Lesley Duncan’s lyrics came back to find me today (I know the song because of Elton John’s cover on his Tumbleweed Connection record) partly because I went back to that disc since it is Elton’s birthday and mostly because of the way it felt to be a part of the bluegrass service we had today. (I wrote a little about it here.) Several of the songs were ones I sang at my father-in-law Reuben’s funeral because they were songs he loved; singing them today made the grief palpable in a way it had not been for awhile. We closed our service with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which, after today’s service, I took to be a rhetorical question.
question(s)
why do I feel more at home here
when I sing this world is not my home?
why does singing about heaven
make me want to plant trees?
why don’t the gospels talk
about what Jesus liked to sing?
our lives go on as endless song . . .
how can I keep from singing?
I spent the day packing boxes, loading them into the U-Haul, and unpacking them in their new location. In this year when I’m not going to have to move to a new house, my school decided to move to a new building. We’ve anticipated the move since the beginning of the school year, but permitting and bureaucratic issues with the town (not Durham) have delayed things, to put it mildly. We went into high moving gear when we got the clearances we needed in order to not have to pay April rent in our current location. We divided into groups, each teacher taking on a team of kids and a list of assignments, and we got it done – or at least got a lot of it done; tomorrow we will finish and I will drive to the new building when I go to work on Friday.
As someone who has spent my life moving, I’ve learned a thing or two about place. A few years ago, I wrote a post called “cooking acoustics,” which was about the power of the room when it comes to baking bread. Many years before that, I remember a conversation with Rhealene Stewart, who was the organist at University Baptist Church most of my life. She was there when the church moved into the “big sanctuary” and used to talk about how the room changed the people. “We became more formal from the very first service,” she said, “not because we talked about it or decided to do it, but just because we moved from church in the Fellowship Hall to church in a room with stained glass windows and a pipe organ.” Church acoustics.
Ginger and I have lived in seven residences in our marriage. In each one, we have developed traditions that were site specific, not because we were intentional about leaving them behind as we moved but because a different space offered different “marriage acoustics,” if you will. In Marshfield, the set up in our living room with a u-shaped couch turned, somehow, into our putting a futon mattress down on the floor – we called it the palette – and sleeping there from Thanksgiving to Christmas (or New Year’s). It was one of our favorite things. We moved to Durham and the living room was neither big enough for the couch or a mattress. When Thanksgiving came, we just didn’t do it, and remarked to each other of the passing of the ritual but the futon seemed to belong in Marshfield in a way it didn’t find a home here in Durham.
So as I stood in what will be my room, which tonight is filled with furniture to be placed and boxes to be unpacked, I wondered what the school acoustics will be. The traffic patterns between classes will change, how the rooms are set up will be different, the options I have in teaching are increased. Also, there are more windows, it feels like there is more space, and the building is located in a much more populated area (with a bakery next door!). I have to learn a new route to and from school and figure out a new time to leave each day to get there on time.
As I drove home this afternoon thinking about the day, I began to think about Durham’s acoustics and the resonance my life is finding here. Part of what has shaped me here is missing Massachusetts, and the grief is not the whole range of feelings. The sanctuary at our church here is a small A-framed building that is wood and brick on the inside. I love to sing in the sanctuary because of the way my voice expands in the space. It feels effortless to me. I can feel my throat relax, my muscles ease, and I become connected to the room rather than someone just standing in the middle of it. Walking the street of this city feels the same way. Connected.
Lent reminds me that there are liturgical acoustics as well. These are days of focus and forgiveness, of preparation and intentionality. Eastertide rolls in as the stone rolls away and bursts in our hearts like a big bass drum. Pentecost is Snoopy dancing in the leaves. Lenten acoustics for me thrive on resonance and memory in much the same way I can hear a song I love but have not heard in years and the melody comes up from inside of me out of muscle memory bringing with it not only words and music but the sights and smells and feelings and faces of all the times I have heard or sung that song.
I remember buying the record as a sophomore at Paschal High School in Fort Worth -- 1971. Tonight, some forty years later, it swam to the surface on this spring night as I write about the acoustics of place because I’ve been packing boxes once again. What reverberates most is the gratitude.
The first Sunday of the month means we celebrate Communion at our church, as in many Protestant congregations. Of all the things we do together in worship, Communion lands at the top of the list for me: we remember the story that binds us together in word and in action, we feed one another, and we do some thing that every Christian who came before us has done all the way back to that First Supper in the Upper Room.
I come away from the meal each month feeling filled and connected.
This afternoon, Ginger and I went to an assembly of Durham CAN (Durham Congregations, Associations, and Neighborhoods) which is a community organizing group made up of a wide cross-section of people from across the city who connect to bring about change in our city. They organized neighborhood audits a couple of months back where people walked the streets of various neighborhoods – particularly some of the poorer ones – and made note of all the things that needed to be fixed. They gave that information to the city. Today, the City Manager stood before the assembly and one of the Durham CAN leaders asked him if he would be accountable to come back in ninety days and report on how the needs on the list were being addressed. He said he would.
Durham CAN doesn’t raise money or hire lobbyists. They connect people in the community and bank on the relationships to call people to accountability. The trust of the organization is in the power of relationships. After the meeting ended, Ginger introduced me to Mauricio, whom she had met at an earlier meeting.
