changing the channel

Tonight the Red Sox will play the last game of a disappointing season that ended long ago, as far as any aspirations for the post season were concerned. The only thing that matters about tonight is that it would be nice to beat the Yankees on the way out. As far as the Yanks go, the game matters only as far as bragging rights go; win or lose, they are going to the playoffs. That said, I’m going to watch the game tonight instead of the presidential debate because the game has more significance. The debate is the political equivalent of professional wrestling: all posture and no substance.

Ever since Richard Nixon’s loss to John Kennedy was attributed to his poor showing in their televised debate, candidates on both sides have worked to master the medium, to make sure they come off in the best light, and to learn how to spar and wait for the right moment to deliver a “zinger.” So they talk about how well the other one debates in order to lower expectations, the pour over old tapes to look for strengths and weaknesses, and they sequester themselves to practice, practice, practice so we can all gather around our televisions like a mob at a cock fight to cheer for our favorite and shout down the other. When the debate is over, all that will be added to the equation is  fodder for the 24 news cycle, who are the ones who fomented the fervor in the first place.

So watch baseball or Law and Order reruns or something that matters. Skip the debates. Better yet, get together with a group of people you trust and who don’t all agree with you and have a discussion about what needs to happen in our country that avoids the catch phrases and cliches that fill our airwaves. Talk about health care without using the word “Obamacare.” Talk about class issues in our country without referring to the “Forty-seven percent.” Don’t run to opposite poles and scream at each other. Don’t settle for political theater and honest discourse. Get together, eat together, and then listen more than you talk.

And while you’re at it, pull for the Sox.

Peace,
Milton

better reception

Last night, the Red Sox lost their last home game of the season. We have six away games left -- three with the Orioles and then three with the Yankees -- and then our season will be over. We will finish with a losing record for the first time in fifteen years. If Toronto continues to oblige, we may be able to avoid finishing last.

The lectionary passage from last Sunday seems well chosen for the end of the baseball season:

And they came to Capernaum. And when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?” But they kept silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”

In seasons such as this, I wish it worked that way in baseball. Between the Red Sox descent, the rise of ridiculous rhetoric in the election cycle, and my continued thoughts about our time in Tuscany, the passage has hung with me. What I quoted here was only a segment of the passage (Mark (:30-37) that began with Jesus making a prediction about his death. Mark’s economic prose doesn’t make it clear if the discussion of the pecking order grew out of that prediction, or if the struggle over superiority had kept them from hearing anything he had said to that point. Either way, they missed said point because they were so taken with themselves. Jesus moves them to the back of the metaphorical bus and then picks up a kid (I suppose one was nearby) and said, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me,” as though that cleared everything up.

You have to wonder what the kid thought about it all.

Though his admonition to servanthood is what is most often pulled from this passage, I’m intrigued by the verb in the last sentence: receive. Whoever receives a child in my name, receives me. It’s not about importance; it’s about hospitality. Who wants to come to dinner where the hosts begins by saying, “I brought you all here tonight to remind you I matter most.” But to be received -- welcomed, included, brought in. Now we’re on to something.

And notice the verb that doesn’t show up in the sentence: deserve.

Some years ago, my friend Billy and I wrote a song called “The Last in Line.” The first verse said,

the last in line doesn’t ever make the team
doesn’t get a second chance
doesn’t find a field of dreams
the last in line doesn’t get a special prize
doesn’t ever hear his name
you don’t look him in the eyes
nobody wants to be the last in line

In our election climate, every candidate at every level, it seems, is required to pay homage to the fact that we are the greatest country in the history of the world. We’re Number One. U-S-A. U-S-A. I wonder who we are trying to convince, or why we feel compelled to make the point every chance we get? We are much like the disciples on the road with Jesus: too caught up in ourselves to hear the rest of the conversation.

The central part of the town of Lucca, where we were in Tuscany, is a medieval city still surrounded by the old city walls. As we drove one day, I saw ruins of an old aqueduct. The people of Italy live out their lives on top of and among the ruins of greatness and seem quite content to be an also-ran, if you will. Yes, they have their problems. But they didn’t seem to be keeping score. I was there for ten days, so I won’t claim to have a handle on the Italian cultural psyche. Maybe I’d do better to say I understood life differently among the ruins. No one stays Number One forever. Five falls ago, the Red Sox were World Series champions. And so it goes . . . .

Ther sports metaphor falls short, however, when Jesus starts talking about receiving the child (though I suppose I could switch to football . . .) because hospitality is not about what anyone deserves or has accomplished. Jesus brought the little one into the circle and said, “Receive her and you’ll see God with new eyes.” And we will see ourselves differently, too.We spend most of our American conversation around who deserves what or who is getting what they don’t deserve, or why I deserve to keep what’s mine and perhaps take some of what’s yours since you don’t deserve it as much. We get upset when other countries seem weary of our self-promotion. Perhaps we would do well to notice we are almost the only ones who feel compelled to keep proving we’re Number One. Or maybe simply come to terms with the truth that it just doesn’t matter.

What matters is how we welcomed one another, fed one another, included one another. Loved. One. Another. In her sermon Sunday, Ginger reminded us that such an approach to life and faith gets “messy and smelly.” Yes. When we move beyond the dichotomy of winner and losers and begin to receive one another, life gets smelly and messy and requires us to think about most every encounter, rather than lean on categories and cliches.

As Mark recounted beyond the lectionary passage, the disciples responded with a “yes, but,” asking about the other guy in town who was casting out demons. Jesus told them to receive him as well. Start with what brings us together. Start there. Now stay and receive whomever we can find. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily as “We’re Number One,” which is fine.

We’re not.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: choosing our words

Not long after we moved into our school building last year, Borders went broke and sold everything in their stores including the fixtures. The tables in my room are the very ones that held stacks of books for customers’ perusal and my walls are lined with the book shelves that made corridors of what are now giant empty brick and mortar boxes. One of the parents showed up one day with boxes of books that belonged to her father, who is quite a reader it seems, to fill up the shelves so the room looked learned in. Last week, one book caught my eye tucked away on the bottom shelf in the corner: a first edition hardback copy of A Circle of Quiet, one of my favorites of Madeleine L’Engle’s nonfiction work.

Needless to say, the book doesn’t live on that shelf anymore.

Our regular staff meeting was cancelled this afternoon, which meant I left school for the computer store and my evening shift earlier than usual, which meant I had time to read a bit when I got there. Berger, of course, who has laid patiently for several days. He told a wonderful story of a woman who had escaped from Kampuchea (now Cambodia) as the Khmer Rouge took hold. Berger described the Kampuchean people of that time as people who were

on the point of being tyrannized and massacred by their own political visionaries, who transformed them into fanatics so that they could inflict vengeance on reality itself, so they could reduce reality to a single dimension. Such reduction brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart. (127)

In the margin I wrote, “our politicians.”

