lenten journal: what's the story?

A couple of nights ago, I posted what has come to be known as the Kony 2012 Video as my blog post. I learned of it through my eleventh graders. One of them was in a documentary studies class I taught last year in which we watched “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a Frontline piece looking at the Rwandan genocide ten years later and “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which is about the human tragedy in Darfur. They know I grew up in Africa and that I am moved by stories of a continent with which I identify; they were moved by what we saw last year. And so, instead of the work I had planned, we watched Kony. They had lots of questions, not the least of which was, “Why don’t we do something to be a part of this? It seems important.”

I came home and made it my blog post on the basis of the residual sadness and anger I carry because Africa does not really matter to Americans as a general rule (as demonstrated in Rwanda and Darfur and mostly because our media have chosen to make connecting us to Africa less important than most anything) and because of the emotion I shared with my students in class. I had heard of Invisible Children but had not done any research on the organization. I knew of Joseph Kony, but not in any current sense. I was moved. I responded – just as the folks who made the video wanted me to do.

This morning, one of the folks I work with at the computer store posted this graphic 

with the caption,

For all of you who posted the Kony video, rather those about to post the video...

Then, from a number of sources, I began to read insight from folks who had also been moved by the video but who didn’t allow their emotion to control their first move. They asked good questions and looked beyond the well crafted call to immediate and specific action. Some of the questions were about the organization, some were about the veracity of the information, some were about the perspective from which the story was being told, some were about the choice of solution being offered. I offer three perspectives that are speaking to me today, all of whom are seeking to do more than criticize or cast suspicion and all of whom have personal ties to Africa.

I was pulled, in particular, by this video of a Ugandan woman who challenged those who would tell a story that is not their own:



Ethan Zuckerman writes at “My Heart’s in Accra":

I’m starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?

As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response.

That’s a story worth watching.

Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay writes,

Most people don’t want to feel like they are being rescued. That can be humiliating. So… what do we do with a movement that does not work toward dignity?

Do we simply applaud it for the marketing genius that it is? Do we buy into it and support the cause even if it turns out to be misguided or misinformed because we don’t want to be the poop in the punch bowl?

In closing, I do applaud the western world for looking at this situation in the world. It is far beyond our backyards and it does not encroach on our drive into work, or our gaming, or general lives… We have shown in our immediacy that we do have pulses and hearts. We have shown that our reflex toward justice is still strong. What we should do is match our passion for justice with wisdom and humility. It was Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, who told me, “ Justice without mercy is tyranny.”

Thank Invisible Children for bringing this issue into the public conscience. Please take a breath and walk humbly into the realm of action.

How do we keep the work from hurting more than helping? These are the questions that we must ask. These are the questions that I wish Invisible Children was asking before they launched this campaign to coincide with our election year. It is a good marketing idea. It just isn’t a great and dignifying form of action.

Loving kindness, doing justice, and walking humbly with our God calls for us to live in the creative tension between immediate response and thoughtful action; it also calls us to learn how to let listening be our primary posture. (You realize, I hope, I’m talking mostly to myself here.) I’ve written recently about wondering what Jesus would ask; I wonder, in this case, if the questions might include

Who is telling the story? and
To whom does the story belong?

Then I can ask -- ask them and ask God, “What is my role in their story?” and become a part of the cast.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: kony 2012

I don't want you to read today. Watch instead. Then do something: Kony 2012.



Peace,
Milton

advent journal: fight or forgive

I managed to avoid the mall this season until today. I had to go because that’s where the stuff I needed was being kept (Ginger and Jay were going, too), so, as long as we were going, we decided at least part of the afternoon should be spent at the movies; we saw Invictus.

Put it on your Must See List.

As Jay and I were winding our way, I got a phone call from a religion reporter in Austin who is writing a story about David Gentiles for the newspaper this weekend. As I talked about Davy, I told her he is one of the reasons I trust the veracity of the Incarnation because David incarnated God’s love as well as anyone I know. The movie reminded me that Nelson Mandela falls in that category as well, though I don’t personally know him. As Matt Damon’s character, Francois Pienaar, says of Mandela after visiting the cell at Robben Island where he was imprisoned, “I was thinking how he could spend thirty years in a tiny cell and then come out and forgive the ones who put him there.” Mandela told Francois he had been inspired by poetry (hooray!), particularly “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. I found it when I got home.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The question Mandela kept asking was how to inspire people to be more than they imagined they could be. Listening to NPR as we drove home, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison with the imaginative and transformative leadership of Mandela and the partisan bickering and (I don’t even know what to call it) that plagues most every member of Congress, causing them to treat each other with the incivility and immaturity of a grade school playground (my apologies to grade schoolers). I am not inspired. I also didn’t intend to head towards a rant this evening, so I will change my tack.

At the end of the movie, they showed pictures of the people portrayed in the movie. When I came home, I looked for video of the rugby team and found this video of the team singing “Nkosi Sikelele Africa,” the South African national anthem, before the start of a game with England in 2007. The anthem itself is both song and metaphor for South Africa: it has parts in the four languages primarily spoken in the country. The video is amazing to me because the rugby team is primarily Afrikaners and they are singing their hearts out. They are testament to the power of forgiveness and compassion; you can’t beat unity into people, you must lead them.



My friend Gordon Atkinson preached a sermon Sunday calling us to “be the manger.” His wife, Jeanene, is the one who told me about it (she’s my friend, too).

He said that whether we are ready or not, Christ will come. The reality is that we don't have to be ready, we don't have to "have it all together," we just have to receive the Christ child: it's our job to be the manger.

