advent journal: living in black-and-white

Last night our little town of Durham lay in the path of a winter storm working it’s way up the East Coast and we got enough snow to make it feel real. Once the ground was covered, I walked out into the street to take a picture of our house with lights aglow. Because the first attempt let me know the shutter speed was too slow for me to hold the camera steady, I flipped open the flash and took another one, lucking into this wonderful shot of the illuminated house framed by the shining snowflakes caught in the flash of the moment.


I managed to get up and out of the house this morning to run some errands and end up at Guglhuph, one of our great local places, for lunch with Ginger and a Massachusetts friend who is moving to the area. I got there early so I would have some time to read, sat down with my coffee, only to find Raymo talking about photography and referring to Janet Malcolm, who says the serious photographer resists “the blandishments of color.”

“It is black-and-white photography,” she says, “that demands of the photographer close attention to the world of color, while color photography permits him to forget it” . . . The black-and-white medium is hard, says Malcolm, color easy. The former requires art, the latter doesn’t. (131)

Here’s the house, then, in black-and-white.


Many years ago, when David Gentiles was youth minister at Hunter’s Glen Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, he invited Billy Crockett and I to come for a weekend. Billy’s concert was the real draw; Dave knew we were working on songs for a new record and he invited me to come along and then he paid for a couple of extra nights in the hotel so we could do some writing. The song that came out of one all-night session was called “Song and Dance,” an unabashedly joyful look at life taking off of the scripture verses that talk about the trees clapping their hands in praise to God, and we wrote:

put away your woes
let ‘em go let ‘em go
they’re gonna be here tomorrow
tune your hearts
to the birds that fly
out on the edge of the deep blue sky
can you hear the music
through the circumstance
listen to the laughter
in the song and dance

I still love that song. It is a full-speed-ahead-arms-wide-open-Snoopy-dancing-in-the-leaves-run-and-jump-and-love-will-catch-you expression of hope and faith that still rings true for me. It’s also akin to my photograph in the snow last night, or driving through the variegated splendor of a New England autumn and taking a picture of the leaves. It’s going to be a great picture because you’re taking a picture of something great. But how do you find the spirit in the song when the color drains from the scene?

Grief is in black-and-white: the winter of the heart, a season of skeleton trees, long dark days, and bone-chilling cold. One note I read in the exchange between friends talking about David quoted C. S. Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief feels like fear.” And fear is the antithesis of love and faith and art. We know that well as a nation because we have allowed fear to be our driving force far too often since September 11, 2001, and that fear has robbed us of too much of our imagination, compassion, and hope. Though it may feel like fear, grief is not the same thing. Grief is loss and pain, and coming to terms with our limits and mortality. As the Sundays sing, “Here’s where the story ends.”

Yes and no. It is also where art and faith and love show their strength and offer some of their best music through the circumstance.

“The art of observing the night sky,” Raymo says, “is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination” (133). He goes on:

Stargazing, like black-and-white photography, demands close attention to color. There are no ravishing sunsets in the midnight sky, no deciduous riots of red and gold in the forest of the night. The snapshooter turns from the telescope in despair, but the artful observer will take the hint and let his imagination enrich the palette. William Henry Smyth fixed his telescope on the stars and saw “crocus,” “damson,” “sardonyx,” and “smalt.” This is the kind of imagination that labels paint chips . . . Of hints and traits we make our way. (135)

Faith and art and love are best expressed as a response, which also means in the context of relationships. The insidious thing about the fear that grips us as a nation is it is generalized: we are scared of big things, broad strokes, which makes us frightened of pretty much everything. Seeing a bogeyman under every bed is not imaginative, it is incapacitating. We respond, therefore, with force and violence, neither of which is artful, faithful, or loving.

The pilgrim who would find his way to the edge of the galaxies and to the beginning of time must forgo daylight’s easy color and launch himself upon the black-and-white sea of the night and in those huge spaces find stars the colors of damson, crocus, grape, and straw. (138)

Jesus, it seems to me, was born in black-and-white, bringing a trace of color into a world full of fear and grief. And the angels sang to the shepherds. As I grieve David’s death, I wait in the dark for a birth, for Christ to be born again this year. I can see the traces of color and the hints of hope in the those of us who knew and loved David – and also know and love each other – have worked to not let grief turn to fear, but are finding ways to share our love, to tighten the bonds, and to imagine we can hear the music, even through this circumstance; we look out into the darkness and we see the colors of “friendship,” “compassion,” and “trust.”

The very first song I wrote with Billy for a youth camp said

here’s another picture of life
all of us together with Christ
its an open heart
it’s a work of art
it’s the basic stuff
that makes another picture of love

It's still true -- even in black and white.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: night vision

If someone were driving by our church tonight, they might have mistaken us for Baptists: the parking lot was full on a Wednesday night. The choir was rehearsing, with orchestra, for their Vivaldi offering on Sunday, the bilingual English class was having their Christmas party in the Fellowship Hall, and a group of us were gathered in the Dowdy Room (not a descriptive adjective, but the name of someone) for our annual Blue Christmas service, designed to allow those who are grieving or struggling to have permission to feel something other than full of holiday cheer. It’s one of my favorite services of the year and, in every church where we have had the service, it’s always a small crowd.

I know there are more than ten people in our church who are struggling through the season. I also realize there are any number of reasons they might not have been there; I’m not making a judgment here. I just wish for more because of what the service means to those who do participate. There is wonder-working power in shared grief and pain. We hold each other up and we learn from each other. I see my pain differently when I am sharing the load with those around me.

Chet Raymo sends my looking skyward, once more:

If we want to understand the Milky Way, it is usually best to look to other galaxies. The Milky Way is the one galaxy we cannot see in its entirety because we are inside it. (114)

We certainly feel our pain up close, yet when it comes to making meaning out of our existence we must look out, look toward one another in order to gain some perspective. I learned about my depression by reading what others lived through and by talking to almost anyone willing to share their experience. Had I been left solely to stare out into my own darkness, I couldn’t have found my way through deepest midnight of those days. Still, it seems we have to train ourselves to need one another, even when we know we don’t want to be alone. Living intentionally means choosing to live in community until it becomes second nature.