I know it’s an overstatement in the sense that none of our national figures come close to resembling Pol Pot or have any intention of unleashing the kind of wholesale violence inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, yet what resonated in the quote was the note about reducing reality to a single dimension and leaving us with nothing but polarities from which to choose. As I read, I remembered words Madeleine had written about the dangers of reducing our vocabulary, so I went looking for them when I got home.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think. Try to comprehend an abstract idea without words: we may be able to imagine a turkey dinner. But try something more complicated; try to ask questions, to look for meaning: without words we don’t get very far. If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality. (149)

When we reduce our political discussion to who’s red and who’s blue, when our primary word for describing any foreigner we don’t understand is terrorist, when we live in such a sound bite culture that most every news story headline is almost a brand name by the time it is repeated verbatim by most every news outlet, we are left without the depth or nuance it takes to be human to and with one another. The tenor of the recent debates has been Orwellian: “Two legs bad, four legs good.” And, as the pigs in Animal Farm knew, if you get the sheep to shout the slogans loud enough you can control the discourse and rob everyone of their freedom.

Our state, North Carolina, is a good example.

In May, we are voting on a constitutional amendment that, when allowed to be stated in the limited vocabulary of our limited legislature, is designed to “defend marriage” by banning equal marriage. Those who are promoting the amendment have reduced the discussion to the single dimension Berger described, fomenting fear of gays and lesbians as if they were dead set on destroying society. What they don’t talk about the parts of the amendment beyond its obvious discrimination of gays and lesbians that take away rights from any domestic partnership – those who share in adoption, or share their lives at all. They won’t even have legal standing to visit each other in the hospital. Our draconian politicians promoting the amendment don’t do much more than shout “Straight legs good, gay legs bad,” and hope that limiting the discussion will do the trick. They are lying through their teeth.

I have several words for them, trust me, but before I let my anger get the best of me I want to find the words to try and get them or anyone else to see that their reduction the discussion “brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart.” They are not doing their jobs, they are not doing God’s job; they are doing damage – deep, hurtful, who-know-how-long-it-will-take-to-undo damage. Their amendment is not about protecting marriage or promoting morality; it is about preserving power. They want to keep things the way they are because that means the straight white men get to keep running things. Gentlemen – and it is a room packed with men, from one straight white guy to another, those days are over. Thank God.

What I love about Jesus’ vocabulary was his words were expansive. He didn’t reduce large ideas into controllable slogans, instead he took simple ideas and blew the roof off. When he told us to “consider the lilies,” he called us to contentment with who we are and put us in touch with our mortality in the same sentence. The lilies bloom and don’t worry about what’s next and they bloom for about three weeks and they die. He ate with sinners and the One Percent, the prostitutes and the Pharisees. He talked about the poor more than he did the powerful. And he welcomed people every chance he got.

Time is too short and this matters too much to let the discussion around the amendment be reduced to one that comes disguised as sanctified and entrenched morality. Amendment One is draconian and destructive. It robs people of rights they already have and promises to inflict deep pain on any number of North Carolina families. We cannot allow ourselves to constitutionalize discrimination. Let’s defeat the amendment and choose better words that invite and include.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: everyday equation

This afternoon, I went with our math teacher and the twelve kids that make up our little high school to a machine shop which is owned by the parents of one of the students. The teacher wanted the kids to go so they could see that math gets used in the real world. I went because I like seeing cool stuff and it meant I didn’t have to teach fifth and sixth periods.

I had never been in a machine shop before. The owner took us all through the 25,000 square foot plant, explaining what they did and showing us a bunch of pretty amazing machines and the amazing people who ran them. One machine, which was twenty feet long, had a tray into which they fed fifteen foot long stainless steel rods, which were about an inch and a half in diameter. The rods met up with a rotating head that held twenty different tools. Every minute and a half, the machine would produce a finished piece, about two inches long, that had a flat top, a threaded side, and a hollow core; it was used in fire suppression equipment on the underside of buses. They make about 10,000 of them a month. The little piece was a work of art.

Later on, we were in the room where they cleaned and packaged the various pieces for shipment to their customers. There was a box of the same pieces we had seen made.

“We are washing these by hand right now,” he said, “but you’ll see in a minute what we are making so we can clean them in our sonic bath” (it used sound waves in the water to do the cleaning). Sure enough, in the next room there was a guy operating a big machine that was drilling holes in a piece of half-inch plastic to make a tray to hold the first pieces so they could go in the sonic bath. I asked why they needed to do that. The owner went on to explain that at the company that uses them there are a group of about fifteen women who put the parts together by hand. They expect the pieces to be a certain way and, if they are not, they women get upset. Recently, it seems, there had been some problems with the consistency of cleanliness, at least to the women who were receiving the parts.

“I’ve known the owner of that company for twenty years,” he said, “and we’ve had that account a long time. But if I don’t make sure those women who deal with the parts are happy, it doesn’t matter who I know. We’ll lose the account.”

I was glad to hear who had his ear.

In the last couple of days, the news has come that our government has passed a law allowing horses to be slaughtered and sold for human consumption and another allowing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges. Even this week, Congress is flinching at extending the payroll tax holiday though they had no problem making sure their tax breaks for the elite rich in our country were extended last year. The Occupy protesters have been run out of their camps in parks around the country as though they were some kind of threat, and many arrested, though not one of the bankers and financial people who brought the country to the point that people had to protest have even been charged. In this machine shop that is our country, no one is listening to the women, or the men, in the supply room. Our leaders appear to hear and see no one but themselves and those who write big checks.

Too political for Advent? Sorry. The connection for me is that the entire drama of the Incarnation unfolded in the supply room. From Mary to Elizabeth to Joseph to shepherds to innkeepers and immigrant star-gazers, Jesus was born among those who were not policy makers or job creators or people too big to fail. I know I am far from the first to make this observation, nor is it the first Advent it has crossed my mind, but something about thinking of that one woman complaining to the point that it changed the way the companies did business gave me hope, even as I sometimes despair at the lack of leadership and vision in our country.

I don’t think America will save the world or that it is essential for us to stay “the greatest” for the world to survive. I do think the love of God that had the audacity to become incarnate in a poor couple’s kid will save us all if we are willing to find our way to the manger. Whatever happens in our world, more will be changed by people camping in parks together and eating dinners together and sharing food with one another and looking out for each other than by any grandiose gesture of government or multinational conglomerate.

The Bible tells me so.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- After I posted this I read that the Senate killed the proposal in the bill that would have allowed for indefinite detention of US citizens outside of the country (as in Guantanamo) but the Senate defeated an amendment that explicitly said it was illegal to do so.

an open letter to jim wallis

Dear Mr. Wallis:

Yesterday, you published a post on your blog articulating why your magazine refused to publish an ad from the “Believe Out Loud” campaign, which calls for the full inclusion of LGBTQ folks in our congregational life. In explaining your choice you said, in part:

But these debates have not been at the core of our calling, which is much more focused on matters of poverty, racial justice, stewardship of the creation, and the defense of life and peace. These have been our core mission concerns, and we try to unite diverse Christian constituencies around them, while encouraging deep dialogue on other matters which often divide. Essential to our mission is the calling together of broad groups of Christians, who might disagree on issues of sexuality, to still work together on how to reduce poverty, end wars, and mobilize around other issues of social justice.

As one who grew up Southern Baptist and found Sojourners to be people who stretched and challenged my concept of who I was called to be in this world as a follower of Christ, I am deeply disappointed by your words because they lack the courage and conviction that I’ve seen in your work for justice over the years. I’m sorry to see you, well, play politics and play it safe. At least that’s how it feels to me -- and I know from reading just a few of the comments on your blog that I am not the only one that feels this way. Had the issues regarding equal acceptance and equal marriage were being drawn along racial lines, would you have written the same paragraph?