I love the image. We are called to be a place, a heart, a being, that can receive and hold Christ. Thirty years in a cell that was hardly big enough for him to lay down, and Nelson Mandela was still a manger, still a receptacle of Love, because he refused to be defined by his calling rather than his circumstance. As we gather with shepherds and wise men again this year that Christ might be born again among us, the choice has not changed: will we fight or forgive?

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

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

asking for your vote

A friend sent me the following email message from a woman who wants to open an ice cream shop in Rwanda. It's an awesome idea and she needs us to vote for her in order for her to see her dream become a reality. Please read the following letter, follow the links, and vote for Rocky Road to be an ice cream flavor in Rwanda and not a metaphor for life.

THANK YOU FOR TAKING A MOMENT TO READ THIS EMAIL TO THE END!

Loved Ones, Friends, Friends of Friends, Friends of Loved Ones, Total Strangers...

If ice cream or some other such treat has ever put a smile on your face, given you a break from a hard day, made you feel more in love, soothed your tears, or made a kid you know shriek with glee, please read on:

My friend Alexis and I opened Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn NY less than a year ago. It went well, and now we have two locations. We are kid-friendly, eco-friendly -- it's a special place (more details on our website www.bluemarbleicecream.com or on our new Facebook page, check it out).

Now, for an expansion we never saw coming, WE NEED YOUR HELP. Blue Marble Ice Cream is launching its third location. Not in Soho, not in LA, not in Chicago.

In Rwanda.

Encouraged by a friend in Rwanda yearning to bring joy and laughter to her community, we are launching a nonprofit to start a shop in this developing country where milk is a natural but relatively untapped resource.

NOW, to help this happen, we ARE NOT asking for money, we are asking for your VOTE.

American Express has launched an initiative called Members Project, which invites cardmembers to post their dreams of change online for the chance of winning funding to help them come true. AmEx is devoting $2.5 million to the winners, so the stakes are high!

Our project is called "Sweet Dreams: The Power of Ice Cream." This project is still in early development, but it is building momentum and we promise to share more details with you very soon.

Here's what we need from you:

1) Click on this link to CAST YOUR VOTE FOR OUR DREAM. It is simple and takes all of 20 seconds. A minimal investment for such a worthwhile endeavor! :) www.membersproject.com/project/view/FY1ZKE

2) Send this email to all YOUR loved ones, friends, friend of loved ones, friends of friends... This is all online, so LET'S GO INTERNATIONAL! TELL EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE!!!

3) Please, do this now. They are only accepting votes until September 1 -- this is all word-of-mouth, we have no other means of promotion, so PLEASE help us spread the word that may lead us to much needed funding for our very worthy project.

We only heard about this opportunity at the very last second and posted our project with no time to spare - other projects have had up to a month already to assemble votes. Please help us catch up! And read below for the full project description.

As friends, as ice cream lovers, as Brooklynites, as compassionate members of a global community, let's bring some sweetness and joy to Rwanda!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jennie Dundas, Blue Marble Ice Cream

420 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11217

(718) 858-1100

Peace,
Milton

random notes

As I was driving to church yesterday, I heard that Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the runoff presidential election in Zimbabwe because he couldn’t deal with the violence being inflicted on his supporters by Robert Mugabe’s regime. All indications are that Tsvangirai won the first election and Mugabe doctored the results to cause the runoff. The history of Zimbabwe is a tragic story of the killing of a nation that had great promise and Mugabe is one of the key killers.

Pray for Zimbabwe.

________________________________________

I was out of the kitchen today and spent a good bit of time in the yard. I got a deal on daylilies last week and needed to get them planted. I also installed rain barrels under the drain spouts to have water to feed my plants and vegetables. My good friend and counselor, Ken, used to talk about gardening as a helpful response to depression. There are studies that show there’s something about playing in the dirt that makes life brighter. Ken’s take was it was an organic connection. We came from dust and will return to dust; to go out and dig around in the dirt makes a basic, essential, and healing connection. He’s on to something.

Thank God for gardening.

________________________________________

George Carlin died of heart failure over the weekend. He was 71. He was hitting his stride when I was in college and seminary and I still have several of his routines seared in my memory. As he grew older his cynicism sometimes got the best of him; he was at his best, however, when he played with the language. My favorite routine is a wonderful example of what happens when we really listen to our words. Here it is: Football vs. Baseball.



So long, George.

Peace,
Milton

talk and pray

I got a note today inviting me to a reunion of folks who went to Nairobi International School back in the seventies. My parents were missionaries and we lived outside of Nairobi in a small town called Karen that took it’s name from Karen Blixen or Isak Dinesen, as she is known to many. I was in ninth grade, my brother in seventh. On Saturday mornings, we would walk out to the road and hitchhike into the city to eat at Iqbal’s (whose specialty was chipati and keema).

My view, looking back, is romanticized because I was a ninth grader and I’ll also stand by my statement that Kenya was a great place to grow up. Though it shares many of the same problems of other African nations – poverty, HIV/AIDS, postcolonial tribal issues – Kenya has been a haven for refugees of the surrounding war-torn countries (Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, and others), so the brutal rioting and ethnic violence that broke out in Kenya over discrepancies in the most recent presidential election are damaging in many, many ways.

Here are two first hand video accounts from a Kenyan television station, one from Kisumu



and one from Nairobi.



I follow my blogging pals Bill and Laurie in asking for prayers; I would also ask you to talk about what is going on to those around you. On a night when our presidential race is officially beginning (does it ever really end?), a country I love dearly is imploding over the election of their president. Hundreds have been killed. Tens of thousands have been displaced.

