an earring of hope

Today is Steve Earle’s birthday.

I’ve been listening to his songs all day, which is not so different from many other days, just more purposed. I love both his music and his story: he is a living testament to hope and redemption. One of my favorite tunes is “Some Dreams,” which was used as the theme song for The Rookie and embodies his tenacity and determination.



The chorus says, simply

some dreams
they never come true
they never come true
yeah, but some dreams do

As a recovering addict, he knows of what he speaks. As I listened to it this week, the two middle lines were the ones that hung with me: some dreams never come true. Life, often, doesn’t go the way we plan or even hope for. There are dreams we can taste and see, things we know how to bring into being if things were to fall a certain way and those things don’t fall. We have worthy ideas and good plans and, still, some dreams . . . .

I know. Aren’t you glad you read this far?

Please keep going, because I did. As I kept singing the song, something hit me in a way that it had not before – and I can express it best in a paraphrase of the same chorus:

some dreams
they never come true
they never come true
yeah, but someone’s do . . . .

On the heels of MLK Day and the countless repetitions of his “I Have a Dream” speech (which never gets old), I am aware in ways I was not before that dreams come to life – and death – in community. Whatever a dream becomes is born out of togetherness. AS long as I’m paraphrasing, there is no “I” in d-r-e-a-m. (Now you will quit reading.) Dreams have a chance to come true when community congeals around them; when mine don’t, I then have the chance to find meaning and healing in a dream that belongs to someone else in this shared adventure we call life together. I get to help your dreams come true or, perhaps, we will stand together in our magnificent defeats. That’s good news all on its own.

When I was in seminary, I pastured a small rural church in Central Texas populated, mostly, by farmers and ranchers, most all of whom planted some sort of hay each spring. When it came time, harvesting was a communal exercise. We all showed up at whoever’s farm ripened first and helped them cut, bail, and haul the hay into their barn. By the time we were finished, someone else’s field was ready. Over the course of a couple of weeks, we worked our way around four or five farms. My contribution was to bring out a couple of my large seminary friends who knew how to haul hay. We worked hard, ate well, took care of each other, and came away with some good stories to tell. Occasionally, a mistimed thunder storm would mean the hay that was cut but not yet bailed was going to be lost on one of the farms. Again, I saw the power of community as the ranchers took care of one another.

And they would all plant again the next year.

John Berger is a writer and artist who inspires me. I am in the middle of his latest work, Bento’s Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? is stretching both my mind and heart. In a chapter that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, he makes this statement, describing the work of another artist:

A sense of belonging to what-has-been and to the yet-to-come is what distinguishes [us] from the other animals. Yet to face History is to face the tragic. Which is why many prefer to look away. To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope. An earring of hope.

I smiled when I first read the last sentence. The two little silver rings that have lived in my left ear lobe for twelve or thirteen years found a new shine and significance in his words. These are days around here – and by here I am drawing a larger circle than our address – where pain and grief and loss feel as common as weather. Things we thought would happen will not. People we hoped would stay have gone. Here, in between the what-has-been and the yet-to-come, we are working hard to engage. Were it a matter of saying, “I must go on,” I’m not sure many would do so. But even as we face the tragedy that is life, we are also being offered invitations by those around us to remember we belong. Some of the invitations to dream beyond ourselves are as small as trusting we can get to lunch or carry on a conversation. Others offer the chance to see dreams come true in everything from supporting midwives in Guatemala to opening an urban farm in East Durham to making music and writing books. And that’s just here in Durham. I don’t mean to make it sound as though the strings well up at sunset and everything is hunky dunky, and yet I do catch a glimpse of something in the midst of my melancholy, a flash of promise.

An earring of hope.

Peace,
Milton

jesus, steve earle, and the gay pride parade

A couple of Sundays have passed since Ginger preached on the parable about the workers who get hired at various times during the day and then all get paid the same at quitting time (Matthew 20:1-16). It’s a bothersome parable on its own terms, made even more difficult when heard in American congregations filled with those who have been trained to raise up our so-called “self-made” heroes. The bullet points in the World Geography textbook from which I am asked to teach spell it out (without irony):

• The political system of the United States has been vital to the economic success of the country.
• The government established in 1789 reflected a shared belief in individual equality, opportunity, and freedom.
• These ideals supported an economic system based on capitalism, or free enterprise.
• One of the notions behind free enterprise is the belief that any hardworking individual can find opportunity and success in the United States.

The issue in the story, however, is not a question of effort or work ethic, but of opportunity. “Why do you stand here idle all day?” the master asked. “Because no one has hired us,” they answered. Had he been willing to take them all on the first trip, they all would have been willing to go.

But that’s not my point.

Some time during the week prior to her sermon, Ginger asked me what I thought about the parable. My initial response was to say our attitude about the story depends on where we find ourselves in it. If we think we are the ones who were hired first and worked longest, then the story feels unfair. If we see ourselves as those fortunate to get hired at all, grace abounds. The Saturday after her sermon, I sat in the hall of our Durham Performing Arts Center to hear one of my songwriting heroes, Steve Earle. In recent years, he has become an articulate spokesperson for progressive causes, an ant- death penalty advocate, and a disseminator of grace. His road to the present state has taken him through several failed marriages, a heroin addiction, and a stint in federal prison. As I listened to him speak and sing, I thought, “This is a guy who knows what it feels like to get found late in the day.”