Last week on Grey’s Anatomy, Callie, one of the doctors who was about to get married, and who was also lesbian, was doubting herself and her commitment to the one she loved because her parents had walked out on the wedding since “the church” would not sanction it. Miranda, one of my favorite characters, challenged her to stay true to her commitment. “The church has a lot of catching up to do with God,” she said. Her words rang in my ears as I read your post.

You are falling behind.

None of us has the luxury of deciding what parts of God’s calling we are going to live out. I understand that we all have interests and abilities that perhaps lead us into one area or another with greater emphasis, but cannot decide, as you have done, that we won’t take up an issue because it’s too controversial or it might affect our ability to raise awareness – or funds – in other areas. Your work in fighting against the injustice of war and poverty is important and valuable. Yet how can we deal only with economic poverty and not come to terms with the spiritual bankruptcy that allows us to discriminate against GLBTQ folks in Jesus’ name? If we, who have the choice to say it doesn’t affect us or it is not our top concern, do not make it a vital issue in our lives how will things ever change? You advocate for the poor because you know their voices will not be heard on their own. Does that stance not demand a universal application?

You are right to think that taking a stand will cost you. Trying to not have to take a stand will cost you more. I also understand, as you say, that not all of us who call ourselves Christian agree on this issue, just as Christians have been divided each time they have had to catch up with God when it comes to including and loving one another. At this crucial intersection of faith and justice, please don’t settle for playing it safe. Whatever you deem your priorities, who knows that you are in this world for such a time as this.

Peace,
Milton

fearless love

I went to sleep last night after hearing President Obama announce the killing Osama bin Laden and woke up to any number of blog posts and commentaries already written. You people need less sleep than I do – and I’m running on fumes. Those of us who love to put words to paper find moments such as this begging for us to write something while, at the same time, I wonder what I have to say that will add constructively to the virtual Tower of Babel filling everything from Facebook to Twitter to the Huffington Post. My reality is writing is part of the way I process what I see happening in the world and in my life. Though I would love to feel that I am saying something original and profound, I’m willing to own that I’m mostly writing to help me sort things out and choosing to do that in conversation with whomever chooses to join in because I believe we sort things out better together than on our own.

Osama’s death doesn’t change much of anything as far as I can tell. Even early this morning, one of the headlines at the Huffington Post talked about the possibility of reprisals from Al Qaeda. We are not safer because we killed him. We will still have to take off our shoes at the airport, still spend a ridiculous amount of money on national defense, still have to listen to our politicians whip themselves (and us) into a frenzy of fear to try and get elected as the one who can protect us. We are still running scared. Some have talked about his death as closure for what happened on 9/11, but their statements beg the question as to what is being closed. The grief is not over. His death replaces no one, nor does it measure us as some sort of equitable revenge. Ghandhi’s oft-quoted words find particular resonance today: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Nothing is solved or healed or bettered by killing Osama. We got revenge, not justice. The satisfaction will be short-lived.

I am left particularly incredulous by those who chose to “celebrate” his death, particularly those who clothed that celebration in Christian terms, as though this was some sort of victory for Jesus – that would be the same Jesus who said, unequivocally, “Love your enemies.” I’m pretty sure assassination was not one of the ways he imagined that love being expressed. Osama’s death is not a religious victory not a triumph of Christianity over Islam. We are not in a holy war. Our nation has chosen to participate in an increasing spiral of violence the consequences of which are far from over. Bin Laden didn’t represent Muslims any more than Fred Phelps or Terry Jones speak for all of Christianity. His presence and actions in the world called us to check our character and our resolve as Christians to show whether or not we are willing to follow Jesus in difficult and dangerous days. We appear to be about as reliable as Peter in the courtyard.

Here’s the part in the post where I begin feeling the creeping resignation that those who share similar views will read on and those who don’t will either stop reading or take time to send some sort of comment to tell me I am idealistic or naïve and even God knows there comes a time when you have to open a can of Whup-ass on those whom you see as enemies. I despair because most of the posts I read today – and perhaps this one – weren’t written with the expectation of a genuine conversation about how to live out our faith. We are writing to be heard more than we are writing to listen, which is the way in which Christianity in America has become most acculturated: we operate by the same polarizing, violent rules of conversational engagement that paralyze our country.

Since early this morning I have had a David Wilcox song on my mind called “Show the Way.” The opening verses say,

you say you see no hope
you say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change
you're saying love is foolish to believe
'cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your day dream
put the fear back in your life

look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late
he's almost in defeat
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat,
from the moment that the whole thing begins

it is love who makes the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene set in shadows
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
for in this darkness love can show the way

As I spoke of this song, a friend reminded me of another Wilcox song written when the AIDS epidemic was the designated dividing line among Christians called “Fearless Love.” The song tells the story of someone in a protest stand-off between the two sides. The verbal violence escalates to someone throwing a stone and hitting a man who was HIV postitive on the head and causing him to bleed. The person holding the sign of judgment was then confronted with what to do about the bleeding person at his feet.

your mind snaps back to where you stand
your church is here to fight a cause
and at your feet a fallen man
whose head is cradled in his arms
though his blood contains his death
and though the lines are drawn in hate
you drop your sign of Bible verse
and help the wounded stand up straight

oh yes the high religious still will scorn
just like that did all that time back
they'll say you helped the other side
they saw you haul that soldier's pack
but now how could you carry that man's sign
in your heart the choice was clear
you didn't join the other side
the battle lines just disappeared
when fearless love, fearless love
fearless love makes you cross the border

“Nothing changes just because one guy gets killed, even if it is Osama,” said one of my eighth graders as he came into class this afternoon. Fearless love, however, changes all of us.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: coming clean

After I finished writing what follows here, I decided I needed to write a brief preface. I don’t usually do so, but I also don’t get specifically political very often. I am troubled by the bombings that began today because of what it says about who we think we are and who are choosing to be as a nation in our world. I needed somewhere to say so out loud. Thanks for listening.

A number of years ago, Ginger and I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C... I remember, in particular, standing in a small room whose walls went up twelve or fourteen feet and were covered with photographs from a village in Russia. The explanatory plaque on the wall told of this community of Russian Jews that were all murdered. The only things left were the photographs in front of me. The pictures were taken when the people in them didn’t know they were going to be killed. There were wedding pictures, family portraits, and shots of friends probably taken for no other reason than someone had a camera. The photographs hung on the walls in the museum without any relational context other than our common humanity and the reminder of what we are capable of doing to one another. More than once, as we journeyed through the museum, we heard or read the words, “Never again.”

A little over a week ago, my Documentary Studies class watched Ghosts of Rwanda, which returned to the country ten years after the genocide of 1994 in which 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. Europe and America did little more than send in planes to get the white people out. The very few UN “peace keepers” in the country were not allowed to even shoot their guns.

Today, on the anniversary of the U. S. invasion of Iraq, we launched “Operation Oddesy Dawn” and began bombing Libya. The Huffington Post said,

In announcing the mission during a visit to Brazil, President Barack Obama said he was reluctant to resort to force but was convinced it was necessary to save the lives of civilians. He reiterated that he would not send American ground troops to Libya.