Please, please, talk and pray.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- NPR has a good collection of information.

skip the oj for breakfast

Gracie, our youngest Schnauzer, woke me up early this morning and I turned on the television as I was trying to gain consciousness just as all three morning shows were cranking up. The lead story on all of them was about O. J. Simpson. In fact, over half of the first thirty minutes of Today was about him. I kept watching, thinking they would actually tell me what was happening in the world sooner or later. No such luck.

I don't care how much they talk about him, it's not news.

Things are happening and they are things we don't hear about, such as these stories I found on several international news outlets. These things actually matter and yet our media choose not to tell us much, if anything at all.

The situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate. For all the supportive rhetoric that has come from Western governments, the genocide continues.

The Israeli government has declared Gaza a "hostile area," which could lead to Israel cutting off electricity and water to the region.

Severe floods all across Africa have devastated several countries, leaving many homeless, cut off, and threatened by disease.

There are also important things happening in Burma, Indonesia,
Cambodia, Nepal, and India.

How can we consider ourselves, as a nation, to be the world leader when we have no idea what is going on?

Peace,
Milton

song and dance man

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday; he’s sixty-six. Though I’m not one of those who owns every Dylan record, I am one who has been marked by his words and music. He is someone who has articulated life both personally and prophetically. I thought I would take some time to say thanks.

I got my first guitar for Christmas of my ninth grade year, which was 1970 to the rest of the world. I was lucky because I had friends who already played and so I had a chance to learn quickly. One of the first songs I learned to play was

Come gather 'round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

I don’t remember the last time I actually played “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but I thought about one of the verses as I wrote my congressman and senators to decry the way the Democrats have capitulated on the Iraq war funding. I realize the issue is complicated and what bothers me most is I don’t see anyone in Washington who speaks and acts like a real leader. Dylan was way ahead of me. Over forty years ago he wrote:

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside and it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

There were eight or ten of us who would sit in a circle in the grass at Nairobi International School most everyday and play and sing. Even in Africa we felt the wind blowing, though the answers Dylan said were there felt elusive. I realize one of the things I learned from those days was life was fundamentally about searching for better questions. Though many of his lyrics roll out like emphatic prophetic hammers, their power is in the profound interrogative at the heart of it all. He wrote lines as full of symbolism as they were of syllables, lines that still stick in my heart and mind:

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog a soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

His was music that made me angry and hopeful at the same time. His songs were some of what fertilized my life to help me become who I am now. Sometimes they made me scratch my head as I tried to figure out what he was saying, sometimes they connected me with those around me as we sang together, sometimes they burrowed deep into my memory and took up permanent residence.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
"Rip down all hate," I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Alongside of the politics, Dylan’s songs were some of those that taught me about the complex continuum of personal feelings. His lyrics were both simple and impressionistic, telling a story and leaving room for us as listeners to fill in the details.

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right

How could he write a song where the characters were both unknown and achingly familiar? And who says, “Fare thee well,” anyway?

When I was discovering his music, Dylan was thirty. Today, I’m fifty and he’s old enough to collect Social Security. Daniel Pinkwater had a piece on All Things Considered this afternoon talking about the current resurgence (insurgence?) of folk songs. His lament was the young singers covering the songs weren’t connected to the original feelings behind the songs. “They don’t know who the original singers even were and are young enough for their parents to not know either,” he said. I hear his point and I want to give the current ninth graders with guitars room “for meditations in cathedrals of [their] own,” to borrow a phrase from Billy Joel. Dylan has had the stage for a long time and, one of these days, will be as forgotten as the rest of us. Permanence is not the point. Dylan appears to know that, as evidenced in this quote from The Writer’s Almanac:

Bob Dylan was once asked if he thought of himself more as a singer or a poet. He said, "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man."

The best way I know to finish my tribute is to borrow a few more words:

I'll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

Happy birthday, Bob.



Peace,
Milton

hopper, harare, and hot sauce

Today is Ginger’s birthday.

We drove into Boston around two because, thanks to a friend in the church, we had tickets to the Edward Hopper exhibition that just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts. Ginger and I have different viewing practices when we go to a museum. She moves through the room intuitively and I a bit more deliberately, reading all the notes and captions in the same way I stop to read historical markers on the highway when I’m by myself. When we finish looking, we spend some time in the café comparing what we saw and felt and, I think, expanding the impact and understanding of the art work for us both.

The exhibit fell in two major groups for me: buildings and people. He also had a few landscapes, but even then he seemed more interested in how the buildings fit in the picture. There were a lot of houses. One that particularly caught my eye was “Rooms for Tourists,” which showed the house at night. The various sources of light intrigued me.


I also liked this one of pharmacy. The caption said the guy trying to sell his paintings kept trying to get Hopper to take the word “Ex-Lax” out of the picture. He didn’t.


The other one that grabbed me was “Sunday Morning,” a row of shops laying fallow on the Sabbath. It was as if all the buildings had stories to tell and had not had a chance until Hopper painted them in solitude, without the crush of humanity, so their stories could sneak out and show themselves in the silence.


His paintings of people weren’t as narrative. This one, called “Automat,” shows a woman by herself with a cup of coffee. Only the title reveals where she is. There are few details to contextualize the moment; she is simply there, in solitary.


“Nighthawks” is arguably his most well known painting, and it is equally enigmatic: one man remains faceless; the street outside is dark; and there’s no way to know how anyone got in or out of the diner.