One of my favorite parts of the service tonight was the closing reading, which accompanied the lighting of four candles. I offer it as a view into our little constellation of compassion.

One: The first candle we light to remember those whom we have loved and lost. We pause to remember their names, their faces, their voices, the memory that binds them to us in this season. (Light first candle.)
All: May God’s eternal love surround us as we hold them near.

One: This second candle we light is to redeem the path of loss: the loss of relationships, the loss of jobs, the loss of health, the loss of dreams. (Light second candle.) We pause to gather up the pain of the past and offer it to God, asking that from God’s hands we receive the gift of peace.
All: Refresh, restore, renew us, O God, and lead us into your future.

One: This third candle we light is to remember ourselves this Christmas time. We pause and remember the disbelief, the anger, the down times, the poignancy of reminiscing, the hugs and handshakes of family and friends, and all those who stood with us. (Light third candle.)
All: Let us remember that dawn defeats darkness.

One: This fourth candle is to remember our faith and the gift of hope which the Christmas story offers to us. (Light fourth candle.) We remember that God who shares our live promises us a place and a time of no more pain and suffering.
All: Let us remember the One who shows the way, who brings the truth, and bears the light.

And then we sang:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by;
Yet in the dark streets shineth the everlasting Light!
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

As we sat silently, the Spanish folks snacked down the hall and, in the sanctuary, the singers and strings practiced for their concert; then we all went out into the night, as the galaxies gazed and glistened.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: proximity matters

After a week with my in-laws, a week where I didn’t have to work and had time to cook dinner in the evenings, I’ve had two days of double shifts split between lunch at the Duke restaurants (making soups, mostly) and evening catering jobs, one on a grand scale (520 people) and the other, a family’s holiday party (eighty people and a big house, but small by comparison). Though the two events were for the same reason, I found tonight’s much easier, and more fun, because I was in someone’s house – in their kitchen – cooking for friends. As I put platters together to go to the table, I stood in the eye of the storm of affection and connection that swirled though the house, fueled by laughter, conversation, and a good amount of wine. The same dynamic may have been a part of the larger event, but I never saw any of the people I was feeding; that was the difference.

Proximity matters.

My most recent Raymo readings (before my double shifts) found him talking about the dark matter that makes up most of the universe, continuing to puzzle astronomers and most anyone else who thinks about it:

“Ninety-seven percent of the stuff in the universe,” I said,” is stuff about which we know absolutely nothing.” “It is probably the best stuff, too,” my friend replied. The turth is that astronomers do not as yet have any idea what this “stuff” is that holds the stars in their galactic orbits. (104)

He goes on to say the thinking about what may fill it has more to do with small than large.

Other forms of “dark stuff” have been suggested by the physicists who investigate the realm of the subatomic: hoards of neutrinos, each endowed with an imperceptible whiff of mass; or a gas of yet-to-be-discovered “gravitinos” or “photinos” or “axions,” particles a trillion times lighter than electrons, hypothetical entities that no one could have thought of them did not wander like a pilgrim among the modern kingdoms of Prester John, the worlds of infinitely large and infinitely small. (105)

The more I read Raymo (and watch things like TED talks), the more I begin to understand today’s scientists are people of imagination, mystery, and even faith. These folks are looking into the night sky and imagining – even describing and naming – magnificently minuscule particles that might fill up the darkness. L’Engle agrees, getting to the same place by another way:

Science, literature, art, theology: it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language. (209)

I drove to Chapel Hill this evening listening to stories about the climate change conference in Copenhagen, troops being deployed to Afghanistan from right here in North Carolina, among other things. Whatever the technological medium, I can be bounced around the world in a minute, challenged to take in more information than I know what to do with. The term “global village” may work as a metaphor as far as how information can be disseminated, but it breaks down when it comes to describing what holds us together. We are left feeling like the astronomers, wondering what is in the dark matter between us. Even in the smaller party this evening, I noticed those who talked to me as though I were a person and those who only saw the uniform and allowed me to become as invisible as a gravitino.

I came home tonight to news that a friend far away is in critical condition. I found messages from other mutual friends, all of us trying to find each other in the dark, counting on our connectedness to get us through the questions we have tonight and the explanations that will come tomorrow. I stood alone in a room filled with people tonight and came home to an empty house to feel close to my friends all because of our shared pain: we needed to find each other.

Compassion is nothing one feels with the intellect alone. Compassion is particular; it is never general. (L’Engle 193)

Proximity matters. Like love, we feel pain when it has a face, a name. Our names, the subatomic stuff of the universe, connect us and bind us together in the dark.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: happy to be here

In my reading earlier in the week, Madeleine L’Engle (on a page I can’t find now) talked about the necessary structure of life giving us freedom. She used poetry in general, and the sonnet in particular, to make her point: the boundaries of the form create the space to move freely. I’ve had my copy of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks in the CD player this week and he proves her point:

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

This morning, Raymo reminded me the structure that fosters creativity runs to the very core of our existence.

Blake was right to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. The silicon and oxygen in the grain of sand and the carbon in the flower could not have come into being unless the forces that hold the universe together had exactly the values they do. Adjust the strength of the electromagnetic force or the nuclear force but slightly, and you knock out of kilter the resonance in the carbon nucleus that allows three helium nuclei to come together in the cores of stars to form that element. Stop the synthesis of elements at helium, and never in a billion years of burning would a galaxy of stars produce enough silicon or oxygen to make a single grain of sand. No, the coin did not come down on its edge. The situation is more improbable than that. The coin was flipped into the air 10(to the fifteenth power) times, and it came down on its edge but once. If all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth were possible universes – that is, universes consistent with the laws of physics as we know them – and only one of those grains of sand were a universe that allowed for the existence of intelligent life, then that one grain of sand is the universe we inhabit. (93)

And in that universe, on a tiny planet revolving around an average star, I am one small being; one small, grateful being. Had the synthesis stopped at helium (notice the way I write as though I understand), we would not be here. Here, in the middle of the afternoon of the day that begins my fifty-fourth year, I’m aware that the journey that is my life, that has gone from Corpus Christi to Bulawayo to Lusaka to Nairobi to Accra to Houston to Dallas to Boston to Durham, with intermittent stops in Fort Worth along the way, is equally as full of structure and surprise as any planet or poem. The structure of Facebook allows for birthday greetings to come across the years, like light from distant stars, all arriving at the same time, a meteor shower of memories and affection. What a gift.