"We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy," he said in Brasilia.

During the film on Rwanda, they showed a clip of President Clinton explaining why the U. S. wasn’t intervening. After what happened in Mogadishu, he said, we would not longer intervene unless we had “a compelling national interest.” The truth is we, as a country, can stand by while tyrants and terrorists run amok, as long as they aren’t killing Americans or they don’t have large oil reserves. The civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has gone on for years. Millions have been killed. The armies have consistently used rape as a weapon. In 2004, we said out loud that what was happening in the Darfur region of Sudan was genocide and we still have done nothing. We are bombing Libya for primarily economic reasons, not humanitarian ones. (I’m not sure you can ever bomb someone for humanitarian reasons; that’s too incomprehensible an irony for me.)

In this season of penitence, perhaps we would do well as a nation to come clean about our intentions, at least to ourselves. As long as there were no protesters in Libya, we kept their money in our banks and sold them weapons – not the really nasty ones, but weapons nonetheless. We will care about African nations when they find oil within their borders. We are more interested in things being stable around the world than we are in people being free and fed. Forgive us, Lord, even though we aren’t particularly repentant. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

oh, say can you see . . .

The Durham Bulls put out an open call for anyone who wanted to audition to sing the National Anthem to show up at the ball park last Saturday and take their best shot. I got there about thirty minutes before auditions were to begin, only to find I was sixty-eighth in line. Fortuitously, Number Sixty-Seven was my friend Terry. Neither of us knew the other was coming. Our serendipitous encounter turned the day from a lonely audition to an adventure in friendship. We took our seats on the third base line and waited our turn.

“Number One,” said the first woman who took the mic, and she began to sing, setting the pattern we would all follow. All 164 of us. The paper they handed us in line spelled it out. We were to walk down to the field when it came our turn, take the mic, say our number, sing, and then hand the mic to the next person in line. We had to sing the anthem in seventy seconds or less without venturing from the traditional melody because, should we be selected, we would be leading the crowd in the song, not performing for them. If we were good enough, we would receive an acceptance letter in a couple of weeks, though that didn’t guarantee we would sing at a game. If an opening came up, we would get a minimum of one week’s notice before our turn to sing. The best news for me was the tryout was for real: I got to stand at home plate and sing the song over the PA. Whether or not I get selected, I got to sing the National Anthem at the ball park.

The first woman started singing at ten o’clock. It was ten minutes till twelve when I held the mic for Terry to play the anthem on his harmonica (he rocked!) and about sixty seconds after that I took my turn. By then we had heard sixty-six renditions of the song. I can do without if for awhile. I think we were fifteen versions in or so when Terry turned and said, “It’s kind of fun to hear the different takes and see all the different people here. I wish we could hear the stories behind why they showed up and why they want to sing.”

Yet all we were allowed to do was sing. There was no time for stories. The first woman, white and middle aged, offered a comfortable version, followed by any number of elementary and middle school students. The four older men did a precise barbershop version that was harmonious and somehow lacking in passion. The twenty-something couple offered their version with acoustic guitar and bluegrass harmony and gave the song new life. An African-American woman sang it like a gospel song and almost brought us to our feet, even though we had already heard it twenty-five times. One young boy picked it out on classical guitar, and then a teenager did an electric version without most of Hendrix’s improvisation. The teenage girl right in front of Terry was taken over by her nerves after the first line and two hours of waiting and handed me the mic as she walked away in tears.

It’s not an easy song. The range is wide and the lyrics are, well, a little foreign to us in these days. I think it’s safe to say the only time most of us use the word rampart is when we’re singing the anthem. The lyric is more militaristic than inspiring. I would much rather “America, the Beautiful” took its place, yet there I was on the field, microphone in hand, singing with all the power I could muster. The scene is not without its irony because I don’t have a nationalistic bone in my body. Being an American doesn’t always come easy for me. I didn’t grow up here. I don’t always know how to belong here. Yet, there’s something about baseball that connects me to my country in a way I only know how to describe as a “Field of Dreams” moment. Remember Terrence Mann’s speech in the movie?

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.

When I took the mic, there were no corn stalks to be seen, nor ghosts of players past. I looked out over the left field wall where the flag hung motionless in front of the Tobacco Road Sports Bar and the office building that houses it. I was singing due north, aiming my voice at our home which lies a little over a mile from the park, beyond the bar and the Performing Arts Center, and the prison, and the Farmers’ Market, and the old Bulls’ park where they filmed Bull Durham, and the skate park, and Fullsteam – my favorite pub. I sang because I love to sing, I love baseball, and I want to feel connected to my country even though that’s not always comfortable. I sang and, in that moment, I felt unabashedly American.

And when I finished, I wanted a hot dog with everything.

Peace,
Milton

declaration of . . .

we may hold
these truths
to be self-evident
life, liberty, and
the pursuit
of happiness

however
even truths
have their limits
when we wrote
those words
we were young

and isolated
and thinking mostly
of ourselves
now, we are older
and established
and powerful

and something
has been lost
in the translation
of your cries
for freedom:
our gas prices

are going up
along with our
fear and anxiety
we know
you have suffered
but the world

was working
pretty well
like it was
change is hard
when it costs us
for you

to be free
we hope
you understand
perhaps this truth
or, at least,
reality lives
in the shadows:

our comfort and power
matter more (to us)
than your freedom
we do understand
your yearnings
can't that be enough?

Peace,
Milton

words from martin

This morning I went to Watts Street Baptist Church to hear Tim Tyson preach on "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: Black Power and the Religion of Jesus." He rocked and I will have more to say about what I learned in another post (or two). But tonight I want to share the MLK quotes included in "A Litany of Rededication" we said together at the close of the service.

"One of the tragedies of humanity's long trek has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class, or nation. . . . Our world is a neighborhood. We must learn to live together as brothers [and sisters], or we will perish as fools. For I submit, nothing will be done until people put their bodies and souls into this."

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than peole, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

"There are some things in our society and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted, to which I call upon all people of good will to be maladjusted, until the good society is realized. I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating efforts of physical violence."

"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. . . . Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace. . . . [We] must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

"I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. . . . The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing . . . for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names; and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy."

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

I am saddened that these words spoken a half century ago sound as if they were uttered yesterday.

Peace,
Milton

good words

The words on this blog tonight come from President Obama's speech at the memorial service in Tucson. They feel worth passing along.

To the families of those we've lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants gathered tonight, and the people of Tucson and Arizona:  I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today, and will stand by you tomorrow.

There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts.  But know this: the hopes of a nation are here tonight.  We mourn with you for the fallen.  We join you in your grief.  And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy pull through.

As Scripture tells us:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.

On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff, and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech.  They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders - representatives of the people answering to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns to our nation's capital.  Gabby called it "Congress on Your Corner" - just an updated version of government of and by and for the people.
That is the quintessentially American scene that was shattered by a gunman's bullets.  And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday - they too represented what is best in America.

Judge John Roll served our legal system for nearly 40 years.  A graduate of this university and its law school, Judge Roll was recommended for the federal bench by John McCain twenty years ago, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and rose to become Arizona's chief federal judge.  His colleagues described him as the hardest-working judge within the Ninth Circuit.  He was on his way back from attending Mass, as he did every day, when he decided to stop by and say hi to his Representative.  John is survived by his loving wife, Maureen, his three sons, and his five grandchildren.