From there we made a stop in a wonderful little coffee shop called Uptown Espresso to wait for friends – actually, better identified as our intentional family here in New England -- to join us. The folks working there were friendly and good at making coffee. From there we crossed the street to follow the recommendation of another church friend about an exhibit of sculpture by artists from Zimbabwe who call themselves Friends Forever and have joined together to figure out how to get their works to parts of the world where people can afford to buy art so they can make a living. These stones were full of stories. In fact, the man introducing the exhibit spoke of how the artists begin with a big slab of stone and “wait for it to speak to them.”

We quickly became attached to the work of one sculptor in particular, Colleen Madamombe, one of the few female artists and the creator of these wonderful stone women who told their stories through their posture. (Of course, at this point it would be great to show a picture of the piece we bought, but my camera is without batteries. Here a couple of others, though.)



From there we drove to Redbones Barbeque in Somerville where we were joined by one more family member and we continued our practice of laughing, talking, and eating together regardless of who is having the birthday. To some observer, painter or not, outside looking in, I suppose we could have been captured in a moment not unlike Hopper’s people, hanging in space without context. But the picture I see around the table with some of those I love celebrating the person I love most is too multidimensional to fit on a canvas or even a blog entry. To come to the table together reminds us there is no distance between the meals we have shared, regardless of how much time has passed. Our memories stack up like stones for an altar, one on top of the other, enabling us to live those moments in concert rather than a string of situations held together by the gossamer threads of time.

Since today really was a spring day, we took the top off of Ginger’s Jeep Wrangler. As we drove through Somerville, a car pulled up next to us and a man with a very recognizable African accent said to me, as I sat in the back seat, “I think this car is perhaps too small for you” and he smiled. The sound of his voice unlocked memories of my childhood in Africa that had been petrified like some of Hopper’s people. The melody I hear when an African speaks English sets my heart to dancing and sets the stories free.

So does celebrating Ginger’s birthday. Milestone days are stones that talk. They remind us where we have been, call us to ask where we are going, and implore us to continue to chip away at life until we can see ourselves as works of art. Though, I’ll admit, I can easily picture myself in Hopper’s diner, encapsulated in the melancholy and shadow of life as he sees it, the work of art that moves me most shared a cheese plate, a cup of coffee, and some hushpuppies with me, smiled and giggled when she opened her presents, and will lay down beside me in just a little while as she has done for almost as many nights as I can remember. I can hear the stones talking, telling me that out of these formidable rocks of remembrance as well as the sand pebbles of everyday living we are sculpting a portrait of love.

Peace,
Milton

new eyes to see

One of the things about Jesus' healing miracles is he asked different things of different people. Sometimes he simply said, "You're healed" and that was that. On other occasions, he asked questions first or told them to do something. Jesus healed one blind man by putting mud on his eyes and then telling him to go and wash. The first time, the man could only see partially. The people look like trees, he said. Jesus repeated the application of the mud and the man could see after he washed a second time.

Sometimes we gain our vision gradually, if not incrementally.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has offered the world an unprecedented view of the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. In conjunction with Google Earth (a program you can download for free), the museum has made it possible for us to see current satellite photographs of the areas of Darfur that have been plundered, burned, and destroyed. By clicking on the links, you can find photographs, video, and personal testimony to what has happened and what is going on now. Whatever we choose to do or not to do, we can no longer plead ignorance.

If you're looking for some way to be a part of the solution, savedarfur.org is organizing Global Days for Darfur -- April 23-30. They provide ways to find out what is happening in your area. You can also plan an event and register with them to get the word out.

I wrote a few days back about the move to use the upcoming Olympics as a way to pressure China into action on Darfur. Things have moved quickly on that front according to this New York Times article.

I also found new eyes to see a part of the world we hear a lot about, but see very little. Healing Iraq is a blog with words and pictures about life during wartime. Hometown Baghdad is a video blog put together by some guys living there who travel around with hidden cameras to chronicle what life is like. Here is a sample of their work.




After watching and reading, I feel like the man might have felt after the first mud was washed from his eyes: I can see things moving, I just can’t quite make them out. For all of the noise that gets made about Iraq on our side of the water, I had very little idea of how people went about their daily lives. I did notice that, while all our news outlets talked about the bombing of the Iraqi parliament and what it meant that the Green Zone had been compromised, the Iraqi bloggers talked about the loss of the bridge – that’s what mattered most to them.

We are being given a chance to see in ways we have not before. May we wash our eyes clean so we can see clearly and respond with intentionality and determination.

Oh -- and apropos of nothing, there's a new recipe.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: darfur

We had our service on Darfur this morning at church and tonight we met to watch Darfur Diaries: Message from Home. After the film, a group of us shared some soup and talked about what we had seen and tried to figure out how to respond to a situation that is half a world away, more horrific than we can imagine – even after seeing the video, and so large and complicated that it leaves us feeling helpless and overwhelmed.

We talked for a long time about things we can do. One of the things we kept coming back to was writing letters and making phone calls to our government officials to urge, shame, and embarrass them into action. The late Senator Paul Simon said, "If every member of (the U.S.) the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different." With that in mind, here are some links to places that will help us get our voices heard and hopefully the voices of those in Darfur as well.

Save Darfur has petitions to President Bush, and the United Nations.
Human Rights First is asking 200,000 people to "stand in" for a victim in Darfur.
The Genocide Intervention Network has great talking points on how to call your member of Congress.
Africa Action has another petition to President Bush as well as a Legislative Action Center.
Be A Witness is petitioning the media for better coverage of the crisis in Sudan. They also have this wonderful commercial that all of the networks have refused to run.