While I’m here typing at Beyu Caffé, Durham’s newest coffee shop and restaurant, Ginger is presiding at a funeral for one of our church members who passed away a couple of weeks ago. Her family had to come some distance, and so the service was set for today. I know that one way to look at life is to see each passing year, even each day, as a step closer to the end. What often comes with that is an aversion towards, if not a fear of, aging. I am growing older; my intention is also to be growing, period. These are not days to begin winding down, or settling in, but to be looking up and out, buoyed by all the gratitude I can muster. I turn to another poet, Guy Clark:

I got an ol’ blue shirt
And it suits me just fine
I like the way it feels
So I wear it all the time
I got an old guitar
It won’t ever stay in tune
I like the way it sounds
In a dark and empty room

I got an ol’ pair of boots
And they fit just right
I can work all day
And I can dance all night
I got an ol’ used car
And it runs just like a top
I get the feelin’ it ain’t
Ever gonna stop

Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall
Stuff that’s real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall

I got a pretty good friend
Who’s seen me at my worst
He can’t tell if I’m a blessing
Or a curse
But he always shows up
When the chips are down
That’s the kind of stuff
I like to be around

Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall
Stuff that’s real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall

I got a woman I love
She’s crazy and paints like God
She’s got a playground sense of justice
She won’t take odds
I got a tattoo with her name
Right through my soul
I think everything she touches
Turns to gold

Stuff that works, stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall
Stuff that’s real, stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall

Thank you.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: comprehending a metaphor

These are the words with which my day began:

Only a daredevil makes metaphors. To make a metaphor is to walk a tightrope, to be shot out of a cannon, to do aerial somersaults without a net. The trouble with metaphors is that you never know when they’ll let you down. You turn a somersault in mid-air, you reach for the trapeze – and suddenly it isn’t there.

Take the butterfly for instance. Surely the butterfly is a safe bet for a metaphor. The delicacy of beauty. The fragility of life . . . Even Shakespeare does it: “ . . . for men, like butterflies, show not their mealy wings but to summer.” And there you go, sailing through the air, the daring young man on the flying metaphor, when . . .

Along comes the mourning cloak butterfly. (Raymo 77)

I know. I hadn’t heard of it either. But the mourning cloak butterfly, it turns out is one tough little creature, hibernating through the New England winter, among others, and showing up at the first sign of any kind of warmth (using that term loosely). I was one of those who thought of butterflies as poster children for all things beautiful and fleeting (except for Monarchs, maybe), until I read Raymo.

And there goes the metaphor. Beauty is fragile? Life is fleeting? Not at all. Beauty, it turns out, is tough, and life is well nigh impossible to extinguish. The mourning cloak proves it . . . It is an old tattoo ringing in the ears of philosophers and poets, physicists and mystics: the power of the mourning cloak, the resilience of its beauty, what makes it tough, what makes the flame of elegance impossible to extinguish, is something that cannot be seen. (78,80)

Before I finished my first cup of coffee, my mind was off and running to connect the dots. First, an old favorite from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

And then on to a passage I read from L’Engle last night that quoted the very verse from John that Raymo echoed twice:

St. John said, “And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it (I need the double meaning of the word comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take place. (183)

One of my working metaphors for faith is art: living faithfully is living artistically, imaginatively (as in image of God). Art is prophetic, compassionate, even incarnational; so is faith. The artist doesn’t set out to make sense as much as make meaning, to find ways to connect whatever he or she can, to move others to respond and relate. Art is both disquieting and cohesive. Art is the fire that burns without consuming; so is faith. The opposite of art is fear, destruction. The heart of art is love, imagination.

So where does the metaphor break down?

I heard a clip from President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and went to read the whole thing. Here is the transcript of what I heard:

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I understand he was making a speech in a world hell bent on beating each other up, and as president of a nation that tends to believe that a realistic worldview is synonymous with arming ourselves to the teeth. I realize he felt he had political realities to take into account. And I think he showed that my metaphor represents a minority opinion. We allow ourselves to believe force answers fear, rather than art, and peace is not as much a viable option as it is a Quixotic goal. The limits of reason are not the limits of either faith or art.

They never were.

We are preparing our hearts for Christ to be born again in our time and our culture. The first time the story was told, the baby was born into poverty and grew up on the margins of society. He grew up, surrounding himself with people of no power or means and taught them, expecting they would keep on going. And then the ones with the power – those who saw the world realistically – killed him. His death was not the last word because of force or power, but because of love, imagination, and mystery: because of art: faith.

All the just wars we can wage will never resurrect anything. Onward Christian soldiers is a metaphor that fell apart long ago. Go out and stand in the dark, under the stars. Get up early and watch the sunrise (I’m not going to, but you do). Go out and find a mourning coat butterfly. Listen to songs like this one:

I woke up this morning
and none of the news was good
death machines were rumbling
cross the ground where Jesus stood
and the man on my TV told me
it had always been that way
and there’s nothing anyone could do or say
and I almost listened to him
yeah, I almost lost my mind
then I regained my senses again
looked into my heart to find
I believe that one fine day
all the children of Abraham
will lay down their swords
forever in Jerusalem

or this one:

and in despair I bowed my head
there is no peace on earth, I said
for hate is strong and mocks the song
of peace on earth goodwill to men

then rang the bells both loud and deep
God is not dead nor doth he sleep
the wrong shall fail the right prevail
with peace on earth goodwill to men

And then let us say again, together, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it.”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a circle of friends

Time is a living thing.