“I want you to tell Milton your story,” she said to him.
Mauricio is from El Salvador and came to the U. S. in early 1980 at the encouragement of his mentor, Bishop Oscar Romero, who helped him and several other your Salvadorian men get out of the country to tell El Salvador’s story and to escape being killed by the death squads. Romero himself was assassinated in March of the same year. I was speechless. I was standing next to someone in Durham, North Carolina who was standing next to me because of the actions of one of the heroes of my faith. For a moment, I stood in a small church connected across miles and years to someone who had helped to shape my faith, connected hand to hand, person to person.
When we left the meeting, Ginger and went home, fed the pups, picked up the pot of chili I made this afternoon, and headed for Fullsteam to break bread or at least eat chili and drink beer some folks who had been at the assembly and a few others who were just coming for the food and fellowship. The chili was hot, the beer was cold, and the conversations were rich and flavorful. I met some wonderful people. As we were getting ready to leave, one of the folks with us pointed out a large table of Duke Divinity School students and mentioned several of them had gone to Wheaton College in Illinois, where our nephews went to school. Ginger and I walked over to the table, introduced ourselves, and then asked if they knew Ben and Scott and several faces at the table lit up. For a moment, I stood in a pub connected across miles and years to two guys I love deeply through people I can’t even call by name but who share the affection for Ben and Scott.
The incidental contact of an introduction, a conversation, or passing the Bread and the Cup is the stuff of glory, or community, of incarnation. We make our way across oceans and opinions, across aisles and attitudes in small steps and gentle gestures much more than huge leaps and grand actions. We serve one another, hand to hand, all the way back to the Upper Room.
This morning, time was moved along
by turning pages, the clicking of keyboards,
and restroom requests; the tools of the
trade are stored in backpacks and we
made our day without thinking of
how long to braise the lamb.
A twenty-mile asphalt artery took me
from one world to the other, time travel
in a matter of minutes, punctuated by
a uniform change and a cup of coffee.
Neither knows much of the other;
I am a sliver in this Venn diagram.
My flight on the freeway puts me past
eighteen exits, or so, each one an off ramp
to another layer of life, another place
just like the kitchen and the classroom
where someone is telling time and
inhabiting the world they know.
It makes me want to exit early, stop
and ask, “What’s cooking?”
The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives. Your brain on music is all about, as Francis Crick repeated as we left the lunchroom, connections. (This Is Your Brain on Music 192)
The story of the chapter that ended with the above paragraph was one full of connections, human more than neurological, as Levitin talked about researchers he had read and met and worked (the Crick, for example, is of Crick and Watson, the discoverers of DNA) with to do what it took to figure out what happens to our brains on music. If I knew much about science, I’m sure the names he mentions would be hall of fame ready, but his point has less to do with name dropping that it does with how one discovery or realization connected to what someone else was doing, or what questions they were asking; most of the time, the connections that surfaced showed up with at least some element of surprise.
I can’t hear the word connect without thinking of one of my favorite novels, E. M. Forster’sHowards End because connection lies at the heart of a story that tries to reach across the class lines of English society.
Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire . . . Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
Last night, Bill Mallonee sang at our church. I know Bill because of John Brashier, who was my youth intern in Fort Worth and then invited Ginger and me to help with youth camp at his own church. Bill, with his band Vigilantes of Love, sang a concert at camp. Later that year, he came to Gordon College, north of Boston, and we drove up to hear him. That night we met Christopher Williams, who became a good friend and who is a wonderful singer/songwriter himself. Last spring, John asked me to come take part in a writer’s conference at his church in Jackson, Mississippi. He also invited Tim Youmans, who had been his youth intern and is now a soon-to-be Episcopal priest, as well as a singer/songwriter. The third leader was a person named Justin McRoberts, whom we only knew through his songs – specifically his cover of Patty Griffin’s“When It Don’t Come Easy.” Justin McRoberts is on the cusp of releasing a new project, Through Songs I Was First Undone, which is a collection of the songs that helped him make connections. I just noticed that if you preorder before February 23 (there’s still time), you get a bonus EP; Christopher Williams is singing with him on two of the tracks, one of which is the Patty Griffin song.
Only connect.
The more Levitin talks about all we have learned about how the brain functions and what neurons are firing and what processes are at work, the more there is to explore and explain. What we know best is how much more there is to know. Life and faith are no different. I can no more decide to just go about my business here in my little part of the planet than one of my neurons can decide to fire independently without cause or consequence. Both my neuron and I are inextricably connected in some ways we can comprehend and many, many others that are inexplicable and even invisible.
One of the folks connected in several ways to Bill et al. was David Gentiles, my friend who died a little over two months ago now. There aren’t too many circles in my life to which David didn’t have some sort of connection. As I was writing, I thought about a blog post he wrote a little over a year ago talking about his connection with his three daughters; the musings came about because he was listening to John Denver (on vinyl) singing “Poems, Prayers, and Promises.” The chorus catches me by surprise tonight, thinking of him.