Evangelicals for Darfur have a petition and some wonderful worship resources -- on the same page.
Save Darfur also has some ways to involve your congregation.
Africa Action also has a Religious Action Network.
Though not specifically about Darfur, here is information about the U2charist.

If you want to know how your representatives are voting on Darfur, check out Darfur Scores.
The Sudan Divestment Task Force is looking to apply economic pressure.
Other resources I've found are Darfur Peace & Development, The Enough Project, IRIN Africa, and a great blog called The Coalition for Darfur.

One of the ideas Ginger mentioned in her sermon this morning was committing to "tithe" ten minutes a day to raise awareness about what is happening in Sudan. Ten thousand people a month are being mudered, not to mention those who are being raped and tortured. The situation is about to reach a tipping point such that the death toll could increase ten fold. We need to be talking, writing, calling -- anything we can think of to let our leaders know we want them to take decisive action to stop the killing. In ten minutes, we can sign email petitions, call one or two of our elected officials, or tell a friend about what is going on. In The Soul of a Chef, Ruhlman tells of one guy who wanted to work at The French Laundry so badly that he made about forty copies of his resume and a cover letter, put them in envelopes that were addressed and stamped, and put on in the mail everyday until all of them had been mailed. His sheer persistence got him an interview and, ultimately, the job he wanted.

Ten minutes a day.

We are planning to host a Dinner for Darfur in a few weeks in our parish hall and ask our members to bring someone who doesn't know what is going on. We will serve them a meal, give them the information we have collected, and invite them to take action as well.

The other thing we talked about was how to come to terms with the extreme pain and suffering in Darfur alongside of all of the pain and suffering we know about: the folks still homeless on the Gulf Coast, the tsunami victims in Asia who are still sleeping on the ground, our friends and family who have struggles of their own. One of the key paradoxes of faith is when we voluntarily enter into the pain of another the load lessens for us all. The only way anything will change in Darfur is if we look beyond our helplessness, our feelings of being overwhelmed, our hopelessness and voluntarily choose to figure out how to enter into their pain. "They" are not dying in Darfur; WE are.

Please take some time (ten minutes?) to check out the links. Please take time to comment and add more links, ideas for involvement, and anything else you want to say. Jesus said when we do anything (or don't do anything) to "the least of these" we are doing it to him. How will we live with ourselves if the Darfurians are exterminated while we are too busy to choose to help?

Sorry, I don't mean to preach. I do mean to offer an invitation. Please, join in and help our brothers and sisters in Darfur.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: awakenings

Several weeks ago, Ginger asked me if I would put together a worship service focusing on the genocide in Darfur as a way to inform our congregation and help people know what they can do. When I started doing my research, I wrote this post and found out rather quickly that the primary response people had was one of feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Since them, I’ve been thinking about how to get beyond those feelings to see what else we can find in ourselves.

I got an email from my friend Burt who was responding to my post on The Secret and he said:

Been reading the Lenten journal ... It's great as always. One thought about the "name it claim it piece," I think in it's right form, it's mature expression, the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness proceeds reality... creates it... or influences and shapes it. So, as conscious (or at least semi-conscious) beings, our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things for better (and I guess for the worse too). I think it's in this sense, that I can believe in intercessory prayer... our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think... so are our minds. So... you have this spiritual principle that's been around a few thousand years and pops up in all sorts of places but what happens is, that in the hands of immaturity it turns into the shit that we hear and that you wrote about. Most "shit" out there has some connection to reality... even "name it, claim it."

I chewed on his paragraph for a good while today as I looked over worship resources and articles on Darfur and found myself pulled by his phrases:

• in it’s mature expression the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness precedes reality
• our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things
• our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think
• in this sense I can believe in intercessory prayer

Intercessory prayer is an enigma to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I am saying sometimes I’m not sure. When I pray for someone I can take a meal to, I can feel it. Praying here in Massachusetts for my father-in-law as he recuperates in Alabama leaves me a bit puzzled. Would the healing happen differently if I had not prayed? Would they have found more cancer? If enough of us had been praying over the last four years, could the genocide in Darfur have been averted? Are those fair questions?

The beginnings of the trouble in Darfur started at about the same time George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. We have people keeping count of how many soldiers have died. We hear about car bombs and IEDs most everyday on the news. Yet ten thousand people a month are being killed in the Sudan (my father pointed out to me that’s about fifteen people an hour) and we have not been awake to those numbers for the most part.

How then should we pray? How then should we live?

Since I grew up in Africa, I have a pretty sensitive antenna when it comes to news from the continent and I get a little snippy when what the American media feed us are photographs of Britney Spears’ shaved head and Anna Nicole’s funeral. Two weeks ago the Zambezi River flooded in Mozambique leaving almost 300,000 people homeless. I’ve not heard it mentioned in any American newscast. The news makes my heart hurt; the lack of coverage makes me angry. Yet, I still don’t know how to pray.

Trying to awaken a congregation to the needs of the refugees and victims of the civil war in Sudan is risky because offering the information and challenge as an invitation rather than a polemic is a difficult high wire to walk – at least for me. My passion too quickly comes across as indignation. I want people to hear for the first time things I’ve been conscious of for a long time and rise up and do something.

That’s the next issue: do what?

There are petitions to sign and speakers to hear. We are going to watch a DVD Sunday night as part of our emphasis. There are organizations to support and contributions to make. I realize, though, when I say we can pray I’m almost apologetic, or at least a little dismissive, as though it is an action of last resort: there’s nothing we can really do, so let’s pray.

I’m not satisfied with either side of that equation.