George and Dorothy Morris - "Dot" to her friends - were high school sweethearts who got married and had two daughters.  They did everything together, traveling the open road in their RV, enjoying what their friends called a 50-year honeymoon.  Saturday morning, they went by the Safeway to hear what their Congresswoman had to say.  When gunfire rang out, George, a former Marine, instinctively tried to shield his wife.  Both were shot.  Dot passed away.

A New Jersey native, Phyllis Schneck retired to Tucson to beat the snow. But in the summer, she would return East, where her world revolved around her 3 children, 7 grandchildren, and 2 year-old great-granddaughter.  A gifted quilter, she'd often work under her favorite tree, or sometimes sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants to give out at the church where she volunteered.  A Republican, she took a liking to Gabby, and wanted to get to know her better.

Dorwan and Mavy Stoddard grew up in Tucson together - about seventy years ago. They moved apart and started their own respective families, but after both were widowed they found their way back here, to, as one of Mavy's daughters put it, "be boyfriend and girlfriend again." When they weren't out on the road in their motor home, you could find them just up the road, helping folks in need at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ.  A retired construction worker, Dorwan spent his spare time fixing up the church along with their dog, Tux.  His final act of selflessness was to dive on top of his wife, sacrificing his life for hers.

Everything Gabe Zimmerman did, he did with passion - but his true passion was people.  As Gabby's outreach director, he made the cares of thousands of her constituents his own, seeing to it that seniors got the Medicare benefits they had earned, that veterans got the medals and care they deserved, that government was working for ordinary folks.  He died doing what he loved - talking with people and seeing how he could help.  Gabe is survived by his parents, Ross and Emily, his brother, Ben, and his fiancée, Kelly, who he planned to marry next year.

And then there is nine year-old Christina Taylor Green.  Christina was an A student, a dancer, a gymnast, and a swimmer.  She often proclaimed that she wanted to be the first woman to play in the major leagues, and as the only girl on her Little League team, no one put it past her.  She showed an appreciation for life uncommon for a girl her age, and would remind her mother, "We are so blessed.  We have the best life."  And she'd pay those blessings back by participating in a charity that helped children who were less fortunate.

Our hearts are broken by their sudden passing.  Our hearts are broken - and yet, our hearts also have reason for fullness.

Our hearts are full of hope and thanks for the 13 Americans who survived the shooting, including the congresswoman many of them went to see on Saturday.  I have just come from the University Medical Center, just a mile from here, where our friend Gabby courageously fights to recover even as we speak.  And I can tell you this - she knows we're here and she knows we love her and she knows that we will be rooting for her throughout what will be a difficult journey.

And our hearts are full of gratitude for those who saved others.  We are grateful for Daniel Hernandez, a volunteer in Gabby's office who ran through the chaos to minister to his boss, tending to her wounds to keep her alive.  We are grateful for the men who tackled the gunman as he stopped to reload.  We are grateful for a petite 61 year-old, Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away the killer's ammunition, undoubtedly saving some lives.  And we are grateful for the doctors and nurses and emergency medics who worked wonders to heal those who'd been hurt.

These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle.  They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength.  Heroism is here, all around us, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, just waiting to be summoned - as it was on Saturday morning.

Their actions, their selflessness, also pose a challenge to each of us.  It raises the question of what, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward.  How can we honor the fallen?  How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.  Already we've seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems.  Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.  In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness."  Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack.  None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy.  We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.  As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

After all, that's what most of us do when we lose someone in our family - especially if the loss is unexpected.  We're shaken from our routines, and forced to look inward.  We reflect on the past.   Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder.  Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us?  Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward - but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.  We may ask ourselves if we've shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives.  Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order.  We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame - but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.

That process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions - that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.  For those who were harmed, those who were killed - they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong.  We may not have known them personally, but we surely see ourselves in them.  In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners.  Phyllis - she's our mom or grandma; Gabe our brother or son.  In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America's fidelity to the law.  In Gabby, we see a reflection of our public spiritedness, that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union.

And in Christina...in Christina we see all of our children.  So curious, so trusting, so energetic and full of magic.

So deserving of our love.

And so deserving of our good example.  If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let's make sure it's worthy of those we have lost.  Let's make sure it's not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.  It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

I believe we can be better.  Those who died here, those who saved lives here - they help me believe.  We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.  I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed.  Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future.  She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful.  She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model.  She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations.  I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.

Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called "Faces of Hope."  On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child's life.  "I hope you help those in need," read one.  "I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart.  I hope you jump in rain puddles."

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.  And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we've lost in restful and eternal peace.  May He love and watch over the survivors.  And may He bless the United States of America.

Peace,
Milton

of mushrooms and mayhem

A couple of weeks ago, I got to attend a mushroom workshop put on by my friends at Bountiful Backyards, our edible landscapers here in Durham. We were each given a freshly cut oak log. We drilled forty or fifty holes in it and then filled them with the mushroom spores, inoculating the log. We then sealed the holes with beeswax. What will happen over the next several months is the mycelia will grow out of the spores and take over the log, which is their nutrition. When the log is pretty well covered up the mycelia, they will start to fruit and I will get to harvest my home-grown shiitake mushrooms.

I thought about my mushroom logs this morning as more details came in about the shootings in Arizona yesterday. Actually, I should say I thought about the notion of the saturated log bearing fruit because that’s what I feel happened when the unstable young man opened fire. Violence is the primary working metaphor of American society and we are saturated such that we are bearing the fruit of our choices in language, attitude, and action.

In the first notes I wrote this morning, I said war was the working metaphor, and I could hear Edwin Starr singing, “War – what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.” Yes, we are a nation who thrives on conquest on a number of levels and we’ve declared war on everything from countries to drugs, but what owns us like a cancer is more nuanced and more insidious. We thrive on violence:

• the plethora of reality shows are centered around who can be goaded into fighting with one another;
• the twenty-four news channels have the volume set on “Scream” and their focus on fighting because it brings the ratings;
• the profit-at-all-costs business models of Wall Street and the like feed are predatory;
• our national politicians rely on incendiary language to stay in the news and have reduced governing to a middle school playground fight.

Violence – what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.

To be an American is to be locked and loaded and consumed with self-interest. Make sure you get your rights. Make sure you get your stuff. Make sure you protect yourself. And make sure you beat down (verbally, at least) anyone you consider to be a threat. Yes, I know those last sentences come across as overstatements, but look around. Listen to the political rhetoric. Listen to how our politicians and pundits lob violent words at one another day after day. Put anything on Facebook that is the least bit politically opinionated and watch the firestorm that erupts. We eat, sleep, and dream violence. Violence and fear.

These folks who incarnate the violence so publicly from Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray to Timothy McVeigh and down through all of the school shootings to Jared Loughner are us. They are the fruit of what has permeated our culture, our cities, our schools, and even our churches. They are not aberrations. They are a working metaphor for America.

They are us.