We talk about it as something that ticks by or slips away, something we make or take or keep or lose, but it is a force, a dimension, an entity on its own terms. Though we often talk about telling time, we do better to listen to what it is saying, or revealing. Chet Raymo talks about looking out into the night sky as a venture back in time, the light in the sky coming from different stars and galaxies, all different light years away. What we see in the present moment, standing underneath Orion, are layers of time all arriving at once; tonight I am found anew by words from a few old friends.

Paging through an old book, particularly one I’ve read several times before, is much the same experience. Madeleine L’Engle published A Circle of Quiet in 1972; she was past fifty and I was closing in on sixteen and preparing to move back to the States for good, leaving Africa behind. I finished high school, college, seminary, chaplaincy, and was working as a youth minister when, Blair, a friend from Baylor Hospital days gave me the book for Christmas. I was thirty-two. Seeing the name written on the inside cover took me back to conversations long since buried under all that collects in life like the dust that buries ancient civilizations. I can tell from my margin notes that I’ve been though the book at least three times, not counting this Advent. Some of the comments I can calendar easier than others. I have names written in the margins next to lines that remind me of someone, or something someone said. Others are distinguishable because of the different colors of ink.

This time around, I’m reading the book at about the same age that Madeleine wrote it and I picture her being my age for the first time in our literary friendship. I am getting to know her when she was my age. And I smiled when I read this paragraph:

Jung disagreed with Freud that the decisive period in our lives is the first years. Instead, Jung felt that the decisive period is that in which my husband and I are now, the period of our middle years, when we have passed through childhood with its dependency on our parents; when we’ve weathered the storms of adolescence and the first probings into the ultimate questions; when we’ve gone through early adulthood with its problems of career and marriage and bringing up our babies; and for the first time in our lives find ourselves alone before the crucial problem of ho, after all these years, we are. All the protective covering of the first three stages is gone, and we are suddenly alone with ourselves and have to look directly at the great and unique problem of the meaning of our own particular existence in this particular universe. (113)

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “hope for growing old.”

In certain moments, the years feel as though they flow by like a river; in others, they stack up like altar stones. Either way, the more of them I live through, the more I find myself thankful to be here, and to be. Madeleine died a little over two years ago. My father-in-law is here, but disappearing in his Alzheimer’s. I went to Texas several weeks back because I thought my mother was not going to recover from surgery (she’s still here and doing fine). I am a couple of days away from turning fifty-three, perhaps the same way a farmer turns the soil in preparation for planting. I suppose I could think of turning, as in turning a car down a different road, or the way a horse turns toward the clubhouse; then there’s turning, as in repentance, and the turning of the leaves, blazing their way to death. Maybe all of those.

Everything in the universe shares the same arc of being, if you will, moving from where we entered the story to where we exit, stage left. We are both essential and temporary. At the bottom of Page 99, Madeleine wrote:

Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take ourselves lightly. If every hair of my head is counted, then in the very scheme of the cosmos I matter; I am created by a power who cares about the sparrow, and the rabbit in the snare, and the people in the crowded streets; who calls the stars by name. And you. And me.

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “Living with a sense of appropriate significance.”

Fifteen years after that note, my friend Burt called one day and asked me to write a poem about the value of daily work for worship at his church, and I sent him this.

daily work

In the crush of afternoon traffic I sit
in an unending queue of cars, staring
at the stoplight; from my driver’s seat
I can see the beckoning billboard:
“Come visit the New Planetarium
You Tiny Insignificant Speck in the Universe.”

When the signal changes, I cross the bridge
over river and railroad yard, turn left
past the donut shop, and park in front
of my house. Only my schnauzers notice
because they have been home alone.

I have been hard at work in my daily orbit,
but I stopped no wars, saved no lives,
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning;
today would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart:
to have some angel show me I matter.

As I walk the puppies down to the river,
I wonder how many times have I come to the water
hoping to hear, “You are my beloved child.”
Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit,
“I am not the one you were looking for.”

I stand in the stream of my existence,
between the banks of blessing and despair,
convinced that only messiahs matter,
that I have been called to change the world
and I have not done my job.

Yet, if I stack up the details of my life
like stones for an altar, I see I am
one In the line of humanity,
in the river of love: I am a speck,
in God’s eyes, of some significance:
so say, also, the schnauzers
every time I come home.

However the years stack up, I have spent more days than I can count going to the river or the altar or out under the stars to be reminded (convinced?) that I matter, even as I know I am only passing through. I lean into Madeleine one more time:

So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that this will never be simply chronological aging – which is a nuisance and frequently a bore -- the old ‘bod’ at over half a century has had hard use; it won’t take what it did a few years ago – but that I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously – to be, in fact, a true adult. (132)

And one more twenty-year old margin note, quoting another friend, Reed: “We stop doing things that prepare us way too early.”

For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe.

advent journal: towards a fascinated faith

I first found Chet Raymo in the Science section of the Boston Globe where he wrote a weekly column. I was neither an ornithologist nor an astronomer, but he talked of birds and stars in a way that fed both my curiosity and my faith: he made me think I could understand what he was talking about and share his sense of wonder. The first time I read The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage, I discovered we shared a faith background, though his was more history and mine present tense. He described his journey using a bird as his metaphor:

The upland plover is a shy bird. It is the color of dry grass. In the rare event that one I flushed, it takes to air with a soft, bubbling whistle . . . If the poet wanted an image for the absconded God, he could have found none better than the upland plover.