I know part of what I have to get past within myself is the feeling (which I’m not proud of) that if people just knew as much as I do about Darfur or cared as much things would be different. It’s not my primary feeling, but it’s there and it can get the best of me. I may know a lot, but I’m still sitting here in Marshfield ranting into my keyboard. I don’t need to start wearing my “activist” button just yet. I’m not someone other than the folks in our congregation who are frustrated and perplexed by what is going on in the world. I’m one of them. Neither Marshfield nor Darfur has given any indication I might be their Messiah.

Burt talked about our “thoughtful and awakened presence.” It just struck me that he didn’t say awake, but awakened, as in someone else woke us up, opened our eyes. Once again, I’m back to prayer:

open my eyes that I may see
glimpses of truth thou has for me
open my eyes illumine me
Spirit divine

Peace,
Milton

only connect

Since our first real cold snap a week or two ago, the door on the driver’s side of my Jeep Cherokee Sport has been locked up. I’ve become quite adept at entering the car from the passenger side and, I’m sure, have provided a good bit of amusement to people in various parking lots around the South Shore. Today, when I took my car to have the oil changed, I got the door fixed as well. The problem was not big, they told me: the locks had dried out.

While they were fixing the car, I was next door in the Dunkin Donuts drinking coffee and reading my Utne Reader (one of my Christmas presents from Ginger). The first article was called “Our Blackberries, Ourselves” by Lisa Else (taken from a longer article in New Scientist magazine), in which she discusses whether all the opportunities we have to be “constantly plugged in” help us to be better at self-reflection and community:

People are connecting one on one – they have their online social networks or their cell phones with 250 people on speed dial – but do they feel a part of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political commitments? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that would require them to act in concert rather than just connect? Recently, connectivity and statements of identity on places such as Facebook or MySpace have themselves become values. It is a concern when self-expression becomes more important than social action.

Her words took me back to familiar words from one of my favorite novels, Howard’s End by E. M. Forster, which looks at the changing face of human interaction as the technology changed drastically in the days before World War One:

Mature as [Henry] was, [Margaret] might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire . . .

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

When my family first went to Africa in 1957, the only way to get to Southern Rhodesia was to sail from New York harbor, across the Atlantic Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the port of Beira in Mozambique on the southeast coast of the continent. The voyage took thirty-one days. When we wanted to call our family in the States at Christmas, we had to make a reservation weeks in advance with the international operator and then pass the phone around quickly so everyone could speak in the three minutes we were given to talk. What news we got from family came by mail that arrived two weeks after it was written.

By the time we came back to America for our first leave four years later, we could fly and be back in Texas in just a few days. Tonight I can read any African newspaper I want with the click of a mouse. I love that I get the chance to make contact with those of you who read this blog – and particularly with those who comment – and I’m aware that it is more than “only” connecting because how we connect is also important. Many use pseudonyms for their online identities. Some reply anonymously or without a way to respond other than in the comment box. I love that I can look at the map on Stat Counter and find readers from Singapore to Seattle; I even had one from Azerbaijan. I love reading the blogs of people with whom I share some “cyberintimacy” because I want to see what the next chapter in the story is. My world is wider because of this blog. And Lisa Else has a point: the value of the connection is only as good as the community it creates. We are treading new ground here. No one before us in human history has had the capacity to get so much information so instantly and in such volume. When I log on to AOL to check my email, I’m often presented with a “news” page that juxtaposes things like “Three hundred killed in car bombing” with “Man breaks hot dog eating record,” as though the two stories deserve equal consideration.

It can’t be as easy as “only connect.”

It isn’t. Listen to Forster one more time:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

The endless stream of the twenty-four hour news channels tells one story, shows another in a smaller window, and ticks another across the bottom of the screen, fragmenting both our world and us. Margaret’s sermon was to connect head and heart, heart and hands, passion and prose, faith and action, thoughtfulness and intentionality, patience and urgency so that life feels like something other than a centrifuge.

We are paradoxically blessed to live in a time when we can know what is happening around the world. These are days of wonder and days of incredible responsibility. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded;” Jesus said, “and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48). I ‘m still floundering trying to figure out what knowing about the situation in Darfur means for my life. What I’m learning is I’m missing an important connection if I think of it in terms of my life or my response alone. It is in the connections that “human love will be seen at its height” – connections I find in family, in church, and here on this blog that help pull the fragments together.

Peace,
Milton

can you hear me now?

There are days that writing comes easy and days it doesn't. There are also a lot of days in between where I find something to say once I get myself up the stairs and put my fingers on the keyboard. Every so often comes a day like today where the issue is not whether it's easy or hard to write as much as it is whether I feel like I have something to say.

When I get to a day like this, the first fear I have to face is the prospect that I'm on the precipice of depression again. I've had moments over the past few days -- more like a week, I guess -- where I can feel the depression lurking around the edges of my life like a stalker in a Lifetime movie. That it can't find a way to get inside gives me some hope that my new medication is working and for that I'm grateful. This week marks six years since I took my first dive off the deep end, as it were. Sometimes I think the pull of my depression is as much muscle memory as anything else. And then, of course, this particular January has offered its share of crisis and uncertainty, creating the opportunity for a symphony of emotions.

I'm also struggling to write tonight because I don't feel very good at what I'm trying to do. I've been writing about Darfur because I really want to have a conversation about how I (we?) can respond. When I wrote about the war in Iraq a week or so ago, I yelled so loudly through the screen that I hardly gave anyone a chance to respond, so few did. My las two posts about the genocide in Sudan garnered two comments. I realize way more people read this blog than comment, and I also realized how much I hoped to hear from more folks when I felt my disappointment at seeing zero comments on yesterday's post.