We are a week away from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the MLK holiday, honoring yet another who was a victim of the fruit of our violence. Yet, to the end, he chose to practice nonviolence faithfully – as Jesus taught. Faithfully means keeping our promises to God and to one another, being committed to a world that is larger and more profound than our own self-interest and national interest and more imaginative than our fear, and saturating ourselves with the Spirit of grace and forgiveness. Then we can bear different fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

I know I’m not saying anything new or original. Still, I don’t want to sit silently, even if the material has already been covered. Even before Jesus came, the prophet boiled it down: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God.

Say it again, y’all . . .

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: looking for scout

We’re beginning to make the turn towards home in To Kill a Mockingbird in my American Lit. class. We had a discussion today about the way in which a crisis exposes both the things that tie us together and the things that tear us apart. Maycomb, the little town where the story takes place, had some deep divisions around race and class that stayed mostly unspoken until Atticus Finch, a white lawyer, agreed to represent Tom Robinson, an African-American man who had been accused of raping a white woman. She also happened to be dirt poor. In a few pages, the biases and boundaries of the small town were exposed as though a sirocco had blown through blowing all the top soil into the next county and leaving everything out in the open.

In one of the most powerful scenes, a group of white men come to the jail to exact their version of justice on Tom. Atticus is sitting on the porch of the jail (Where but the South do you have a jail with a big porch?) to be a human barrier between the lynch mob and his client. The men respect Atticus but don’t intend to be deterred. What none of them knew was that Scout had followed her father to the jail and was hiding in the shadows. As the tempers begin to flare and the volume begin to grow, Scout recognizes one of the men as the father of one of her classmates and she calls out to him and asks about his son. The shouting stops and the man answers the question. Scout calls out in greeting to some of the other men who greet her in return, and, within a few minutes, start heading for home, humbled by a ten-year old prophet.

Her forthrightness turned a light on the lynch mob and called them into honesty.

Though I won’t feign understanding of all of the implications of the Wikileaks mess that is going on, I do think about Scout calling those men by name when I hear another story explaining what was in the diplomatic cables. I am not naïve. I know the world has convinced itself that secrecy and even deceit are a necessary part of diplomacy and politics. And look how well it’s working. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to elections in Haiti to civil war in Sudan to the arrogance and incompetence of our own leaders in Washington, our leaders sit just as Buddy the Elf accused the false Santa: on a throne of lies. And they probably smell like beef and cheese, too.

Power is the primary currency and it has left us bankrupt.

At least in the book, there’s a sense that the men came to themselves, much like the prodigal son, and realized they needed to stop what they were doing and go home. Listening to the congressional rhetoric, the win-at-all-costs-anything-for-power mentality feels conscious and brazen. Wikileaks or no, they are going to keep on keeping secrets and banking both power and money because that is what they think matters most. While Congress let the Dream Act and the chance to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fall by the wayside, the same Wall Street firms that imploded our economy are paying out $90,000,000,000 (yep – 10 zeros) in bonuses (so they need those tax cuts to continue, don’t you know).

King Herod, who would have done quite well in Washington, was willing to wipe out every toddler in the land because he was afraid of whom Jesus might become. Two thousand years later, we as the Body of Christ aren’t scaring anyone hardly at all, or expecting much to change. Christmas will come and Washington will go on having prayer breakfasts and listening to lobbyists without any sense of irony and very little integrity, ceaselessly campaigning for the next election.

I am not saying I expect our government or this nation to be Christian. It is not by definition. I am saying for people created in the image of a subversive, inside out, unabashedly loving God who picks the poor every time, we have work to do to make speaking up our daily practice rather than letting it become an occasional event.

Peace,
Milton

change

Some years ago, Ginger and I were walking along the sidewalk in Davis Square in Somerville, Mass. when we passed a homeless man sitting in a doorway. Just as we drew even with him, he barked, “Change!” loudly enough for the people across the street to hear him.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any,” Ginger said.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” I pleaded.

Same word, different ears.

The story came back to mind over the last few days, as the election hysteria crescendoed, along with the predictions of the Democrats’ demise, and most of the news analysts couldn’t complete a sentence without talking about change. And I wondered about their working definition of the word. It can mean to alter or transform; it can also mean to swap out, as in exchange. Then, of course, there’s the pocket-full-of-change variety, or as far as this election was concerned, the truckloads full of change.

I found some comfort in looking up the word, though I felt I knew the definition, because it helped me come to terms with the reality that the “change” our politicians talk about, particularly when they are the ones out of power, is about the swapping out and the change I dream of has more of a revolutionary edge. Our political process is more pendulum than promise, more vengeance than virtue, more hubris than hope. Based on their track record, to see tonight’s election as profound change in Congress makes as much sense as thinking it’s a whole new ball game because two football teams swapped ends of the field at halftime.

When I look at the rest of the world, I am amazed that we move from one party in power to the other with little or none of the violence that plagues some nations. Then again, none of those nations have the resources we do. And we can only see our process as relatively violence free if we ignore the way we talk to each other. This election season has been a verbal bloodbath. We have little to be proud of. We are angrier, meaner, and more extravagant in both our budgets and belligerence than we have ever been. And we are obsessed with elections. Everyday is election season. By Monday, people will begin announcing they are running for President in 2012 so we can all pick sides ands scream at each other some more.

Politicians and special interest groups whose donors remain anonymous spent more money and aired more attack ads than just about any other election. I heard one party pundit praise his candidates for “not getting mired down in talking about the issues.” Mitch O’Connell made a point of saying his top concern is to make sure Obama is a one term president. Not the war in Afghanistan. Not the economy. Not anything other than win, win, win. And he’s far from alone in his sentiment, on either side of the fight.

I voted today, and I also wondered if my actions did anything more than perpetuate the system. I work hard not to shop at Wal Mart because of the way they have chosen to run their business over the years. Why do I keep participating in a system that is invested in making sure people with money have the most influence, holds a warped view of power and what it means to be in charge, and has no appetite for transformation?

The question is not rhetorical. Neither is it a cheap cynical shot. It’s very alive to me. Whatever the issue – immigration, poverty, nuclear arms, foreign policy, health care – shouting each other down is not the same thing as a meaningful discussion. Making political or parliamentary maneuvers to block legislation is not the same as honest dialogue. Well-financed sound bytes are not legitimate substitutes for substantive articulation.

And simply repeating the regurgitation is not reporting, either.

I have no illusion that anyone beyond the fellow members of my neighborhood board listen to me, when it comes to politics. I’ve no money to give, no constituency to offer, even if I am a straight white guy. But speaking up does not feel as futile as voting to me because I believe words do change things – transform things. And I trust what I see in the life of Jesus and in the gospels: real change is not instigated by the powerful, or by appealing to them, or, perhaps, voting for them.

I’ve made several attempts at ending this piece that have moved from overly sincere to sanctimonious to sappy, none of them satisfactory. So I think I’ll go for small. I can’t fix the big issues, so I will choose to look into faces. Anar, a man who works at one of our local grocery stores, works with Bhutanese refugees moving to the area and needs Target gift cards to help them set up house. I can do that. We teach English classes on Wednesday nights at our church for local Latino immigrants. I can do that. I can cook for whoever I can find. I can keep making Kiva loans. I can help my students live through high school. I can love my wife. I can have a lifetime of hope and opportunity by choosing to meet the needs in front of my face.

“Change!”

