the guy is with his computer, however well he has cataloged his every move, what he is doing is not remembering. He will never be able to find a time or place in his life to take in the panoramic view of all he has collected. Leaving if for those who come after him will only prove that he (like the rest of us) is just not that interesting. Remembering is not the same as cataloging every detail. It is re-membering: putting a moment back together again without reading the instructions, letting the pieces rise up from wherever they have been and emerge like a painting on a canvas, so that we can describe what that moment feels like now. Thus, we are shaped by what we let go of, or what slips away, as much as the things we carry with us.

The point of life is not to be permanent, but to be present. None of us is going to be remembered much once we’re gone. But when we are, it will not be because someone came across us in a hard drive file, or put our name on a building, but because of a shared event when we left an indelible mark on someone who mattered to us. The things we do remember stack up like stones in an altar, putting us back together, one step closer to wholeness.

Like the song says, “Try to remember and if you remember, then follow.”



Peace,
Milton

advent journal: goodbye, old friend

In this week where the days are the longest, life is a little darker tonight. Dan Fogelberg died last Sunday morning after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 56. The note on his website reads:

Sunday, December 16

Dear friends,

Dan left us this morning at 6:00am. He fought a brave battle with cancer and died peacefully at home in Maine with his wife Jean at his side. His strength, dignity, and grace in the face of the daunting challenges of this disease were an inspiration to all who knew him.

I feel like I grew up with Dan Fogelberg. The first record of his I remember was Souvenirs, which came out the month after I started to Baylor. What better words for a teenager on the cusp of college than

love when you can
cry when you have to
be who you must
that’s a part of the plan
await your arrival
with simple survival
and one day we’ll all understand
("Part of the Plan")

My across the hall dorm neighbor had an earlier album, Home Free, which was another revelation. Then Fogelberg released five more records between my freshman year and my seminary graduation:

• Captured Angel (1975)
• Nether Lands (1977)
• Twin Sons of Different Mothers (with Tim Weisberg) (1978)
• Phoenix (1979)
• The Innocent Age (two records) (1981)

He gave me the soundtrack for some very pivotal years in my life, mostly marked by searching. Listening back through those songs tonight, I still resonate with the hope informed by an underlying melancholy that runs like a river through his music. He made my heart ache and strain to reach for the heights he described:

once in a vision I came on some woods
and stood at a fork in the road
my choices were clear yet I froze with the fear
of not knowing which way to go
one road was simple acceptance of life
the other road offered sweet peace
when I made my decision
my vision became my release
(Nether Lands)

When I was in CPE and particularly broke, all I could do for my family one Christmas was make cards and try to give them something with my words. I borrowed some from “Leader of the Band” to try and reach out to my father at a time when the distance was palpable.

I thank you for the music and your stories of the road
I thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go
I thank you for the kindness and the times that you got tough
and papa I don’t think I’ve said I love you near enough

The grace he offered his father in the song helped me begin to see a different path to take.

Dan Fogelberg also helped me know I was in love.

On one of my first dates with Ginger, we were driving between Fort Worth and Dallas and she said, “What’s the purse song?” I asked to repeat the question, which she did, and without to much time passing, I said, “Oh – Dan Fogelberg’s ‘Same Old Lang Syne’: ‘I went to hug her and she spilled her purse/ and we laughed until we cried.’”

Right then I knew something special was happening.

I saw him in concert once, before that night with Ginger. He played solo at Reunion Arena in Dallas; I had tenth row center seats – or should I say seat: I went by myself. A grand piano, a guitar, and a small table that held a glass half-filled with whiskey were all that graced the stage. He came out and played for nearly three hours, making it seem as though we were sitting in his living room. When he got to “Same Old Lang Syne,” he moved to the piano and began talking about the 1812 Overture. He went on to demonstrate that the opening notes on the piano are the same melody: da da da da da da da dum dum dum. “Stuff like this cracks musicians up,” he said, laughing harder than the rest of us. Then, when he sang, “I said the audience was heavenly, but the traveling was hell,” we cheered like crazy and he laughed again.

One of his best moves was to sing a duet with Emmylou Harris (also something I wish I could do): “Only the Heart May Know.” The song is a dialog between someone looking back on childhood and those things he remembers. He asks questions of them and they respond.

Silent Sea, tell this to me:
Where are the children
that we used to be?

(Silent Sea)
At picture shows
where nobody goes
and only the heart can see.