This is starting to sound as though I fishing for comments, which is not my point. Let me make my point clear: I'm writing about the genocide in Darfur because I want to have a conversation about what we can do beyond calling and writing any and everyone in Washington asking them to wake up. I want to talk about what it means to pray for them. I want to talk about what to do with my sense of helplessness and hopelessness as I look at how the world treats Africa. I want to know how to say all of this in a way that is invitational rather than declarative.

Peace,
Milton

requiem for darfur

Just as I was getting to work on Saturday, Scott Simon introduced a segment about a Carnagie Hall performance of Verdi's Requiem to benefit the refugees from Darfur. I made a mental note and went to the web site to listen to the program. What I know of classical music I mostly learned from movie soundtracks, so the significance of the chosen piece is a little lost on me. I did find this description at Christopher Lydon's Open Source, who also has a program on the concert:

As great as any of his 28 operas, Giuseppe Verdi’s one Requiem is beyond category among the masterpieces of human affirmation in the depths of suffering and horror. Verdi wrote it in his 60’s to mourn and remember his artistic heroes, the composer Rossini and the poet-novelist Manzoni. The Requiem lives in the choral and orchestral canon as a monument to Verdi himself: his belief, doubt, compositional craft and melodic genius. The work encompasses confessions of sin and guilt, a tour of hell, affirmations of faith and aspirations to heaven. Verdi’s “Dies Irae,” not normally part of the traditional Catholic requiem Mass, has become a Hollywood favorite soundtrack for unidentifiable terror. Prisoners at Terezin, the Nazi camp in Czecholovakia, learned and played the Requiem in defiance of their helplessness. Musicians play it still, not least to remember Terezin.

George Matthew was the conductor for the concert. He was conducting Verdi's piece for the first time. It was not his first time to assemble a variety of musicians and singers for a cause. He conducted a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to raise money for Asian earthquake victims. When Scott Simon asked him why he felt compelled to organize this concert, Matthew said, "We as the classical music community had to say something with our craft."

When Simon asked why Verdi's Requiem, Matthews said it is "at once the music of mourning, at once it is extremely stern, and it is at once full of fear, of active terror in the face of death and really what happens to the human spirit when it's confronted with the prospect of becoming nothing." He went on to talk about its explosiveness and said following those explosions there was "the silent space which is the fertile ground for action." To him, the music suggested that "In our human environment, the prospect of a individual dying unnoticed is not acceptable, it is not natural, and it is certainly not conscionable. It's almost by virtue of the fact that someone is dying, the community must gather and Verdi is speaking to our deepest and best instincts."

Lydon wrote in his commentary of the interview he did with Matthew, "My question to George is how his grasp of Verdi, and Beethoven, can strengthen our limp notions of what is happening in Sudan; how even a rapt contemplation in listening to Verdi can relieve our very contemporary American distance and indifference to what has become the hellish wallpaper of our media and our minds."

I haven't listened to Lydon's show, but I wonder if Matthew's answer to the question was much like his answer to Scott Simon: "We as the classical music community had to say something with our craft." In offering their gifts, the musicians and singers are doing what they can to not let human beings die unnoticed and strengthening our sense of connectedness in the best way they know how.

Our call is to listen and then go and do likewise.

Peace,
Milton

lives in the balance

I've spent the better part of my day reading about what is happening in Darfur in preparation for a worship service we are going to devote to what is happening there and in other parts of Africa. Between the news of famine, AIDS, malaria, and all the other things that afflict the continent, Darfur stands out because it is genocide. My research has been colored by this quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, President Bush said, "“We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma -- and continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur." He didn't give any specifics. I have no need to doubt his sincerity and I don't think his words or actions are going to be what changes things on the ground in Sudan, if Mead is right. And I think she is. So, with determination to become one of those thoughtful, committed citizens, I share what I found today.


As far as understanding the situation in Darfur, I found the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum description helpful:

Sudan's Khartoum-based government is fueling ethnic and racial violence by using the Janjaweed militia as proxies against Darfur insurgents who launched a rebellion in early 2003. But it is civilians who are suffering. Government-sponsored actions include:

INFLAMING ethnic conflict IMPEDING international humanitarian access, resulting in deadly conditions of life for displaced civilians BOMBING civilian targets with aircraft MURDERING and RAPING civilians

Darfurians who have fled the violence provide chilling testimony. One refugee told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that “the Arabs want to get rid of anyone with black skin. . . . There are no blacks left [in the area I fled].”

The death toll exceeds 100,000 and may be more than 400,000. And the crisis continues—the lives of hundreds of thousands more hang in the balance today.

I also loved that the museum is working to apply the lessons we all say we learned from the Holocaust. They also have a disquieting slide show called "Staring Genocide in the Face." Please take time to watch it.