I can’t say exactly when it was that the God of my youth took to the upland plains. He was not driven from my soul. His flight was no fault of my teachers’. My lapse from faith occurred not long after graduation from college, at the end of a period of intense belief during which His face seemed palpably near . . . And sacred plovers leapt from every page, took to wings in coveys, and made a tumult with their wings that drowned the thin voice of doubt. Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers.” The plover was our hope. The plover was Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Then one day I woke up and the plover was gone . . . I turned to my science books and got on with the business of life. (55-56)

One of the songs that makes the rounds this time of year begins with the little lamb aasking the shepherd, “Do you hear what I hear?” I learned how to look at the night sky with a greater sense of wonder because of Raymo’s Science Musings and yet, he doesn’t see what I see anymore. The bird has flown, he says, and so he moved on. It doesn’t surprise me that he has found his new church, if you will, among scientists because scientists are the explorers of our age. We have circumnavigated the world time and again, but we are learning about particles smaller than we ever imagined, finding stars and quasars and black holes farther away than we ever dreamed we would be able to see, and dimensions to our existence far beyond the three we were taught in school. The legacy of the psalmist (“When I gaze into the night sky and see the wonders of your hands . . .”) has been passed beyond the church walls, and we are the lesser for it.

Shane Claiborne wrote an article for Esquire magazine (HT to Jan for pointing it out, since Esquire is not one of my regular reads) and said something that connects here, I think:

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

In 1972, Madeleine L’Engle was struggling with being told that identifying as a Christian would turn some people off. She responded:

I wouldn’t mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is. I wouldn’t mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities. I wouldn’t mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word “Christian” means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of “how those Christians love one another”? (98)

How did we become the keeps of the status quo, the defenders of truth, the rational ones determined to be relevant? Why are we not primarily consumed by and with the mystery and fascination of the Gospel story? What happened to lost in wonder, love, and praise?

We were breathed (laughed) into being, along with quarks and quasars, by our over-the-top-everything-matters-hey-look-what-I-can-do-I-love-you-with-all-my-heart-and-everyone-else-too-let’s-go-make-more-stars-and-stuff-all-ye-all-ye-oxen-free-crazy-go-nuts kind of God. Yet we talk about God as though it’s all business, and serious business at that. We live and worship as though our primary task is to explain God to the world, rather than introduce the One Who is Love to everyone we can and see what happens. Our God may be an awesome God, but our God is not rational. Our God is Love.

The Incarnation doesn’t make sense. Why God would choose to become human, and partake in the entire human experience from birth on, is in itself an outrageous act of redemption. Being fully human is a good thing. It matters; we matter because God loves us from the word go and never, never stops. That Unbridled Love let loose in the world means a peasant girl gives birth to the Messiah in a barn, poor shepherds hear angel choirs, rich foreigners chase stars across the sands, and there are mores stories than we can tell about those who healed and helped, even saved. We, as Christians, are not called to explain any of it, but to become carriers. of redemption, infected with the same irrational exuberance that lives in the heart of God.

A healthy church has less to do with making sure the theology is right than it does with being right with each other. If we chose to redeem our time together rather than make demands, we might see God differently and the story as well. Though I love Raymo’s imagery, I don’t see God as a shy bird hiding in the high places. The story we are telling in these days says just the opposite:

Love divine, all loves excelling
Joy of heaven to earth come down

Why, then, are we not out under the stars with the shepherds and the scientists asking, “Do you see what I see?” Oh, that we might live out a fascinated faith together.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a sense of humor

Some time during the evening on Saturday I first noticed the little wisp that floated into my vision. It looks like a pen and ink drawing of a cloud, or a thin line of black smoke, except it has a certain bounce to it, based on my blinking, that makes it do a little dance and float down and then back up to the top of the frame. I learned today at the eye doctor that my smoky little dancer is called an eye floater, and that it’s probably here to stay. What looks like it is hanging out in front of me is actually something going on inside my eyeball, in the vitreous humor, and is part of growing older – at least for me. The humor in my sight is a bit twisted, it seems.

When we were in Texas for my mother’s surgery a couple of months ago, a friend came by to see her. He is a cellular biologist, which is actually a bit of a misnomer because he is way inside the cell dealing with particles smaller than I even know how to imagine. I asked what he was studying now and he told us they had just gotten a new microscope that allowed them to see exponentially deeper into the cell and its subparticles, and he began to tell us how these submicroscopic parts of us open up related to our emotions. When we feel good, they are open to receive nutrients; when we are angry or sad, they close. Then he said something even more interesting: “They open up the most when we laugh.”

Raymo tells of an Mediterranean creation myth that says God brought everything into being with seven laughs: Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha. (46) As he goes on to speak with his continuing sense of wonder about the universe, he says,

God’s Hha Hha Hha was no snicker, but a roaring belly laugh. (50)

I love the idea of all creation bursting forth in a fit of divine laugher. I picture everything from the giggles that made monkeys, the chortles that produced platypuses, and the guffaws that gave us hippos. By the time God got to humans, I picture the kind of laughter that makes your sides hurt and your nose run. I love the idea, and it’s hard to hear on a day like today. My in-laws are visiting this week, which means we are up close and personal with my father-in-law’s continuing descent into Alzheimer’s. This wonderful, gentle man who turned seventy-nine yesterday and has always carried a sparkle in his eye that gave us a glimpse of God’s creative laughter looks empty now. His eyes are vacant; he is in the room and he is not here. His very existence is being insidiously erased while we watch and our hearts are broken. The comfort we find is in watching our Schnauzers gather around him with a love that finds him when we cannot; he sits and pets them and they love him back, for which we are grateful, even as we are exhausted by the prospect of what is yet to come. As we prepare for Christ to be born again, we are also trying to prepare for the grief that is yet to come. It’s hard to hold wonder and weary together.

Yet what are the options?