I have to say it now it’s been a good life all in all it’s really fine to have a chance to hang around to lie there by the fire and watch the evening fire while all my friends and my old lady sit and watch the sun go down and talk of poems prayers and promises and things that we believe in how sweet it is to love someone how right it is to care how long it’s been since yesterday and what about tomorrow what about our dreams and all the memories we’ve shared
Connect the prose and the passion and love will be exalted. Gather in close and sing to each other. The connections run deep and resonant, my friends, across the hemispheres of the world as well as the brain, across miles and years, through synapses and songs, through heartbreak and hopelessness, outlasting depression and despair, holding us together because it is who we were created to be, as the old song says: we are one in the bond of Love. Patty Griffin wrote
when you break down
I’ll drive out and find you
when you forget my love
I’ll try to remind you
and stand by you
when it don’t come easy
Two hundred and fifty one years ago, on this night, the Scottish poet Robert Burns was born. Though I have a wee bit o’ Scottish blood in me, I’ve never been an avid celebrator of the anniversary, which Garrison Keillor describes as an evening when, “They read Burns' poems, sing his songs, eat haggis, and drink lots of whiskey.” Alas, the only whiskey in my house is Bushmills.
Burns stays with me for a different reason. As one who taught ninth grade English for a decade, I’ve read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men more times than I can count, inviting students into the sad beauty of George and Lennie’s life together. The title of the book is drawn directly from Burns:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley
which is often paraphrased in English as, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
You may not remember much about the book. The fact is George and Lennie never had really big plans. Lennie was mentally disabled and looked at life with brutal simplicity. If George had had plans before Lennie, he had already laid them aside to take care of his friend. When they did talk about schemes, they had to do with saving money to get a place together, a dream that hangs in front of them until the very last scene of the novella. George explains it this way, when Lennie coaxes him to tell how they are different from the other guys working alongside them.
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. . . . With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.
What ultimately shapes us are not the plans we make, but the people we choose. I thought again today about the anniversary party I went to the other night. Though some attention was given to the various positions Rev. Cheek had held during his forty year ministry at his church, the stories that mattered were told by family and friends about family and friends, the laughter was as deep and resonant as the love that filled the room. Burns was right: the best laid plans won’t work out, mostly. What gives life its meaning are not our successes, for the most part, but those with whom we chose to share the failures, as well as the fun times. We call them our life stories, after all, not our life maps.
Here’s something Steinbeck wrote in his journal about a year after he published Of Mice and Men:
In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men; if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.
If I think of my life in terms of plans, and plans gang aft agley, it makes about as much sense as a street map of downtown Boston. I’ve gone from being a pastor to a chaplain to a youth minister to a high school English teacher to a chef, with a couple of detours here and there. I’ve not gotten rich, to say the least. If life is some sort of distinguishable path, I’m hard pressed to show mine as a success. The good news is I don’t think of life that way. Life, to use a borrowed phrase, is a journey without maps. We have to pay attention to the people around us in order to find our way.
Every chapter of my life has been filled with those who have offered love and encouragement far more profound than I have deserved, as well as forgiveness. As we close in on twenty years of marriage (this April!), I feel more than ever what I have said before: whatever any kind of final judgment may look like, I believe simply saying, “I was with her,” will be enough to validate my existence, for she is the love of my life.
I have had plans along the way; I still have some. To this point, none of them has worked out as I either hoped or expected. Still, I spent the evening cooking with Abel and Arnaldo and came home to Ginger and the Schnauzers, so I understand exactly what George was saying: I got a future because somebody gives a damn about me.
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.
I woke, on this first day of Advent, knowing that the day was full, moving from church to work to writing (since my practice is to write everyday during the season), and hoping I could point my mind and heart in a direction that would give me something to say when I got home from work around eleven. Just before I left the house, I checked the Writer’s Almanac for my daily dose of poetry only to find that this particular First Sunday of Advent is the same day on which both Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis were born. And I said – out loud, “At least I know what I’m going to write about tonight.”
I met both writers when I was a child. Not in person, you understand. Mrs. Reedy read A Wrinkle in Time to us as reward for our hard work as fourth graders at the Lusaka International School; I don’t remember how The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe ended up in my hands, but it set me off on adventures of my own as I climbed through the back of the wardrobe with Lucy and the others. I could fill up two or three shelves with books by the two of them, and write for several weeks about what each of the different books had meant to me. Therefore, I feel right in saying I met them when I was a child and they became my friends, though neither ever knew me.
Madeleine taught me about Advent, as well as the rest of the liturgical year. I have read and re-read The Irrational Season, which is a series of essays beginning with Advent (“The Night is Far Spent”), following the calendar through Epiphany and Lent and so on, and ending with Advent once more (“The Day is at Hand.”) I can’t get to my copy tonight because we have a friend visiting who is sleeping in the room where that book lives, and so I picked up one that stays here in the dining room, And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, and paged through, reading what I had underlined many years ago. What I found reminded me that one of the strains of faith Madeleine has sung with resonance to my heart is that of connectedness.
Quanta, the tiny subatomic particles being studied in quantum mechanics, cannot exist alone; there cannot be a quantum, for quanta exist only in relationship to each other. And they can never be studied objectively, because even to observe them is to change them. And, like the stars, they appear to be able to communicate with each other without sound or speech . . . Surely what is true of quanta is true of the creation; it is true of quarks, it is true of human beings. We do not exist in isolation. We are part of a vast web of relationships and interrelationships which sing themselves in the ancient harmonies. Nor can we be studied objectively, because to look at us is to change us. And for us to look at anything is to change not only what we are looking at, but ourselves, too. (20,21)
My margin note reads, “Life is a group sport.”