In the bridge they sing, “Friends we knew follow us through all of the days of our lives.” How amazing it is to look up and look back and see someone’s fingerprints all over your life because of the songs he wrote. Like Madeleine L’Engle, Dan Fogelberg is someone who befriended me and helped keep me alive in ways I didn’t understand until much later; maybe even tonight. I’ll never meet him, but, thanks to the songs, he’s not completely gone.

and if you ever hear them calling out
and if you've been by paupers crowned
between the worlds of men and make-believe
I can be found
("Scarecrow's Dream")

Even though I know how to get there from here (that’s a place I go quite often), I must say, "Goodbye, old friend -- and thanks."

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – I couldn’t pass up this concert clip.

not just passing through

Lat night at the restaurant, I was the utility infielder, if you will, doing whatever prep projects I could find and then jumping in to help whoever was getting “in the weeds” as we say. A good deal of my time was spent shucking oysters since Gianni has a hard time doing it. It’s not that I’m a super shucker myself, but I was the one with the time to do it. I found this video clip that shows how it’s done:



Multiply that by about fifty and you get an idea of how my night went. Needless to say, I’m a better shucker than I was when the dinner service began. Practice, in this case, improves both confidence and competency.

But that’s not true of everything.

I’ve spent most of my life moving. I’m fifty years old and I’ve lived in five countries, close to a dozen cities and towns, and have had at least forty different addresses. I am practiced at saying goodbye but, unlike oyster shucking, it has not gotten any easier. In fact, I think it has become more difficult.

This morning, Ginger announced to our church that she is resigning to become the Senior Pastor of Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Durham, North Carolina. It’s goodbye again.

One of the things I love about the UCC is the intentionality to which they call their pastors and parishioners when it comes to parting ways. I grew up in Baptist churches where the preacher stood up one Sunday, resigned with a two-week notice, and was gone before anyone had time to feel much of anything. The UCC suggests somewhere in the neighborhood of a sixty day farewell process, ending with a wonderful liturgy where both pastor and parish give and ask forgiveness; offer words of affection, gratitude, and encouragement; and release one another to what is yet to come. Yes, two months is a long time and the goodbyes are hard and yes, it’s worth it. We have stories to tell, things to do, and – of course – meals to share. What lies ahead in Durham is full of good people and amazing possibilities. At coffee hour, some folks asked me questions about the church there and the town as well. It is a cool church and the move is the right one for us.

But today was the beginning of goodbye, which we must do well both to honor those whom we love here and to open our hearts to those whom we will love in the days ahead. Ginger and I married in April 1990 and moved to Boston in August. For the last seventeen years we have had a Massachusetts address and a zip code that begins with 0. We have been able to listen to Joe Castiglione call the Red Sox games on the radio when we couldn’t see Remdawg on TV or get to Fenway in person. We watched them build the Big Dig from start to finish (well – sort of a finish). Ginger has weathered not only the Boston winters, but my three major career changes and my depression. We found our home in the UCC here in churches in Winchester and in Marshfield. Ginger earned her doctorate and has carved out a significant place in the Mass. Conference of the UCC. We know how to drive in Boston traffic, know what a “regular coffee” is, are both loyal and addicted to Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, regularly use “wicked” as a superlative, can push a mean snow shovel, have laid on the grass along the Charles to hear to Pops play on the Fourth of July, and, week in and week out for the last seven years, worshipped and fellowshipped as members of North Community Church.

As much as I love gospel music, one old hymn that has always bothered me is

This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .

because I can’t come to terms with thinking of our lives as nothing more than way stations. All the joy, pain, sorrow, hope, love, and heartbreak are the existential equivalent of a bus station: we’re just waiting for our ride.

No. I’m not here forever, but I’m doing more than passing through.

One conversation I had at coffee hour today was with a woman who is a wonderful artist. She was asking me about my new job (which I get to say goodbye to as well) and I rambled on for a couple of minutes. She then noted she could see my passion for cooking even though she didn’t share it. In the course of her explanation, she said, “I think part of it for me is it’s so temporary. You finish fixing the meal and then it’s gone.”

Yes. Exactly.

My culinary art is lucky if it stays intact two or three minutes from the time I put the final garnish on the plate and notify the server. As we talked some more she said, “I guess what endures is you get to create something that lives on in what happens at the meal.”

Again. Exactly.

The table nearest our open kitchen filled up about eight last night and, when I finished cleaning my station at ten-thirty they were still sitting there. The food was long gone, but their conversation and laughter had been the soundtrack for the final hour of my evening. In the course of human history there have been very few days, if any, that resulted in something permanent. All of our art is housed in temporary exhibitions.

What a gift that we have been created to attach to one another, to love one another, even when we know the goodbyes are inevitable. If we were only passing through, it wouldn’t hurt like this.

Peace,
Milton

working my way home

I sat down to write tonight and began by first by checking in at Pandora, which is a really cool music site that lets you set up your own “radio station” where you designate the artists you want to hear and then they surprise you with some others based on your music genome. I’ve created several stations, but the one I clicked tonight was “Boys with Guitars” and the first song up was one by Paul Simon off of his album Surprise. As I was collecting my thoughts and feelings, I heard him sing,

I figure that once upon a time I was an ocean
But now I'm a mountain range
Something unstoppable set into motion
Nothing is different, but every thing's changed

I spent my day caught, or maybe pulled, between who I was and who I am. This morning I met with my friend Ann who is in seminary (and also wife of Doug of Red Sox jinx fame) and taking a class on Missions. She asked to interview me for a paper on missionary kids, or MKs for short. She had done a good amount of reading and research getting ready for our time together and the quality of her questions helped me not only to remember things but to feel them as well. We talked about all the places I lived, all the schools I attended, what I remember about moving all the time, what it was like when we came back to the States on leave. I talked so much we ran out of time before she ran out of questions; we’re getting together to finish up the interview tomorrow morning. When I left her house to walk back up to the church for the closing session of Avalanche Ranch, I realized I was all stirred up.

This is the fourth summer I have been the song (and dance) leader for VBC. Many of the kids who have come have been there all four years. They have lived in the same house on the same street in the same little seaside town all that time. I was twelve years old before I knew people like that even existed. We were on leave and living in Fort Worth and I was going to Hubbard Heights Elementary School. I came home from my first day and said to my mother, “I met the weirdest kid today. He’s lived in the same house his entire life.”

“There was a kid like that in my class, too,” my younger brother said; “in fact, there were several of them.”

“I hate to tell you boys,” my mother said, “but I’m afraid we’re the weird ones.”

At least I was twelve before I had to learn that particular piece of reality. I went on to talk with Ann about how home -- as a place -- is not something I know. (For those of you who have read this blog for awhile, I know this is a recurring theme; here’s hoping it’s not also repetitive.) There’s not an address anywhere I can drive or fly or walk to and say, “I’m home.” The house from which I write tonight is home because of Ginger and the pups, but when we move one day it will slide off somehow like every other place I’ve ever lived. I told Ann I used to think it was because I had never lived anywhere long enough to grow roots, but after spending all but three months of my married life in Massachusetts I think perhaps I don’t have roots to grow. What I know of home is in faces, not places.

I look at the careers that have found me and the one I have chosen and I’ve spent most of my life both searching for and working to create home. Last Sunday, as folks took Communion, I sang,

come home, come home
ye who are weary, come home
earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling
calling, o sinner, come home

That’s what I want church to be: home, which is why the administrative side of pastoring exhausted me. When I taught high school English, I wanted my classroom to feel like that as well, which is why having to give grades ate me alive. I know that’s why I choose to be a chef because cooking makes me feel at home and makes me feel like I can help to create home for others.

Tonight was my first night at the new restaurant. The people are really nice and the other folks in the kitchen were both helpful and friendly. The place is set up and maintained well and everyone seemed to work with a sense of collegiality and intentionality. The only thing that made it difficult for me (other than everything being new) was Chef had called me back after saying I was going to be Sous Chef to say the owner had decided to delay opening for lunch until September, so what I thought was going to be a full-time position is going to be a part-time line cook for awhile. I had planned to dive in and be at work again and I’m going to be prepping and learning and standing on the sidelines for at least a couple of weeks instead.

I don’t get to feel at home just yet.

I’m sad because I got my hopes up. I’m grateful because I have a good job in a good place with good people. I also feel good because he had to do some work to make room for me, which makes me feel like he wants me there. And it’s hard being the new kid in a room where everyone already knows each other. As many times as I’ve been that kid, I can’t say it has ever gotten easier.

When Ginger got home tonight after a meeting, I had dinner ready for her and then we took the pups on a walk to the water. I tried to start unpacking much of what has made it to this page as our Schnauzers dragged us around the block under a starlight sky, anxious to get back home to the couch and the cookies. I suppose my life today feels as different from what I knew growing up as an ocean from a mountain range. In some sense, nothing is different -- if home is a place, I’m never going to find it – and, Paul Simon is right: everything has changed; I’m at home tonight because I’m with her.

Peace,
Milton