Madeleine L’Engle tells of being asked at a workshop for high school students, “Do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?” She answered, “I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.” (63) She continued to talk to the students about the three choices we had about how we live our lives. We can live as though the whole thing is a cosmic accident: a bad joke. We can live as though Someone started the whole thing but chose to remain aloof. Then she articulated her choice:

Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live. (64)

My mind moves to melody in times like these, to those words put to music that find a way to carry the strains of laughter that endure across the years like starlight from distant galaxies just now bringing light to our darkness. Richard Thompson wrote

this old house is falling down around my ears
I’m drowning in a fountain of my tears
when all my will is gone you hold me sway
I need you at the dimming of the day

And this from Kris Kristofferson:

there’s a song in my soul for the sun going down
when it dies at the end of the day
with a sadness descending as soft as the sound
of the light that was slipping away

the heavens above me seem empty and gray
as dreams that won’t ever come true
then the star spangled glory of love fills the sky
and my heart with the wonder of you

As Christmas draws closer, we will begin to speak more of shepherds and stars, weary and wonder, if you will, walking hand in hand to the manger: the tired tenders of someone else’s sheep lost in wonder at the angel band.

and ye beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along the winding way
with painful steps and slow
look now for glad and golden hours
come quickly on the wing
o rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing

Christmas will come this year without bringing answers of what the days hold for our family and they will also come with reminders that God has never stopped laughing or loving. God didn’t inflict Reuben with Alzheimer’s to teach us a lesson or to prove a point. God didn’t set things in motion and then sit back to see how we deal with it. God is with us. In the midst of our pain, Love has taken up residence to show us the Laughter that brought the universe into being runs deep beyond our sorrows, deep into our beings, feeding our cells and our souls.

for the wonders that surround us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: little lives

Each day is a little life, and each life is rounded with a little dark. (Chet Raymo, 41)

little lives

I was born this morning
into a world of possibilities
wrapped, first, in the wonder
of a BLT and egg sandwich
(yes, God is good)
and the kind of conversation
among friends that defines
what friends are to one
another: the ones who stay

I grew into an afternoon
of what could be seasoned
with what I signed up for
and then, as the day died
I worked myself into the
the dimming of the day
and the darkness carried
me out into the night
life to hear music

The day may have died,
but the night had not.
I stood in a room filled with
the road company for Rent
and then found my way
to the restaurant to finish
the day among friends,
which is the way all little
lives should come to a close

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what's in a name

I had a couple of errands to run before I went to work this morning, both related to my in-laws coming to visit this coming week. The first was to take our recliner to get the springs on the bottom reattached; for whatever reason, they had chosen to let go over the past couple of months. The second was to drop off my car at the mechanics for an oil change and check up so Ginger could drive it to Birmingham tomorrow (and back on Sunday) with her parents and Gracie, our long-distance Schnauzer, in tow.

Melton’s Garage is a couple of blocks from our house. When I went inside to give the key, the woman behind the counter asked my name. “It’s a hyphenated name,” I began (as I have learned I need to do), “Brasher-Cunningham.” She began to write as I spelled the name out, except when I said, “Hyphen,” she put an apostrophe. I chose not to correct her. When I said my first name, Mr. Melton, who was sitting next to the counter in a motorized cart, said, “Milton, Melton – it’s almost the same,” and he smiled. Big. I thought about what I had taken with me from my morning reading as I left the house, which was Madeleine L’Engle talking about teaching and getting to know her students by name.

A signature; a name; the very being of the person you talk to, the child you teach, is at stake. (15)

I am the third person in my family to be named Milton, following my grandfather, whom I never met, and my father. I was in college before I met someone other than my relatives named Milton. I never had to share the name in school, so it felt both odd and special to me, which, in turn, made me feel a little odd and special. With a name like Milton, it’s not as though I could turn out to be a normal kid. I needed to be up to something.

When we came to the States on furlough, I learned about Milton Berle and Milton the Monster; in college, one of our star football players was named Milton, but he went by Scooter instead. As someone born into Baptist life and a white family, I have noticed most of the other Miltons I have encountered have either been African-American or Jewish. Because the name was so tied to and limited within my family, it brought with it the weight of succession. As the oldest child and the namesake, part of who it helped me become is someone who is never quite sure he has measured up, and yet feels the freedom to risk rather easily. My name has shaped my self-image.

Milton. That’s me.

And who, exactly, am I? I am a group project, that’s for sure – or at least that’s a place to start. I am a fearless cook because, from the earliest time I showed interest in cooking, my mother would say, “You watched me do this the other day; you do it this time.” I don’t know how many times I have heard her say, “If you can read a recipe, you can cook.” I believed her, so the statement has proven to be true. I have an aversion to math because of Ms. Gibbs, my eleventh grade Algebra II teacher. I remember the day I raised my hand and asked a question. I don’t remember the question, but I do remember her response: “I don’t have time for stupid questions.” From that day on, even though I placed out of math on my ACT, I have been convinced I don’t know how to do it well.

Chet Raymo shared this fascinating bit of information:

The Greeks believed that the eye had a double role in vision. They believed that a pale light went out from the eye to the world and returned again to the eye as a traveler returns bearing gifts.

In similar fashion, we learn to “see” ourselves by bouncing our self-images off of those around us, like a dolphin with sonar waves, to see what kind of response we get. Sometime, we get false readings. Sometimes we see new things. Either way, the circle – faint light sent out to see, and then returning full of images – continues; this is how we grow and learn, how we become more fully ourselves, regardless of age.

Last night in the kitchen at Duke, Abel, my favorite coworker, asked me in his lilting Guatemalan accent, “Do you like to read?” When I said, yes, he asked what kind of books I liked. I have to admit, I flinched a bit with my answer. I answered that I read novels, which is true, but I didn’t say anything about theology or L’Engle and Raymo. I returned the question and he said, “I like books that talk about life. I am reading Rick Warren and he asks a great question: what is my place in this world?”