This First Sunday also marks two years since Ginger came to what is now our church here in Durham. We moved because we felt God calling us here, which also meant leaving the Boston area, where we had spent all of our married life together, save the first four months. Two years means we have been here long enough to begin to find new friendships, which take time to grow, and long enough to be reminded moving does not mean forgetting. “I thank my God when I remember you,” Paul wrote, “because you have filled my life with joy.” Those words were burned into my heart because of a song the Youth Choir in Fort Worth sang to and for us as we were leaving them for Boston. Perhaps it is the lyric that best fits the ancient harmonies of which L’Engle speaks. Our daily lives are no more stable than the quarks and quanta, change being the defining word for all of us; what endures is love: love that calls our name from the past, love that greets us in the present, love that calls us into whatever the future might be.
Whatever it is, we will go together.
Seventeen or eighteen First Sundays ago, I went with Ginger to the church in Winchester for the first time. She had been the Youth Minister there for several months, but we didn’t have a car and I was in graduate school and teaching full time, so the prospect of losing a couple of hours to the commuter rail wasn’t an option for me. I slipped down Bunker Hill in Charlestown for early mass at the Episcopal church (again, thanks to Madeleine for the introduction) and then back home to study. Ginger came home one day and asked if I would be the prophet for Advent and walk in each Sunday in costume and read the lectionary passage. (Did I mention I had shoulder length hair and a beard at the time?) I think it was the second or third Sunday that Ginger came up with the idea that I should sing the chorus of “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell as I came up the aisle, and then again as I exited. She has served three churches since then and I have sung my way to prophecy in each one.
The song has left an indelible mark on my heart, because it reminds me of the faces and stories that have gone with my ritual; these too, are words that fit the ancient harmonies. Today, as I walked out, the congregation sang with me. However we prepare, we will do it together, which means it will not be the same as every other First Sunday. As Madeleine says,
We do not love each other without changing each other. (21)
In what was then the second book in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian, Lewis wrote a scene that added another theme to my life. The children return to Narnia, much older now, and Lucy, the youngest, keeps looking for Aslan, the Lion. When she finally finds him – well, let me let Lewis tell it.
The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.
“Welcome, child,” he said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.” (141)
God changes, too, along with the quarks and the quanta and the quixotic band of pilgrims that sang with me this morning, or in Marshfield, or in Winchester, or in any place where people gathered to watch and wait to get lost in wonder, love, and praise, singing in tune with the ancient harmonies that call us to connectedness and to change.
Not that I’ve ever met them, you understand. They don’t even know who I am. Yet I count them as friends because their words have helped me to learn and grow. And so I carry deep gratitude and affection toward Madeleine L’Engle, Frederick Buechner, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Henri Nouwen, to name a few. I thought of Nouwen in particular tonight when I got email today about The TED Prize that was awarded to Karen Armstrong (also an author) in 2008 and culminated today in the launching of the Charter for Compassion. Armstrong is a former nun who has become one of the world’s best and best-known religious historians and probably one of the few people in the world who actually understands Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Charter for Compassion is her initiative to call people together by beginning with the understanding that compassion and interconnectedness lie at the heart of most all of the world’s religions. The charter begins:
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.
I still haven’t gotten to how Henri Nouwen fits in to all of this. Well, I have to back up a few years.
Try twenty-five years.
In the early eighties, Nouwen wrote a book called Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life that I bought and read and read again. In it, he gave me the best working definition of compassion – voluntarily entering the pain of another – and he made the case for that compassion being a “uniquely Christian virtue.” As one blurb explains:
At first sight compassion seems to be a natural, instinctive, human response to others’ pain and suffering. But on closer inspection the authors conclude that for the Christian true compassion is born only out of prayerful reflection on the implications of the Incarnation and the demands it makes on all who would follow in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows.
As I listened to Armstrong talk, I wondered what he would do if he were here to read her offering. Would the priest and the former nun find they were on the same page? The question is fun to think about, but it’s not the one driving me to write tonight. Listen to Nouwen:
Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.
The Fellowship of the Broken. Yes.
As I read his words again, I realize I understand what he is talking about because of the Incarnation, because of my faith in Christ and the lessons I learn from Jesus’ life. When I listen to Armstrong, I understand the Fellowship of the Broken is not limited to Christians any more than we can claim to have a corner on the truth (or the Truth). We are called to care for one another because we are all God’s children.
God’s broken children.
Nouwen was compelling because he lived a life of true compassion, actually entering pain he could not comprehend. He asked to be sent to the poorest parish in the world to work even as he was becoming a well-known writer and speaker; he also spent years as a part of the L’Arche Community. No doubt his faith was what compelled him to make those choices. The same was true for Gandhi, yet the faith that led him down the same path of brokenness was not called by the same name.
Before we even join churches or mosques or synagogues, we are a part of the Fellowship of the Broken. Coming to terms with that connection and committing ourselves to compassionate living is what will begin to put us back together.
The loading dock area behind the West Union at Duke, in which my restaurant is located, is also where we go to throw away our trash. The singular term no longer applies because of the way we are expected to separate and organize our refuse for disposal. There is a giant dumpster where the garbage goes, but first we keep any food-related trash for the compost area, recyclables (plastics, glass, aluminum) in recycling bins, and all cardboard boxes have to be flattened and put into a baler.
