lenten journal: thin skinned

It’s been almost a year since I stepped out of a professional kitchen to return to teaching. Though I still cook daily at home and for friends, I’m not doing quite the volume I once was. One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is in my hands. Because of the prep work – dicing onions, carrots, and celery for soups, for example – I built up two huge calluses on the index finger on my right hand because of the way I held up my knife. The calluses built up to protect me from pain. The skin became thick and tough in places where I once developed blisters, where the wear and pressure came everyday, where I had to get stronger to survive.

One year later, they are mostly gone.

One of my favorite Bill Mallonee songs from his Vigilantes of Love days is called “Skin” and is written about Vincent Van Gogh, who was too tender to take the pain of his life. The chorus sings,

now look if you're gonna come around here
and say those sort of things
you gotta take a few on the chin
you’re talking about love and all that stuff
you better bring your thickest skin

We have calluses; we become callous. Both words can be traced back to the same Latin word, which means “hard skinned” or “thick skinned.” Callus described my finger; callous we use to talk about what happens to our hearts and minds as we face life’s persistent pain. In her sermon on Sunday, Ginger quoted a line from the novel, The Help (which I’m next in line to read), whose story centers around race issues in a domestic context in the South. One of the narrators, an African-American housekeeper, talks about how the pain affects the younger ones “who ain’t built up a callus to it yet.” The callousness of the privileged called for calluses among the help.

The disappearance of my calluses seems like a worthy Lenten metaphor: let the protection dissolve, drop my guard, and feel those things to which I had allowed myself to become numb, or at least unfeeling, for whatever reason. The disciplines of silence and focus, of laying aside and attending, allow our vulnerability to flourish. The point of life is not so much to toughen up but to stay woundable, if we follow Jesus’ example. When Thomas was unsure they were telling him the truth about Jesus’ resurrection, he asked to see the wounds. The callous and endless news cycle in which we live calluses our hearts and minds to the pain around the world because the presentation is as perfunctory as it is painful. Images of Japan are sandwiched between sports scores and celebrity craziness as if they all held equal weight. Each cycle builds another layer of separation; the news becomes white noise that we no longer hear.

The intentional repetition of faithful ritual runs counter to eh callusing motion of much of life. Perhaps one way to understand the bread and the wine as Broken Body and Blood is the meal is an act of compassion, of opening the wounds, of de-callusing and de-callousing our hearts that we might feel the weight of the world as we come to terms with the gravity of grace.

“Awake, my soul,” sing Mumford and Sons, channeling the Psalmist:

in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
where you invest your love, you invest your life
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
where you invest your love, you invest your life
awake my soul

To be awake means to do the prep work everyday without developing the calluses. Nicodemus looked puzzled when Jesus told him he had to be born again. Jesus wasn’t talking in slogans any more than I think he was speaking of one experience. Following Christ means being born again and again and again. We need our hearts scrubbed clean of calluses, brought fresh into the world over and over, that we might see with open eyes and feel with tender skin all those who need to know they are really, really loved. We need to be born again and again to see the promise that lies in our lives where we have settled for routine or expediency, where we have been beaten down by failure, where we give in to despair. We need to be born again and again to pick one another up, to hope for one another, to feel the pricks and aches of what it means to love. I think my friend Bill will allow the paraphrase of his lyric because I know his heart:

you’re talking about love and all that stuff
you better bring your thinnest skin

Let us love the world unflinchingly, setting our hearts to be born again and again.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #22

John 3:1-17 was the lectionary passage today: Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus. One phrase in their conversation, which was translated in the King James as “born again,” has been a dividing qualifier of sorts in Christianity, unfortunately. Besides being born again (as in “one more time”), it can also be read as “born anew” (recreation with a new and different nature) and “born from above” (as in transcendent, or able to see with God’s eyes). I hesitate a little with all this explanation because a poem is a bit like a joke in the sense that explanation doesn’t necessarily help its impact, yet hearing the three ways the phrase can be read made me think what they all share in common is a sense of ongoing transformation.

As part of her sermon, Ginger quoted from a prayer by Oscar Romero, part of which says:

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

I’m grateful for the prayer for several reasons, not the least of which is that it serves as subtext for the closing couplet.

sunday sonnet #22

As a child I learned John 3:16:
that I needed to be “born again”
as if only one thing could it mean --
walk the aisle and turn away from sin.

“Again” is not the only option
in translation choices are a few;
others that are vying for adoption –
“born from above”, and “born anew.”

Semantics somehow shape the story –
the very way we see and hear it;
and when those options we ignore we
can miss the nuance of the Spirit.

Prophets of a future not our own,
we plant seeds that one day will be grown.

Peace,
Milton

nicodemus

When he first heard the words,
he was the first to hear them:
“You must be born again.”
He was old and the metaphor
muddled his mind: go back
into my mother’s womb--
at this age?

Jesus, however, was not about
to forsake his role as midwife.
There in the darkness, he called
the old man to think of something
other than dying, to let his heart
hear he was the one whom
God so loved.

When my grandfather died,
he was only five years older
than I am right now, maybe no
older than Nicodemus that night.
What kills us all in bits and pieces
is living as though love is earned;
birth is a gift.

The God who birthed the universe
has chosen to spend everyday
since in labor, in the pain of
birth and rebirth, a tenacious
expression of love, a ferocious
gift of grace we cannot deserve,
only receive.

Peace,
Milton