What do you hear?

Peace,
Milton

can I get a witness?

T. S Eliot’s amazing poem The Waste Land has found me twice in the last few days.

First, let me confess. I love the poem and I am moved by the poem, but I am far from understanding it. Still, it keeps coming after me. The first touch was at school, reading Robert Cormier’s novel, The Chocolate War, in which Jerry Renault, the young protagonist, tapes a poster in his locker that borrows a line he attributes to Eliot’s poem (I have since learned it is from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock):

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Jerry is trying to figure out his place in the universe, as well as working to discern whether the point is to stay under the radar or to make choices that offer a chance for more than one might reasonably expect out of life. I made mock ups of the poster, as it is described in the book, and handed them out to the class when we got to the chapter where it is mentioned. They looked as confused as I feel trying to make sense of Eliot’s Latin and German. I have more time with them.

The second instance was in my reading this afternoon of Mary Gordon’s Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, which was a gift from my friend, Sonya. Part of what I liked about Gordon’s connection to the poem was that it grew out of a confusion of her own.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” These words from Eliot’s Waste Land involved me in an interesting misreading that went on for several decades. I had habitually misread the plural “ruins” as the singuar “ruin.” I was shocked to find out what I had done, and not pleased with Eliot’s words: I preferred my own invention. I had interpreted the line to mean that the words were a preservation against personal ruin. But “ruins” suggests a public spectacle – like the Parthenon or the Acropolis – and what would be the point of shoring fragments against these colossal wrecks? Such an act becomes an act of witness rather than of self-preservation.

Gordon and Eliot know what Jerry is beginning to learn: when we disturb the universe we set things in motion we can neither predict nor control. Life is less cause-and-effect, in any sort of direct sense, and more of a Ray-Bradury-butterfly effect: who knows what comes of the choices we make other than every little move matters. I wrote a few words in the margin next to the last sentence of the paragraph as quickly as they came to me:

This is the watershed of Christianity in America.

At the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory, I think I may be on to something. Between pitches for the pledge drive this afternoon, I listened to some government official talk about the rising terror threats aimed at our nation. I don’t doubt that there are people in the world who want to do us harm and I also don’t doubt that cranking up the Fear Making Machine is good politics as the midterm elections draw near. Regardless of who is doing the mongering, the call to fear is the call to self-preservation: we must do what it takes to (God, I hate this phrase) “secure the Homeland.” Give up rights. Take away rights. Damn the torpedoes and the consequences. Forget talking softly and get something bigger than a big stick. The bottom line quickly becomes utilitarian, mercenary, and cynical. If self-preservation is our core value, the circle of those we can trust will only grow smaller, whether we’re talking about our country or our Church.

Till I read Gordon’s words, I had never thought of bearing witness as the opposite of self-preservation. When I saw the word “witness” in its context, I thought of the organization, Witness.org, which sums up its mission in the slogan, “See it. Film it. Change it.” For the last twenty years, they have been giving cameras to people in parts of the world no one sees so they can tell their stories in hopes, not of self-preservation, but of radical change.

Jesus kind of change. Gordon, again:

The radical challenge of Jesus: perhaps everything we think in order to know ourselves as comfortable citizens of a predictable world is wrong.

Much of the conversation in American Christianity has to do with how we save the church, or how we change the church. The conversation may be well intentioned yet it is a conversation centered in self-preservation. We want to keep our doors open. We want to be at the center of things. We want to be culturally significant. We talk a lot about correcting the universe, but not so much about disturbing it.

When we come to church, we come looking for comfort, for hymns we love, not for disquietude. I love being a part of a community of faith where often is heard an encouraging word, and I wonder if we would do well to hang one of Jerry’s posters behind the Communion table to remind us that life is about as predictable as the God who breathed it into us and that our mission has nothing to do with being God’s Gatekeepers and everything to do with going out into the highways and byways and bring everyone who is hungry to dinner.

But there’s more.

I’m not trying to be a travel agent for a guilt trip here. I’m trying to voice my own disquietude born of my reading today, which means I have to go back to Gordon one more time. She is responding to the parable of the Prodigal Son, particularly the encounter between the father and the older brother, in which the father says,

“Everything I have is yours.” The good boy is not left bereft. But what has been lost has been found. What is acknowledged here, what is given the greatest weight, is the terrible blow of loss. The loss has seemed final, and then: reprieve. Resurrection. A new chance. A rebirth whose wage is celebration. “We had to celebrate and rejoice.” had to: an injunction, a duty. The duty of celebration.

And the story ends here. With an assertion of the rightness of celebration. The propriety of joy.

When we, as American Christians, read the parables we would do well to cast ourselves as the older brother, the rich man walking past the beggar, the jealous workers, and any other part that describes those who see themselves as the dutiful and the deserving. Everyone of the parables sounds the same disturbing note: we are called to live generous and joyful lives.

And trust God will take care of us all.

Peace,
Milton

be a love dog

Since the early days of this blog, I’ve kept a counter to see how many folks clicked in, thanks to Stat Counter. I had not used the service long before I found they also had a map showing me where folks were when they clicked. Almost every week, there has been someone in Azerbaijan who showed up on the map, and I have often wondered what he or she made of this strange little collection of writings, not to mention how he or she found me in the first place. I mention the person to say I have no idea who reads what I write. My Azerbaijani audience notwithstanding, I assume most of my readers are Christian. Tonight, at least, I am writing specifically to them (you?).

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve listened to the rumble over Park 51, the proposed Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan and have chosen to not say anything because, well, the whole mess seemed more election year theatrics than anything else. This afternoon, however, I heard a story on NPR about protests against the building of an Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and heard one of the protesters say, "We're Christians and this religion represents people that are against Christians. That's something we need to look at, you know, because you're going to have a lot of trouble down the line."

How heartbreaking that a sentence that begins with “we are Christians” could end in such fear and despair.

There is an Islamic Center in Murfreesboro already; the new, larger one is needed because the congregation has outgrown their space. As far as lower Manhattan is concerned, there are at least a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in close proximity to Ground Zero, and that which some have labeled “hallowed ground” is populated with everything from a strip joint to fast food chains to street vendors. Saying the new center is too close makes about as much sense as saying no new Christian churches should be built in downtown Oklahoma City because of Timothy McVeigh’s ties to the Christian Identity movement.

They’ll know we are Christians by our love, not by our fear.

And the call in these days is for us to be known as Christians – that we speak and act first from that allegiance – rather than as Americans. The history of human conflict, including the history of Christian-Muslim relations, is marked by the manipulation of religion for military gain. The Crusades, for example, were more about power than piety. The nationalization of religions across the centuries has proven mostly to be bastardization of belief, rather than a furthering of faith. Most of us, particularly the most vocal of us, I would suggest, have only a minimal understanding of Islam. I won’t claim expertise when it comes to the Qu’ran, and I feel sure the vast majority of Muslims meeting from Murfreesboro to Manhattan are not plotting the overthrow of Christianity anymore than Christian congregations from coast to coast are united in reviving the Crusades. Yet, it seems only the radicals and the ridiculous on both sides manage to get to the microphones.