I am sharing all this scintillating information to get to this detail: every restaurant in our building has to take a turn being responsible for keeping the trash area clean and emptying the baler everyday for a week, and that week comes round for us every other month. Our latest week began today. Billy, the daytime chef is a Duke institution, knows everyone, and takes great pride in the area being cleanest when it’s our week. That also means when someone just dumps their cardboard, he figures out who it is, goes and gets them, and makes them clean up. Up until tonight, he has been the one to do the baling, and I have helped enough to know how to do it. It’s just never been full at the end of my shift.
Tonight it was. More than full. So full Abel and I had to take out almost a third of what was in there to get the baler to work. For those of you who remember when David Letterman used to crush things with a pneumatic press, that’s what this baler does. The cardboard gets loaded in the front, a giant press keeps squeezing it down, and that process continues until you have a full bundle. Then you manually keep the press in the down position, open the front of the machine, thread two twenty foot metal ties through the machine so they wrap around the bale and bind them, release the press so the bale is free, set a wooden palette in front of the open machine, raise the floor so the bale rolls out on the palette (we’re talking a ton of cardboard here), roll the palette down to the loading dock, put some fresh pieces of flat cardboard down so the threading will work the next time, and close the front door so people can start stacking stuff in there again. Tonight, we got to add the steps of cleaning up after two restaurants who, when they saw the baler was full, decided it was cool to jus throw their boxes next to the machine without even breaking them down.
If you are still reading at this point, here’s my question: when you know what it is like to have to deal with the baler because you have to take a turn, why would you make life more difficult for those who are baling when it’s not your turn?
Seems like an obvious question (and answer), yet I notice most every time I take out the trash, whether assigned to bale or not, that cardboard is strewn about without much thought for who does have to do the cleanup. And, I’m afraid, that kind of insensitivity is not confined to recycling at Duke. We, as human beings, often fall short in the “do unto others” category. We may not want it done to us, but we don’t necessarily choose for that to also mean we won’t do it unto others.
In restaurants that serve more than one meal, as the ones I work in both do, all of depend on the kindness of coworkers to leave the station in shape for us who follow. And we are expected to leave things ready for the next shift to come in. That means everything from cleaning well to leaving notes about what might have been used up or will need to be prepped, to taking time to refill squeeze bottles or consolidate the produce in the walk-in refrigerator. And, though I realize this has to rank right up there with a shaggy dog story when it comes to lengthy set ups, I am struck that life is the same way. Whatever the action or the situation, we are, for the most part, following someone into that situation and will be followed by another. It’s as true about grocery lines as it is about churches.
Somewhere in my blog reading when I got home from work (and I lost the reference by the time I got out of the shower and came back to write), I came across a wonderful post challenging churches to think beyond the present tense and be mindful of those who will follow. Their point was looking at a grand theological idea; I’m looking at the same idea on a more hands-on level. Think about who will be walking into the room next, pulling into the parking place next, using that shopping cart next, stepping into your spot once you have moved on. I’m not advocating Random Acts of Kindness (though I like those) as much as making a case for Intentional Acts of I Knew You Were Coming After Me.
We are all being followed, even as we follow someone into most every situation. We may not be able to control much of any of the situations we walk into, yet we can determine how we will leave things for those who come after us. Though I wish more folks would remember this week, while I am baling the cardboard, I’m writing mostly so I will remember next week and next month when I’m not.
I’m a collector. Not a keep-it-in-the-box-so-it-will-be-valuable-someday kind of guy, as much as I like to keep things around for a few days (weeks, years) before I let them go. Things like grocery store receipts, ticket stubs, random pieces of paper that somehow ended up in my pocket. I have brochures and postcards, old magazines, business cards scattered here and yon around the house and, every so often (though not as often as Ginger would like) I clear (at least some of) them out.
My mind is much like the top of my desk in that I collect random bits of information, both useful and not so, and keep them tucked away in what passes for a mental filing system, but is perhaps more like one of those random thought generators that goes to the pile and pushes one to the top every so often. One of my favorite recurring metaphors that keeps bouncing back came from a Wittenburg Door article in the late Seventies or early Eighties that talked about “billiard ball relationships” and how we spend most of our lives deflecting off one another on our way to somewhere else rather than spending the time and energy required to listen to and love one another. Even in the incidental contact of life, we can find meaning and connection rather than allowing ourselves to offer nothing more than a glancing blow.
She's a famous actress movies and TV I recognize her as we climb the stairs of the IRT we cross the street together moving up Broadway I'm trying to come up with something clever I can say about how I love her work what it means to me how in her most recent film she acted brilliantly maybe she'll think I'm stupid maybe this'll make her day but she disappeared into the crowd and the moment slipped away
Both metaphor and melody found me in the afternoon flow of this fall day in 2009 as I was out running errands. I had three tasks: take the Story People poster Ginger gave me for framing, get light bulbs at Lowe’s, and get gas for the lawnmower. My first stop was the TROSA Frame Shop, which also sells furniture. TROSA is Triangle Residence Options for Substance Abusers and a wonderful organization that helps addicts get back on their feet through work. Along with the frame shop, they have a landscaping business and a moving company; all three do great work at fair prices. I’ve been going to the frame shop for over a year now and have gotten to know the woman who does the framing at least well enough that we call each other by name and have told a little bit of our stories.