One of the most amazing things about the Incarnation is that Jesus didn’t show up fully formed. He was born into being, like every other human, and left at the mercy of parents and relatives and teachers and random passers-by to be shown who he was, and who he could become. Sure, Mary and Joseph had some parental prompting, at least in the beginning, but I think about Jesus returning to Nazareth only to learn a prophet does better with folks who didn’t watch him grow up and I imagine his childhood was not easy for any of them. My brother used to talk about “the paradox of grace,” using Mary as an example. “Blessed are you among women,” said the angel (talk about shaping a self-image); “now let me tell you what you’re in for.”

when I find myself in times of trouble
mother Mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom
“let it be”

and in my hour of darkness,
she is standing right in front of me
speaking words of wisdom
“let it be”

Jesus healed fearlessly, the way I learned to cook, and he never went back to Nazareth, much like I never went back to Algebra after eleventh grade. The faint light from his eyes brought back an image of one acquainted with grief and full of love and grace. I have to wonder if, perhaps, it started with him asking Joseph one day, “How did I get my name?”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nothing new

Four days on, my Advent mornings are beginning to find a pattern, a sort of sameness I hope will focus my mind and heart for the day to give me something to say when I come home. After all, as John Prine so beautifully put it, how the hell can a person go to work every morning and have nothing to say? Wednesday nights, as a rule, put that lyric to the test for me because I have lived through four of five ten hour shifts and have little energy beyond what it takes to watch Glee and think about how much my feet hurt. Yet, it seems, taking time to plant small seeds in the morning bear fruit beyond exhaustion in the evening.

I’m still reading Raymo, and I also returned to one of my favorite L’Engle books, A Circle of Quiet. Raymo introduced me to John Burroughs, a writer and naturalist at turn of the century preceding the one we’ve lived through. Chet quoted him in a couple places and both jumped out of their contexts and spoke to me in ways Raymo had not imagined.

One secret of success in observing nature is a capacity to take a hint. (28)

Then I turned the page.

To know is not all, it is only half. To love is the other half. (29)

Needless to say, I spent the day wondering about John Burroughs, the hints he had taken, and what and whom he knew and loved. After Ginger, Cherry, and I watched Glee, I let Google help me find him and found yet another sentence to ponder:

To learn something new, take the path you took yesterday.

I looked back at the notes I scrawled this morning in my notebook to find a resonant word from Madeleine:

Creativity is an act of discovery. (12)

The other part of my burgeoning routine in the evening is picking music. Our house is a bit of a bus station this holiday season, with people coming and going, and what we call our studio/office is actually the guest room, so I’m writing from the dining room table, which means I’m writing in traffic. My answer is to put on my headphones and choose my own soundtrack, and I find myself going to back to songs full of stories and history for me, songs that feel as though they are sung by friends: songs that I know by heart. Tonight, I turned to Shawn Colvin’s Cover Girl, to hear her sing David Byrne’s wonderful song, “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”,

hi yo I’ve got plenty of time
hi yo you’ve got the light in your eyes
and you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
never for money always for love
cover up and say goodnight’
say goodnight

The well-worn paths I find in the music open my heart and mind to discovery, to hints of hope in the middle of exhaustion, to the willingness to walk the Advent road once again to see what I can see. In a world obsessed with new, we are called to tell the old, old story that we might discover we are hungering and thirsting to hear it. It’s the Communion scene at the end of Places in the Heart, Joni Mitchell’s achingly beautiful background vocals on “Long Ago and Far Away,” the black folks standing up in the upstairs gallery when Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom, and Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaiming, “I have a dream,” all rolled into one and, well, more. Life, at it’s best, is about walking the same roads over and over, with eyes and ears wide open as windows to the heart.

Familiarity has its dangers, however. I drive the same way to work every morning and find it far to easy to let my mind run ahead to what has to be done and not see a thing between the house and the parking lot. Familiar hymns show up in worship and we sing them out of muscle memory without taking time to let the poetry pull us toward discovery on the well-beaten path of melody. Last Saturday night, my friend Terry (aka The Best Harmonica Player I Know) and I played and sang our way through an old hymnal with Ginger, Cherry, Eloise, and Jay. All of us, except Terry, grew up Southern Baptist, which means we grew up singing. The familiarity of the hymns, particularly those used for the altar call, had left some scars, and yet, we also found those songs had found new life when they showed up in new places. I remember sitting in the pew in Winchester when we sang “Just As I Am” as the hymn following the time of Confession, not at the end of the service.

just as I am though tossed about
with many a conflict many a doubt
fightings within and fears without
o lamb of God I come

These are the days when we tell the same story again, and again. We talk of Mary and Joseph as though we know them. For many, these will be weeks marked by the return of bath-robed shepherds bringing their herds down the center aisle, of long-standing traditions, of pageants and bazaars and dinners. We know the story. Burroughs reminds us that’s only the half of it. Love is the other half. Love is what pulls us into the details and leads us into discovery. Love is what turns familiarity into ritual, into meaningful and creative repetition.

Tell the good news: this Advent is nothing new; who knows what we’ll discover.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: walking after midnight

When I got home from work Sunday night, Ginger and I took our two Schnauzers, Lola and Ella, for a walk around the neighborhood. We have to go late because Lola is not much of a people person and does better on dark and quiet streets. More nights than not, I sing a little Patsy Cline as we head out: “I’m going walkin’ after midnight” The four of us have a rather settled path, walking down to the end of our street (past Harper Lee’s house – yes, there really is a kid on our street named Harper Lee), turning in front of the North Carolina School for Science and Math, then back down Ninth Street, past the house where I think Boo Radley lives and then the fire station, then left on Englewood, and left again on Iredell and back home. As we passed Boo’s house, Ginger said, “Look,” and there was Orion, hunting over the rooftops.

I won’t even claim to be an amateur astronomer, but I can recognize a couple of constellations. I can find Cassiopeia (thanks to two John Cusak movies, The Sure Thing, first, and then Serendipity), and I know Orion, the Hunter. Almost two decades in New England meant winter was coming when he began to appear in the night sky, his belt shining through even the city lights. This morning, in my pre-kitchen reading, Chet Raymo, a real astronomer, gave me more to ponder:

Giant Orion: boaster, beast-slayer, storm-bringer. Muscle-bulging constellation of the lights. No other part of the night sky visible to northern observers contains more brilliant stars. Here is diamond Rigel, the giant’s forward foot, and ruby Betelgeuse, in the shoulder of the raised arm. Here are glittering Saiph and Bellatrix, the other foot and other shoulder, and Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the white pearls of the hunter’s belt. Bellatrix is the closest of these stars, but at 470 light-years away it is a hundred times more distant than our nearest stellar neighbors. Saiph is 2000 light-years away. These are the giants of the Galaxy, stars ten thousand times brighter than our sun, the largest and most intrinsically luminous stars of the night. (14)

I was taught to look at the stars that we call Orion as a group gathered together in wonder and imagination. I have learned that what I see is far from cohesive. The light I saw coming from Saiph Sunday night was more than fifteen hundred light years older than that coming from Bellatrix, even though I took it all in at once. Betelgeuse is five hundred light years away; Raymo says an “average-sized star” like our sun would not even be visible to the eye from that distance. (Just think of the light we are not seeing as we gaze into the night sky.) He goes into more detail about the information astronomers are learning from new telescope images that

have only recently arrived on our doorstep to tell us that Betelgeuse is a distended giant star, a sphere of hydrogen and helium 400 million miles in deameter, swelling with a violence that consumes planets and lights up dusky corners of the Galaxy. Its surface roils like a sea in a storm, and a froth of fire is flung ten million miles into space. In Earth’s sky this monstrous object is reduced to a point of light in Orion’s shoulder. The stars are good at hiding their true natures. They have a trick up their sleeve, and that trick is distance. (16-17)

I read that last sentence and I couldn’t help but begin to hear Julie Gold’s words (sung in my head by Nanci Griffith):

from a distance the earth looks blue and green
and the snow-capped mountains white

It’s the next verse that gets me, however.

from a distance we are instruments
marching in a common band
playing songs of home, playing songs of peace
they're the songs of every man

And then she sings,

God is watching us, God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance

The truth at the heart of this season speaks otherwise. The Love as old and bright as the most ancient of stars is racing across galaxies to find us. “The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light,” Isaiah said, and John followed, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.” Distance is not the trick in the Incarnation, nor is the Coming Child something Other than the true nature of God. The trick is beyond the distance, in the drawing near. The Light and Love of God are landing among us, not with meteoric force, but quietly and subversively, in a manger, in the darkness on the edge of town.

“You shall call him ‘Emmanuel,’” said the Angel, “which means, ‘God With Us.’”

Scout’s fear disappeared when Boo Radley got close enough to save her life and she saw him, as we say, in new light. The starshine from Saiph, Orion’s back foot, that found us on the sidewalk Sunday night was old light as old as Christmas itself, having traveled over two millennia to find us. And in that light, Patsy Cline sounds like she’s singing an Advent hymn of her own:

I go out walkin'
after midnight
out in the starlight
just hoping you may be
somewhere walkin'
after midnight
searching for me

Even Lola knows you have to go out in the dark if you want to see the stars.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: how silently, how silently

I woke up this morning knowing it was going to be a busy day. (It appears waking up is oging to be a theme this season.) Mondays are rebuilding days at the Duke restaurant, meaning we pretty much have to make all things new, as far as our menu is concerned. From the time I get there at eleven until the dinner service begins at five, I keep a steady beat, working my way down a very long prep list. Though I knew my day would not have any significant breaks, I still put a couple of books in my bag, with it being Advent and all, because I always look for a couple of travelers for the journey this year. They rode to work with me and back home again before I was able to give them any attention; I was glad to have them with me nevertheless.

I did have something on my mind other than cooking, however. In L’Engle’s discussion of quanta last night there was something I didn’t quote, or quoted partially that kept coming back to me.

And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech;

there is neither speech nor language; but their voices are heard among them,

sings the psalmist.

She is quoting Psalm 19, paraphrased this way by Eugene Peterson:

God's glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.
Madame Day holds classes every morning,
Professor Night lectures each evening.

Their words aren't heard,
their voices aren't recorded,
But their silence fills the earth:
unspoken truth is spoken everywhere.

Wait – the choir extolling the sacredness of silence is not yet fully gathered.

I got home tonight and opened one of the books that had spent the day with me, Chet Raymo’s The Soul of the Night, to find him speaking of the silence of the stars. Raymo wrote a column for the Boston Globe for years that often spoke to me, even though it was in the Science section, because he looked at the universe with such a sense of wonder. Here’s what I read tonight:

As a student, I can across a book by Max Picard called The World of Silence. The book offered an insight that seems more valuable to me now than it did then. Silence, says Picard, is the source from which language springs, and to slience language must constantly return to be recreated. Only in relation to silence does sound have significance. It is for this silence, so treasured by Picard, that I turn to the marsh near Queset Brook in November. It is for this silence that I turn to the stars, to the ponderous inaudible turning of the galaxies, to the clanging of God’s great bell in the vacuum. The silence of the stars is the silence of creation and re-creation. It is the silence of that which cannot be named. (8)

I wonder. Another Bostonian, Phillips Brooks, came pretty close to naming it in one of my favorite carols:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in

When Elijah ran and hid because he was scared of Jezebel, God found him and told him to go up on the mountain and wait. The wind came, then the earthquake, and then fire – all noisy signs, but, the scripture says, God was in none of them. Then came, as the footnote in the RSV says, “a thin silence.” And God was there, how silently once more.

Getting ready for dinner is a noisy, frantic affair; getting ready for Jesus, however, is not. Or so it appears. And this is where I come clean about not being so comfortable with silence. I’m not very good at being still and knowing God is God. Yet the cloud of witnesses gathering round me today are calling me to take stock of the spaces between the stars, the minute movements of the quanta, and listen to the sound of silence, a deep abiding call to re-creation and renewal.

We watched Elf again the other night – second time this year already. During the scene where Buddy bounces up into Santa’s sleigh as it is trying to take off, a jack in the box pops up and startles him. As many times as we have seen the movie, none of us had ever noticed that detail before. It seems to me the call to silence is a chance for me to find something new in the story, an opportunity to be caught by surprise in all to familiar territory. Ginger and I often speak of the difference between ritual and habit. The latter is something one does over and over without thinking, or because it is how it is always done. The former is meaningful and intentional repetition, embracing the paradox that mystery resides in words and deeds we know by heart.

And that mystery seeps to the surface when we are silent like the stars.

Peace,
Milton