Today, as part of our opening activities at school, we did an exercise called “My Job, Your Job” where we talked with the kids about what our responsibilities were as both students and teachers to ourselves and to each other. One of the things that made the list was it was everyone’s job to speak up when we saw someone being treated unfairly or being bullied. Don’t wait for someone else to speak up, or for someone to stand up for themselves; step in and speak out. As I listened to the NPR story on the way home, I couldn’t help but wonder where we were, as Christians, when it came to speaking out and standing up for our Muslim sisters and brothers who are becoming targets of an insidious hysteria and hyperbole.

I don’t mean we necessarily have to make the news; the media are not listening to or looking for coherent and compassionate voices, for the most part. I do mean finding ways to make contact – face to face contact – in the places we live, in our towns, on our streets. Interrupt the conversations in the coffee shops to say Muslim is not a synonym for terrorist. Go by the local mosque or Islamic Center and figure out how to incarnate love to them. Don’t let fear be the last word.

Be a Love Dog.

I’m stealing the phrase from Rumi, a Muslim mystic and poet, because he said it as well as it can be said. Here’s the whole poem:

One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, “So!
I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.

“Why did you stop praising?” “Because
I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing you express
is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

The future of our faith does not depend on the fate of our nation. It does, however, depend on the integrity of our own incarnation of the love of Christ to those around us, particularly those labeled as “enemies,” whether the label is accurate or not. “God did not give us a spirit of fear,” Paul wrote to Timothy, “but of power and love, and of a sound mind.”

Let us use those gifts with purposed abandon in Jesus’ name.



Peace,
Milton

tin soldiers

As I remember we sang a lot
about tin soldiers even as
our friends and brothers
drew lots to see who would
wade through rice paddies
and not come home
or come home dead inside

I was thirteen the spring
of the Kent State shootings
tin soldiers and Nixon coming
go ahead and hate your neighbor
the image of the girl
with her arms wide open
sticks in my mind
as though I saw her myself

Forty years on I’m not sure
any of us healed or remembered
well but finally on our own
one bloody morning after
another, still looking for
peace but not hard enough
one tin soldier still rides away

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: walking with martin

As I drove to the Duke restaurant this afternoon, Talk of the Nation was my soundtrack, as is often the case. I happened to join the program just as Tavis Smiley began talking about his program MLK: A Call Beyond Conscience, which looks at Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” that he delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day of his assassination. Though Neal Conan timed the interview to coincide with the broadcast, that it falls in the middle of Holy Week seems worth noting as well, even though it was unintentional.

One of the most moving aspects of Jesus’ journey to the Cross is that he never responded to violence with violence, though he had opportunity over and over again. One of the things I find in the Empty Tomb is the promise that peace outlasts violence. Any time we choose violence as a solution -- out of frustration or pride or power or convenience – whether we’re talking Vietnam or Iraq or Guantanamo, we choose to trust a fallacy that will only lead to deeper conflict. We choose to be cynics. We choose to sell ourselves short.

King’s decision to speak out cost him deeply, but he knew the cost before he spoke. Listen to what he said:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

In the middle of all of the discussions and arguments that are going on about our growing national deficit and our need to cut back spending, the conversation stays stuck on cutting social programs, when slashing our defense budget hardly enters the discourse. We spend a ridiculous amount to prepare ourselves to be the biggest, baddest SOBs in the valley of the shadow; we have convinced ourselves that being the most violent will somehow make us safer. It hasn’t worked. We may think of ourselves as the most powerful, yet we live motivated primarily by fear. We have more weapons than anyone else in the world and we continue, year after year, to spend more on defense than anyone else in the world and we are not safer or saner or even more secure. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, we have proven ourselves insane, driven crazy by our fear while abandoning our faith.

At the risk of quoting King too much, I go back to the speech:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Imagine the explosion had their been twenty-four hour news channels in 1967.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

Imagine what could happen if we took these words to heart in 2010, even as we follow Jesus to the Cross.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: here in america

Here in America

we yell at each other as though
anger were a pre-existing condition,
and diatribe an anagram of democracy;
but screaming doesn’t make it so:
louder and truer are not synonyms --
the same goes for rich and smart.

Using poetry to talk politics
is like giving a homework assignment
to a gaggle of eighth graders:
you can talk, but most aren’t listening;
it takes, therefore, the tenacity of
a middle school teacher to try . . .

because both teacher and poet
can name names: immigration is
named Hugo and José and Miriam;
health care is called Stross and Fez:
the Word becomes Flesh
and the shouting cannot put it out.

Peace,
Milton

lost another one

It’s been close to ten years since I taught high school English, and yet this week I’ve had two occasions to go back to the Reading List and two occasions to mention Robert Burns. Three nights ago, I wrote about Of Mice and Men, thanks to Burns’ Night. Now, just three nights later, I am stopping to say thanks and farewell to J. D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, a tenth grade literature standard with its own reference to Burns in the discussion of the title line.

Holden: "You know that song, 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'?..."
Phoebe: "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!... It's a poem. By Robert Burns."

Phoebe is Holden’s little sister, and an awesome person at that. Their discussion leads to one of Holden’s most honest moments, when he talks about what kind of seed the misunderstood line had planted in his heart:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

I have loved the image since the first time I read it, and I think I love it more because its built on a misunderstanding. Here’s this kid in Manhattan who had no idea what a field of rye wheat looked like, much less why anybody would be coming through it, but he gets captured by the verb caught, the verb that wasn’t there, and all of a sudden what compels him most is saving the children from running to the end of their childhood. All he could imagine was catching them before they fell.

It seems fitting, then, that Ray Kinsella kidnapped Salinger in Shoeless Joe, the novel that was the basis for Field of Dreams (Salinger wouldn’t let himself be pictured in the movie, so the author became Terrance Mann). Catcher was the book that shaped Ray into the kind of man who would build it so they would come. He was the catcher in the corn, if you will.

The first class with whom I read the book was a tenth grade class in Winchester. Every class is a bit of a dice roll, when it comes to the group personality that developed, and this one began as a lovely collection of misfits, in a way, and became one of my favorite collections of students of any year I taught. There were Pat and Phil, two friends. Pat was extremely depressed and Phil was a big Labrador of a kid who loved life and cared for his friend. Pat got out of high school because Phil cared for and about him. Brigid was as free as free spirits come (still is, I’m sure) and dove into the book with as much enthusiasm as she had when she led the class in celebrating Rex Manning Day. And celebrate we did. I think all three of them, in one way or another, recognized parts of themselves in Holden. Me, too.

I don’t know what made Salinger become such a recluse, but it does create rather amazing irony that an almost hermit-like author could give birth to such a people magnet of a character. Salinger didn’t really want to meet or catch anyone coming through the rye, or even the door; to Holden, it was all that mattered.

If Howard Zinn worked to speak for the common people and tell their stories, then Salinger stumbled into speaking for American adolescence. I say stumbled, because I imagine that’s how he came upon Holden: he met a young man coming through the rye and decided to tell his story. Burns was the bridge between them.

Tonight, I am grateful for a man willing to listen long enough to hear a mistake underneath the lines of a poem, and to let that mistake give birth to a character that will now out live him for years and years to come, and continue to catch us before we fall over the cliff.

These are hard goodbyes to say to Zinn and Salinger. I never met either one, yet our chance meetings on the page caught me by the heart.

Thank you.

Peace,
Milton