At the end of April last year, I stopped in the store because I was passing by and saw her at the desk. She beamed as she told me she was just days away from being clean for eighteen months. I asked her what that meant and she said, “It means I get forty dollars of my own each month.” She continued, “That don’t sound like much, but when you’ve gone eighteen months without two nickels to rub together, it feels like a lot.” TROSA had provided her housing, employment, and support over that time, but that forty bucks meant she had earned their trust.
I have not seen her since. Today, I walked in as she was coming down the stairs and she smiled, called my name, and gave me a big hug. Before I could say anything about framing, she told me November 3rd had been her two year anniversary. She had completed the program, was going to graduate on November 15th, and was now in school training to become a TROSA staffer.
I felt fortunate to get to share her excitement and achievement.
I parked at the BP station not far from our house and went in to pay for the dollar’s worth of gas I needed for the mower. When I came out, a Pontiac that looked as though it had come off the assembly line about the same time as Christine Lavin’s record was parked behind me. The driver’s door was open and a man who looked quite frail was sitting with one foot out on the pavement, looking at my car and perhaps wondering what had happened to the driver. When I walked up, he said, “I like your license plate.” (I have Red Sox frames around them.”) I thanked him and he continued, “I was up there in 1980 – Carlton Fisk’s last season.”
“We moved from there about two years ago,” I answered. “I like it here, too.”
“More laid back,” he said, and smiled. I wished him a good evening and then he said, “Nice to meet you. I don’t imagine I will be seeing you again.”
He turned our glancing blow into a lovely moment of truth and connectedness. We probably won’t see each other again. (Right – now watch us run into each other at the gas station once a week.) The brevity of our contact in the scope of human history shouldn’t diminish the moment of common humanity we shared. How much better a life full of those kinds of chance meetings over one filled with silent passings.
Someone has said of language that we have words for what matters to us. Take note, then, we do not have words for the kinds of encounters that colored my afternoon. The frame lady and I are not friends, yet we are more than acquaintances or passing strangers. The gas station guy are more than passing strangers simply because we took time to speak. We have words for neither.
Both need names lest we forget they matter, and they help to make us whole.
I have a love-loathe relationship with much of the technology that gets thrown at us. I love my laptop and I wish the manufacturers had chosen to make sure they were making a great mobile phone before they added all the un-phone features to it. And I don’t really get the whole Twitter thing. Those of you who know me will understand. When have I ever been able to express myself in under one hundred and forty words? Tonight, however, I am thankful for the technology that makes Facebook possible because I have found great comfort there.
My mother had surgery on Thursday. The sentence in itself is not remarkable; my mother has had more surgeries than I can count. When we lived in Boston, I used to tease that she was much like the USS Constitution: still in commission and only about twenty percent original material. My mother is also the most tenacious person I know. She is undaunted by difficulty and determined to push through and keep going. So when the call came last night that the surgery itself was successful, in that they were able to do the necessary repair, but her heart was not keeping a normal rhythm, the news landed hard here at our house. I sat down and posted a few sentences on Facebook asking for prayer and within minutes – literally – the responses began to come. By this morning there were over forty, words of hope and solidarity from most every chapter of my life:
high school friends from Nairobi, Fort Worth, and Houston; childhood friends; church folks from Westbury Baptist, where Dad pastored; folks from the youth and college groups at University Baptist; friends from Dallas days; Baylor friends; seminary friends; Boston and Winchester and Marshfield and Hanover friends; Durham friends; and blog friends, to name a few.
Reflecting on a youth camp experience, my friend Billy Crockett wrote a song years ago called, “Lines,” that sets to music what I saw happening on my screen and in my heart over the last twenty-four hours:
A spider spins the lines from leaf to ladder A trellis spans the canyon to Katmandu A transatlantic cable carries transatlantic chatter And there are lines that run from me to you
Lines that run from vine to branches Lines that carry love's advances For those who try To find their place in time There are lines ... lines
There are lines and I can see them. I am trusting they are strong as we head for Texas in the morning to be with my mother and my family. Some of you I may get to see face to face over the next few days; most of you I will not. But I am leaning hard on the promise that life and faith are team sports, that we are in this together, and that nothing – NOTHING – separates us from Love.
Lines that run from vine to branches Lines that carry love's advances For those who try To find their place in time And for those who long To know that they belong For those who pray And those who up and walk away There are lines ... lines
I feel loved. I feel connected. I feel grateful.
Peace, Milton
P.S. -- This is a link to an old recipe, but it is one that we had for lunch today in honor of my mother.
Tonight was a night to remember in the kitchen because nothing really happened. And it was a night I learned from my coworkers.
I shared the evening with Mitch, our line cook (and among the best read line cooks with whom I’ve had the privilege of working), and Arnaldo, our dish washer (whom I have written about before). Both of them are at stations in their lives where working part-time in our little kitchen is what they need to do. It was an average evening from a business standpoint, which meant we had time to talk as we worked, and time to get to know one another better.