Save Darfur.org has a post called Unity Statement that's worth checking out for the specific things that can be done to help change things in the region, some big and some small. They also have resource packets for worship services of different faiths. In the Christian packet, there is this prayer from a Darfurian woman:

I want to join my prayers to many other voices. Every few months we are driven away from one refugee camp to the other, so far in the desert where nothing, nothing at all exists. This is no way for a human being to live. Now way to live in such a shocking place -- uncultivated, waterless, treeless, and barren region. Everything is burning, Lord, around me, around us; in me, in us. Everything is barren -- hell, hell. Yet, Lord, we believe you are there beside us. We pray for all the Africans living now our same condition. Bring back peace and tranquility to our beloved country. Peace which is desired by everybody, the old and young, rich and poor, women and men. Amen, amen -- let it be so. (© Gloria Silvano, Sudan/CAFOD)

They also offer a sample prayer for use in our worship:

Loving God, we know there are tremendous problems facing the world -- natural disasters, civil wars, violence, disparities in resources, and sickness. We confess that there are days when we look the other way, change the channel, or pretend the problems don't exist. We say that the problem is someone else's concern or displace the blame. We are not confident that we can make an impact and we fear failure for ourselves and on the behalf of others. We might even think that moving to make a difference will change us in ways we will not like or make us uncomfortable. Before we begin, we desire to give up on our opponents and on the victims. Forgive us for our faintheartedness and selfishness, for failing to love others as we should, and for failing to believe that you have empowered us to protect our brothers and sisters. Remind us, Holy One, that some faithful persons refused to give up on us and that You have not given up on any of us. Amen.

Sojourners also has a worship packet and includes this prayer from the United Nations:

Merciful and compassionate Spirit,
Be present to the suffering people of Sudan
Shelter the widows and the children
Comfort all who are weary and afraid
Bring relief to those who hunger and thirst
Center our thoughts with those who suffer in silence
Move us to recall our shared humanity
Unite us in our determination to respond to injustice
May we never forget! May we never forget!
Hear our prayer. Make our action swift.
Amen.

The prayers bring me to another Margaret Mead quote:

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

I don't know what happens when I pray for Darfur. I'm not giving God any new information. I'm not casting some sort of magical spell. I'm challenged, therefore, to articulate what it is I'm praying for. After today, I'm praying to be changed, to be made uncomfortable. One of the things I've said about turning fifty was I felt some relief because I was coming to terms with my limitations. When I was thirty, I thought I was running out of time to change the world. At fifty, I didn't feel that pressure any more.

I'm wrong. The call to be faithful and committed has no age limit.

Peace,
Milton

Photo is from photo essay, "In Darfur, My Camera Was Not Nearly Enough" by Brian Steidle.

stand up and sing

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and one of my heroes because of the way she wages peace with words. When I found a book of her poetry I did not have, You & Yours, I whipped out one of my Christmas gift cards and gave it to myself. This was the first poem:

Cross that Line

Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border
of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.

He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was
not allowed to cross
that line.

Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

When I first read the poem, I recognized Robeson’s name as that of an actor and singer from an earlier time, but I didn’t know why he had to sing into Canada, so I did a little research. Here’s what I found.

Paul Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, NJ, the son of a freed slave who became a Presbyterian minister. He received a scholarship to Rutgers, where he became an All-American football player. He then graduated from Columbia Law School, but left the law soon after because his secretary refused to take dictation from a black man (not the words she chose) and he saw no way around the racism in that field. In the mid-twenties, he entered the theater. After singing “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat, he decided singing full time was what he really wanted to do. One biography describes his growing social conscience this way:

Robeson had been giving solo vocal performances since 1925, but it wasn't until he traveled to Britain that his singing became for him a moral cause. Robeson related years later in his autobiography, Here I Stand, that in England he "learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind." Consequently, he began singing spirituals and work songs to audiences of common citizens and learning the languages and folk songs of other cultures, for "they, too, were close to my heart and expressed the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music." Nathan Irvin Huggins, writing in the Nation, defined this pivotal moment: "[Robeson] found the finest expression of his talent. His genuine awe of and love for the common people and their music flourished throughout his life and became his emotional and spiritual center."

A PBS biography continues the story:

During the 1940s, Robeson's black nationalist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite his contributions as an entertainer to the Allied forces during World War II, Robeson was singled out as a major threat to American democracy. Every attempt was made to silence and discredit him, and in 1950 the persecution reached a climax when his passport was revoked. He could no longer travel abroad to perform, and his career was stifled. Of this time, Lloyd Brown, a writer and long-time colleague of Robeson, states: "Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever."

He wasn’t allowed to leave the US for eight years, when the Supreme Court reinstated his passport. By then he had gone from being a noted celebrity to persona non grata to most. It was on one day during those eight years in the fifties that Paul Robeson sang into Canada.

Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into?

At the interfaith service before our governor’s inauguration, a rabbi (whose name I can’t find anywhere) quoted another rabbi, Abraham Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery and then wrote afterwards:

For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

It is a sad thing to me that I grew up in a denomination that is rooted in the South and never met a white minister there who had prayed with his legs.

Remind us again,
brave friend. What lines should we all
be crossing?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is best known for being one of those whose nonviolent resistance broke apartheid in South Africa. Now he is singing across lines about the way the world treats gay and lesbian people.

“We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about; our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given.” Mr Tutu says he could not have fought against the discrimination of apartheid and not also fight against the discrimination which homosexuals endure. "And I am proud that in South Africa, when we won the chance to build our own new constitution, the human rights of all have been explicitly enshrined in our laws," he said, adding that he hoped this soon would also be the case in other countries.

We talked with one man during the inauguration festivities who told us of Deval Patrick going to visit his eighty-year old father, by his son’s definition, a real Boston Irishman. The son was worried about how his dad might take to the idea of an African-American governor and he wanted his father to meet this man whom he respected and supported. When the old man met Patrick, he apologized: “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to do more back then.”

Remind us again,
brave friend. What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

Darfur is singing.
Sierra Leone is singing.
Iraq is singing (a different song than we are hearing)
Our immigrants are singing.
Our poor are singing.
Our gay brothers and lesbian sisters are singing.

The list is far from exhaustive. The melody, no matter in whose voice, yearns for resonance in our hearts and minds.

Stand up and sing, brave friends.

Peace,
Milton