A week after his concert, my Saturday was filled with our church’s involvement in the North Carolina Pride Festival and Parade. For almost thirty years, Durham has hosted our state’s gay and lesbian pride festival on Duke’s East Campus. For the last four years, my involvement has been on two fronts: leading the music for the inter-denominational Communion service and carrying the banner for our church in the parade. A couple of years ago, we decided we would have a short hymn sing before Communion, which takes place in an outdoor gazebo in the middle of food booths and other vendors. That first year, I chose songs I knew and loved. As we started singing “I’ll Fly Away,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” people began to gather and sing along. Some of them began to weep. I had, unwittingly, tapped into something deep. These were the songs of their childhood, of their faith before they came out and were told they no longer belonged. As we sang, they were able to reclaim what had been taken away from them in some sense. What once was lost became found.

Not all of them are old songs. One I particularly is listed as “For the Fruit of All Creation” in our hymnal. The final verse, which is my favorite of most any hymn says:

for the harvests of the Spirit
thanks be to God
for the good we all inherit
thanks be to God
for the wonders that astound us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

The parade route was heavily lined with well-wishers this year (and a few protestors), thanks to the North Carolina legislature’s decision to put a constitutional amendment to ban equal marriage or any kind of same-gender civil union on the primary ballot next May. As we walked and waved, people waved back and, when they saw we were a church group, said, “Thank you.” That scene played over and over. Somewhere along the route I, the straight white guy, heard the parable with new ears.

Yes, I was on to something when I said how we heard the story depended on where we saw ourselves in it. But I had missed one perspective. From the time I was first introduced to parables, the default setting, when it came to reading, was to assume the king or master or father in the story was God. What if that were not necessarily so? What if, instead of seeing ourselves as workers, we were the one hiring? What if we bring about the realm of God by going back to make sure everyone goes to work in the vineyard?

If God’s realm is one where parents forgive before their long-lost sons even ask forgiveness, where shepherds leave the whole flock to search out the lone lost sheep, where someone will spend the whole grocery budget to celebrate finding one coin in the couch cushions – and it is, then as the Body of Christ we are those called to keep going back, to keep hiring anyone who will work, to make sure everyone has enough, and to remind everyone that there is more enough love and grace to go around – especially those who were taught they did not belong. Isaiah proclaimed:

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound

In this story called life, we are cast as those called to incarnate the love of Christ to the whole wide world.

How can we afford to do otherwise?

Peace,
Milton

index of favorite lines

Here’s what happened Sunday.

Ginger had the congregation read John 1 in unison:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The last line is one of my favorite in all of the gospels. I remember it the way I learned it years ago: the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.

As we read, I was struck by the notion that John and his readers knew more about darkness than you or I do. Light, in John’s time, constituted of oil lamps and, well, starlight – the ones we can’t see much of anymore because of our manufactured illumination. In a world where lamps burned out nightly, John talked about what was inextinguishable: the same inexhaustible, ancient light the Magi followed was born into a baby boy who would become the Light of the World: light as old as creation, filled with the love of our inescapable God, found focus in the insignificance of an infant.

OK, I need to back up a bit. On the way to church on Sunday, as I was preparing to follow the Magi to the manger, this story was delivered without irony on NPR:

America's space program is scheduled to undergo a fundamental shift in 2011. Unless something changes by the end of the year, NASA will no longer have a rocket to send astronauts into space. The space shuttle program is being retired, and for the moment there is no American replacement rocket capable of sending people into orbit.

As we watched the wise men follow the star to the manger, the news came that we have quit chasing stars. (I know that’s not really what NASA was saying, but you have to give me a little poetic license.) In a year when we “discovered” more stars than we had previously imagined, we appear to have grown more provincial. The technological boom is in smart phones, not space craft. I have forty-seven ways to announce my every move to the world, yet, to borrow from my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald line, our count of enchanted objects continues to be diminished. Are we are losing our capacity for wonder, and to wonder?

Now – back to church and the rest of the gospel reading from Sunday:

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

One last bit of time travel: on Friday, Talk of the Nation: Science Friday was going down their list of the top science stories of 2010 and one of the guests mentioned the discovery of extrasolar planets. Though we are not taking to flight very much, the Kepler spacecraft keeps looking for “dips in starlight”

that indicate the passage of planets, had found a whopping 706 candidate bodies by June, bringing the total of presumed extrasolar worlds to well over 1,000. One of Kepler’s discoveries, though much too close to its parent star to support life, has a diameter only about twice that of Earth. The finding demonstrates Kepler’s potential for finding Earth-sized planets.

What intrigued me most was the discussion about how the planets were discovered. The “dips in starlight” were the shadows cast by the small celestial bodies crossing in front of their larger and brighter partners. The planets were recognized by their insignificance – and the light to which they pointed, much like John and the star that led the wise men.

I got to sing in church on Sunday. I sang a duet of Steve Earle’s Christmas song, “Nothing But a Child.” The last verse says,

now all around the world, in every little town
everyday is heard a precious little sound
and every mother kind and every father proud
looks down in awe to find another chance allowed

The last line -- another favorite -- gets me, whether I’m listening to or singing the song. Earle wrote and recorded it as he was falling victim to his addictions and before he went to prison for his heroin habit. The light shines in the darkness . . . .

There is, as we say in the UCC, more light still to break forth. Let’s go out into the dark and wait for it.

Peace,
Milton