Mitch is an avowed Bob Dylan fan and brought a CD of John Wesley Harding in for us to listen to as we prepped for dinner. In the process of the rambling discussion that followed about favorite Dylan songs, I learned that he sang at the March on Washington. Right after Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream,” he sang “When the Ship Comes In.”
A song will lift As the mainsail shifts And the boat drifts on to the shoreline And the sun will respect Every face on the deck The hour that the ship comes in
We got off to a slow start, which meant Arnaldo had finished the pots and pans left from the afternoon prep and was with us on the line, because he makes the salads and desserts. I knew from talking with him before that he had some ship stories of his own, and that he had been in the Cuban Army and had been sent as a solider to fight in Angola back in the Seventies. He also had told me the reason he left Cuba was they wanted him to go and fight in Ethiopia, but he refused. Tonight, he was telling Mitch the story and he responded to Arnaldo by saying, “You were a part of the Mariel Boatlift?” (Like I said, Mitch is one well-read line cook.)
Arnaldo smiled. “You’re a smart guy, he said. I tell my story all the time and nobody in America knows about Mariel.” Between April and September, 1980, Cuba allowed people to come to the United States. (This is a really simplified telling.) One of the controversies was some of the folks Cuba sent our way were prisoners they wanted to get rid of. Arnaldo chose to come because they said they would imprison him for life for not being willing to fight if he didn’t leave. He knew nobody here, spoke no English, and came to Durham because of a sponsorship through a Presbyterian church. After a year, the sponsorship dried up and he was on his own. Now, almost thirty years later, he is washing dishes in our kitchen, showering us all with his indefatigable kindness, and singing Cuban songs as he goes about his work.
Earlier this week, my friend, Gordon posted a wonderful article on the essential impact of individual relational encounters. He words have hung on to me since I read them:
I tend to be a little suspicious when I hear someone refer to large, vague categories of people. We often speak of “the poor” and “the rich,” as though those groups had unionized and were meeting regularly to decide policy and organize action committees. “If only the rich would be more generous,” one person bemoans, while a another says, “If only the poor would take advantage of their opportunities.” I’ve got news for you. The rich and the poor will never act in one accord because there are no such groups. There are only people. Some are rich, some are poor, most are in between, and all of them are individuals. And in the end, I believe that loving individual people is our first and highest calling.
I came home tonight to words my blogging friend, Simon, shared as a part of his latest blog post, quoting Jurgen Moltmann “on the contemporary ‘distress of time’ and the advent of ‘homo accelerandus’”:
He has a great many encounters, but does not really experience anything, since although he wants to see everything, he internalizes nothing and reflects upon nothing. He has a great many contacts but no relationships, since he is unable to linger because he is always ‘in a hurry’. He devours ‘fast food’, preferably while standing, because he is no longer able to enjoy anything; after all, a person needs time for enjoyment, and time is precisely what he does not have.
I can recognize the accelerated being in myself far more quickly than I would like. My days fill up and drag on at a pace that make both my knees and my heart ache. With that in mind, I can do nothing better tonight than to make time for thanks. I am deeply grateful for an evening of discovery, sailing with the two of my crew around the room on the sea of conversation, fueled by the winds of music and memory, and the reminder that what truly saves us is sailing together.
No, that’s what he did for a job. Let me start again. From the first moment I met Pete Cernoia I was glad I knew him. We shared a common love of music and guitar playing, as well as rather skewed senses of humor, but what made Pete shine was more than those commonalties. Pete Cernoia was as true an incarnation of joy as anyone I have ever met. He loved life the same way he played guitar: percussively, energetically, whole heartedly in that Springsteen-tramps-like-us-baby-we-were-born-to-run kind of way. And he never met anyone he didn’t want to help.
Our lives intersected when we both lived in Boston, he in Somerville and I in Charlestown, and then we both moved, he to Gardner, Mass. and I to Marshfield. Though we kept incidental contact, the heart of our friendship was for a season. I haven’t seen Pete in many years, though his fingerprints still feel fresh on my heart. We got word through mutual friends a few months back that Pete had lung cancer. The same friends sent word this morning that Pete died last night.
There are many, many people who knew Pete better than I did. All of us, no matter how well acquainted, were fortunate to feel his love at full volume. Tonight, I remember one night he and I sang together at the Coffee House at Cambridgeport Baptist Church. He asked me to sing one of his favorite songs, “Breathe Deep” by Lost Dogs. It has stayed one of my favorites down all the days.
I still remember the Christmas morning when, after unwrapping most of our gifts, my mother pointed to two cards stuck on the tree, one with my brother’s name on it and one with mine. A string ran from each card, leading us in different directions all over our house until we came to find our guitars.
For almost twenty-nine years I have had a six string of some sort. Mom and Dad hired a guy to give us lessons, but I lasted with those about as well as I did with the piano lessons in the second grade. But I did sit on the side of my bed and try to play along with my records, learning chord shapes from my friends and how the chords went together from listening to people I loved to hear. Like any guitar-toting teenager, I dreamed about being a singer or being in a band, but I wasn’t one of those who spent his afternoons learning licks and doing whatever it took to be a musician.
For me the magic of the guitar was that it always seemed to come with a group attached to it. I learned how to play because there were a group of us at Nairobi International School who all had guitars and we brought them with us and sat around during lunch (and some classes) playing and singing together. I have always had the good fortune to have friends who were better guitar players than I and who were wiling to teach me. In college, I found friends in my Baylor dorm who loved to sing and play and so we did, night after night. As a youth minister, I played and sang with my group because I loved how it made us feel connected. University Baptist Church was known for its youth choir, so the kids could sing well, so we sang every chance we could and they would find harmonies to add to what we were doing. When I play some of those songs, I can’t help but hear them still:
and the depth of God’s love reaches down, down, down to where we are until we’re found, found, found
I’ve sung and played in a lot of church settings. When I wrote songs with Billy Crockett I sang back up for him a time or two. Then there was the weekend in Baton Rouge where he had a gig at the LSU BSU and I drove over to meet him. He was flying in – and was delayed. So someone there who knew I wrote with Billy suggested I sing until he got there. Of course I couldn’t sing any of our songs; he was going to do that. I took my guitar and sang everything I could think of. For and hour and a half. It’s still my longest gig.
Boston was a big Open Mic town. There were lots of little clubs and bars that set aside nights to let folks come in and take their shot. Club Passim in Harvard Square, one of my favorite rooms anywhere, had one on Tuesday night and I used to go and run sound. I thought about getting up there, but I never did. Actually, I never got up on stage in any club for Open Mic on any night in any town until last night.
I didn’t sing for a room full of people. I think there were ten or twelve. Fifteen if you count the dishwashers and the bartender. I didn’t care. I plugged in my guitar and started the intro to John Hiatt’s “Through Your Hands,” which in one of the songs we are doing on Saturday. It was hard to hear and it was my first public performance of the song and it was, well, a little rough. I did alright, but no one stopped their conversations to listen. Each performer gets to sing two, so I chose a more familiar song – no, I chose my favorite song for the closing number. I don’t remember when I learned the song, but it is one that lives deep in my bones, that moves me in ways I can’t articulate.
The first time I ever played it publicly was at a church banquet in Winchester, Massachusetts and I led into the song by saying, “I relate to this song more than any song I know.” Then I sang the first line:
I am an old woman named after my mother . . .
Last night I didn’t say anything. I just started playing the introduction and then singing the words and it felt good and I didn’t care that the high guys were talking almost as loud as I was singing because I was singing. At Open Mic. After all these years.
The lines in the last verse that has always killed me snuck up softly as I stood there after my eleven hour day, just a couple of phrases away from ending the evening of performers I didn’t hear:
how the hell can a person go to work every morning and come home every evening and have nothing to say
“That’s why I’m here,” I thought. “It’s been a long day, but I still have something.”
I finished my short set and stepped down to talk to Ginger and to pack up my guitar. As we were walking out, I turned to one of the high guys and said, “Good job tonight.”
He smiled and said, “You, too, sir.”
“Just give me one thing I can hold on to,” says the song. Last night, for me, that was it.
Peace, Milton
P. S. -- And here's the person who taught me the song.
I found them walking from Winchester High School one afternoon to meet Ginger at her church. A small handbill on the door of the Griffin Museum of Photography announced the showing of color pictures of the universe by David Malin. What I learned that afternoon, and in my subsequent trips with my English classes, was that Malin, who began as a micro-photographer (check out this book), had developed a way of photographing different levels of light, if you will, using different colored plates (I’m out of my league trying to describe this, you understand), such that he was able to give color and scape to what we can only see as small white lights or even darkness, if we can see them at all. This photograph, for instance, is the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion, the Hunter; I do well to find the stars that make up his belt on any given winter evening.
I thought about Malin on my way home from church because of a conversation I had during coffee hour. Brian, who would be able to understand what Malin was doing, told me – with great joy – about a recent discovery. It seems scientists have been able to isolate the largest molecule in the galaxy (so far) outside of our solar system. The cool thing is it is the same molecule that gives raspberries their flavor.
“So you see,” Brian said with a smile, “our galaxy has a raspberry filling. I love it. God has a sense of humor.”
They also found alcohol molecules. The Milky Way appears to be a giant raspberry daquiri. Now that will preach.
Though A Wrinkle in Time is the book that gets the most attention, my favorite volume in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet is A Wind in the Door. Before Malin started taking photographs, or scientists when berry picking, L’Engle was spinning a story of size and significance. Two siblings, Charles Wallace and Meg, face the same expanse of magnitude and minutiae as Charles Wallace has an infection in the smallest particles of his blood and Meg is fighting cosmic evil that is ripping stars out of the sky. (Did I mention it’s a science fiction story?) At one point in the book, Meg is taken to a planet where the mitochondria, the stars, and Meg are all the same size and she is told to remember everything matters and everything is connected.
The secrets of the atom are not unlike Pandora's box, and what we must look for is not the destructive power but the vision of interrelatedness that is desperately needed on this fragmented planet. We are indeed part of a universe. We belong to each other; the fall of every sparrow is noted, every tear we shed is collected in the Creator's bottle.
The connections are as old as creation, and as fresh as our willingness to sharpen our senses and stretch our minds and hearts to find them. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
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.
O, taste and see that the Lord is good. Smell, too.
192)
because connection lies at the heart of a story that tries to reach across the class lines of English society.
more times than I can count, inviting students into the sad beauty of George and Lennie’s life together. The title of the book is drawn directly from Burns: