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

taking time

Remember when Alanis Morissette told us irony was “like rain on your wedding day” – which is mostly sad and not ironic at all? Well, it’s not raining here in Durham, but I have my own offering of irony: I’ve been all set for a post on Sabbath for several days and haven’t made time to write.

Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

This weekend my church hosted a conference on “Faith and the Environment.” My contribution was to help prepare the meals on Friday night and Saturday morning. One of the conference organizers took me on a shopping spree at our State Farmers Market in Raleigh and almost everything we ate came from there. I met some great people doing some wonderful things on both small and large scales. And I heard Norman Wirzba talk about Sabbath and what the concept means for our care of and compassion for the creation of which we are a part.

Using the Genesis 1 account as a map of sorts, he took us on a journey through the days in which God spoke all that is us and around us into existence and then looked at the Seventh Day when God rested to reflect on the purpose behind everything that had been brought into being. The climax of creation, Wirzba said, was this act of menuha, tranquility and repose. Sabbath is not doing nothing, but resting, reflecting, reinvigorating. Rest, in this sense, is the opposite of restlessness.

I came away with a couple of quotes that have stayed with me through what has already been a more restless week than I would like. I will quote them and then tell you they pull me beyond the speech in our Fellowship Hall.

Creation is the place where the love of God is made concrete.

Creation is an act of ultimate hospitality: God made room for what was not God to be.

Though I have not been posting, I have managed to get back in the routine of my Morning Pages (thanks, in part, to Wirzba’s words), which I see as a moment of morning Sabbath, if you will. And as I have turned these two ideas over in my mind and heart, what keeps coming to mind pulls me to see them in the light of knowing that I am created in the image of God. As God spent the “week” breathing, speaking, imagining a universe with everything from light years to ladybugs into existence and then followed that brilliance with time to think about what it all meant, I have weeks of my own to consider. What am I breathing, speaking, and imagining into the world in which I live? How is my love made concrete in what I do? Or is it? And then the big one, for me: how am I making room for what is not me to be?

Twice this week I’ve answered my phone to hear the voice of an old friend. Two different friends, actually. Each one was calling from the road, on their way from one place to another, and began with the same sentence, “I was driving and thinking about you and thought I would call.” The conversations took different turns after their openings, but both had the same result: I hung up the phone feeling loved and connected to something beyond me: to memories and dusty dreams, to laughter and longing, to hope , and to love (as E. E. Cummings said) that is “more thicker than forget.”

Their love made concrete has made me wonder who needs to hear from me.

Working in a restaurant kitchen carries with it a certain sense of urgency: we work with perishable products, we are almost always facing a deadline, and, once service starts, we cook until they quit coming. All those things are true, as is the fact that our sense of urgency is as much self-imposed as it is false. I get more calls on my day off than a heart surgeon it seems sometimes, and most of them were, well, not urgent. But waiting is not one of our strong suits. I’m working to understand this urgent illusion because buying into it is one of the ways I end up not making room for what is not me to be. I can’t make room. I don’t have time. I have things to do.

But living into the wholeness of being created in God’s image is about time, not things. Abraham Joshua Heschel said:

The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept the premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.

If time is at the core of what life means, even as God took the seventh day to relish and reflect on what he had brought to be, how then does time feel like such a tyrant? Why do I feel I have to wrestle my schedule to find time for Ginger, for writing, for life?

I am not living creatively, I think. God did not imagine me living this way. I want to take time to imagine living differently as well.

And then write a new creation story of my own.

Peace,
Milton

prize musings

In the fall of 2000, my friend Jack and I drove from Boston to Stanhope, New Jersey for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. It was one of my favorite experiences, and I was reminded of it when I came across the poster I bought (and never framed) cleaning up our office/studio here in Durham. I bought the poster because of the quote from a Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Tonight, as I’ve been sitting here trying to find a way to phrase what is going on in my head and heart around the responses to President Obama being a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, I came across a link to an article written by J. Parker Palmer while I was trolling my Facebook. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach and Listening to Your Life have been pivotal books in my life, so I followed the link to “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy,” and found:

There are two ways for the heart to break. The brittle heart will shatter into a thousand pieces that are very nearly impossible to retrieve and reassemble. But if the heart is a supple, well-exercised muscle, it can be broken open rather than apart, giving us a larger capacity for both suffering and hope.

The broken-open heart is not the gift of a special few; life gives us many opportunities to exercise our hearts. I know many people whose hearts have been broken by the loss of something or someone they deeply love. They have lost jobs in a heartless market, homes in a corrupt economy, children to their own bad choices, elders to death. And yet many of these people, in the wake of their losses, have not become bitter and withdrawn. They have become more compassionate, extending their hearts to other sufferers and reaching out with forgiveness to the people who caused their pain.

If we can learn from such losses in our lives, the broken-open heart can become the source of what Lincoln called “the bonds of affection,” a sense of unity amid diversity. And that, in turn, will allow us to do what citizens of a democracy must do: engage with issues of great moment that require a collective and creative response.

The recent history of American political discourse (and by recent, I’m speaking particularly to the environment exemplified by the twenty-four hour news channels over the last several years)is not of creativity, or collectivity for that matter, but one centered around fear. For a people who consider themselves to be the most powerful nation on earth, we live frightened lives. And I don’t mean just because of September 11, 2001. On almost any issue, what we accept as discussion is for people to run to their opposite poles and take shots at each other, each of us bent on defending our position as though we are under attack. We don’t want to lose power, lose control, or just lose, period. There is no field in which to meet, only fox holes from which to fire.

I honestly didn’t know much about the Nobel Prize until I started reading tonight. I still don’t know much, but what I do know is the prize, in it’s hundred and eight year history has been influenced by politics (mostly local Norwegian ones, because Norwegians make up the committee), economics, humanitarian values, and personalities. It’s had its hits and misses. In its most recent history, it has given the award as a way of making a statement about what it hopes will happen (and hoping to influence outcomes) as much as rewarding accomplishment. By the time I got through with the article, I could see that their choice of our President fit their pattern over the years. That said, and even though I think the award is pretty cool, I thought they were a little premature in their choice.

Then I remembered being in Turkey a few years back. The very same CNN company that fills our screens with celebrity news anchors who love a good tirade had an international channel full of news: an hour on Asia, then Africa, then Europe, the South America . . . . Ginger and I were flabbergasted. The next day, we were on a bus tour with a group of international tourists and an Australian guy asked me why Americans didn’t seemed bothered by what was going on in the rest of the world and I said, based on the different news feeds I had seen, “They don’t know; our media chooses not to tell us.”

And so I wonder (I don’t know, but I wonder) if the Nobel Committee was offering an invitation in a way, or at least expressing hope that our willingness to elect Obama might mean we were willing to be a part of the world community and not determined to see ourselves as the exception. All the fray over this makes me think we don’t have a real sense of how the rest of the world sees us. We write off hostilities aimed our way by saying those people are jealous, or crazy. We often play the stereotype of the popular high school kid in most any high school movie who thinks everyone wishes they could be in their shoes. We are the country with the mot nuclear weapons who is determined for no one else to get them. (Yes, I understand why we don’t want Iran to have a bomb, and we have to come clean about the double-standard.) We would never think of letting anyone build a military base on our soil and yet we are quite comfortable building them all around the world. (Yes, I understand we feel we need to in order to protect our national interests, and we have to come clean about the double standard.) I’m guessing the rest of the world enjoys our continued emphasis that we are the most powerful nation on earth and they can’t live without us about as much as I would enjoy a Yankee fan getting in my face and yelling, “We’re Number One!”

I have to quote Palmer one more time:

The current sources of democracy’s danger are many and complex, and not directly traceable to one political party. They range from the dominance of big money to the divisiveness of religious fundamentalism; from the failures of mass journalism to the undemocratic dynamics of capitalism; from schools that ignore citizen education to political parties more concerned with their own survival than the survival of democracy.

But the root cause of democracy’s peril is that we, the people, fail to understand the meaning of our citizenship—and fail to use the means at our disposal when threats to democracy arise. Democracy fails when we withdraw from the fray, or stay in it while trusting and talking with only the people who hate what we hate. Democracy fails when we allow the differences between us to loose the irrational and violent angels of our nature, having never called upon the “better angels” that Lincoln tried to evoke in his First Inaugural Address a month before the Civil War began.

And yet the better angels have not abandoned us, and there are ways to call them out. When we are able to meet each other at the level of heart, of soul, of human identity and integrity, the barriers that blind us to each other’s humanity become thinner and the gaps that divide us become smaller. Heart, soul, identity and integrity, call it what you will: it is the “being” in human being, and it has no race or ethnicity, no creed or doctrine, no philosophical, ideological or political commitments.

We are bigger than our fear. We are more than our party affiliations. We are not Number One, but rather one of many. Let’s break our hearts open together.

Peace,
Milton

paying attention

In life, most days, it’s not so much what happens as it is what we notice, what we choose to remember and carry with us.

A week or two ago, I noticed Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. She is the author of The Artist’s Way, a book that has been significant to me at several different junctures of my life, so I browsed through this new (to me) book and was intrigued, since she speaks to me and I’m carrying around more weight than I want to. I chose to come back to our neighborhood bookstore, The Regulator, to have them order it for me, so I didn’t get it until late last week.

One of the key components to her approach to both art and losing weight is something she calls “morning pages.” No real mystery. The name says what it is: get up in the morning and write, first thing, three pages of whatever comes out and then go on about your day. What I learned before, when I wrote every morning as I began to come to terms with my depression and as I have written now for about a week, is my early morning scribbling is a living prompt, in the same way I’ve been given writing prompts in classes over the years: a call to pay attention.

Interesting phrase, isn’t it? Pay attention.

I must pay attention in the same way, perhaps, that I paid the man at the bookstore for my inspiring little volume – give something up for something I want. If I want to pay attention to life as it happens around me, it’s going to cost me. And it’s going to pay off in ways I seldom am able to imagine. Which leads me back to my opening sentence: in life, most days, it’s not so much what happens as it is what we notice, what we choose to remember and carry with us.

I clicked over to YouTube tonight, in search of a video we had talked about at work today and found a selection of four short films from the National Film Board of Canada (gotta love those Canadians) that were competing at the Cannes Film Festival. They range in length from about two and a half minutes to a little over nine, all of them incredibly well made and imaginative. As I watched, I began to think of all the love and work and play and art and sweat and struggle and joy and hope and despair and determination that went into each of these projects, knowing full well they would only be seen by a relatively small group of people. You don’t get famous making two-minute movies.

But you can tell a great story.

And, when you find someone telling a great story you should pay attention long enough to suggest to everyone you can that they might do the same.



Peace,
Milton

chuck taylor afternoon

In the middle of a sunny
Chuck Taylor afternoon, I sit
in the space between work

and obligations, hoping
for time to read and write
and then the day descended –

closed in from all sides
like shrink wrap on a shiny toy
and I had only a moment

this moment

to write away the defeat
brief lines offering a chance
to slip away from suffocation

and slide back into sunshine
and the promise that this
is not the only afternoon

for me and my Chucks.








Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: for a dancer

First, I have a favor to ask. Our church is participating in the Durham CROP Walk tomorrow, which raises money for Church World Services hunger relief both locally and around the world. If you are able, I invite you to support us in our walk. You can donate here.

___________________________

I getting close to the end of one of the books I’ve been reading this season, Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School, and it continues to be full of good things. Yesterday afternoon, I sat out on our front porch and read while I waited for Ginger and our friend Lori to come back from walking Ella and followed Flinn as she came to the end of her Superior Cuisine class with a dinner at Le Doyen, which she says is one of Paris’ best.

The meal began with an amuse-bouche – something to entertain the palate: a small chunk of fish that tasted of smoky bacon topped with a beet sorbet. When the chef came to see how they liked the meal, he asked her which dish was her favorite and she picked that one.

That’s it. By dumb luck, I’ve hit some nerve and named his favorite dish, one that he’s been working on for months. He kneels down, and for twenty minutes we talk. Well, mostly he talks and I try to figure out what he’s saying. Lately, he’s been thinking about the idea of masculine and feminine foods. Do I agree that some foods are masculine or feminine? Before I answer, he tells me how he things about making them “dance” together. Sometimes, at night, after the kitchen has closed, he takes ingredients that he thinks will not work together and figures out how they could. Beets alone didn’t work with fish, but beet sorbet was sweet enough to offset the salt of the fish, for instance. He has many thoughts about sauce, which I miss entirely when he begins talking too fast for me to follow.

Dance works best for me as metaphor. I have good rhythm, I love music, I can feel the beat, but if you’re looking for someone who can really cut a rug, I’m not the guy. I appreciate dance. I even married a dancer, but I am not one. I do understand how, as John Michael Montgomery once sang, “life’s a dance you learn as you go.” Cooking is, too; I may not be much on the dance floor, but I’m a pretty good culinary choreographer.

culinary
1638, "of the kitchen," from L. culinarius, from culina "kitchen." Meaning "of cookery" is from 1651.

choreography
c.1789, from Fr. chorégraphie, coined from Gk. khoreia "dance" + graphein "to write." Choreograph (v.) is from 1943.

Culichoreographer?

We changed our menu a bit at Duke last week, following spring break, to keep with the season and to spark some interest. As we talked about what we might change, Abel asked if he could make the pasta sauce.

“I have a good idea,” he said.

We had a chipotle alfredo on our last menu, but he had different ideas. I watched him write his dance last Monday. He diced onions, celery, and garlic and sautéed them in butter until they had cooked down and then added Marsala wine and let that reduce.

“I need rosemary,” he said. And I got him bunches of it, which he chopped and added to the mix. He was cooking and tasting and thinking at the same time. “Now a little tomato paste.” He finished each sentence with something less than a period, leaving a sense of expectation hanging over the pot. He stirred in the tomato paste and then added chicken stock, some cream, salt, pepper, and a couple of other seasonings, and then let it all simmer – dance together – until he was ready to say, “Taste this.”

I dipped my tasting spoon into the pot and touched it too my lips. To call it a rosemary sauce is to sell it short. I could taste layers of flavor -- movements, if you will: a beginning, a middle, and an end, all in balance and harmony. It’s awesome. It’s selling like crazy. And he choreographed the whole thing with the stuff we had on hand, creating a new thing out of all that was familiar and available.

Whether walking or dancing or skipping, there are only so many motions our bodies can make. Some come naturally; some take training and practice and skill. What makes the difference between how I look moving to music and a dance is how the movements fit together – the conversation between body and heart and mind that makes the simple movement of arm or leg become something transcendent.

Maya Angelou’s poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration is one of my favorites because of its simplicity. I was teaching English in an inner city Boston high school at the time. I took the poem to my students and showed them she hardly used any words that had more than three syllables, or that were not just ordinary words.

A rock. A river. A tree.

People used those words everyday, but she put them together and they became a work of art, they became something that spoke for and to everyone.

I love the detail Flinn gives about the chef staying late to work with flavors he thought would work together and staying with them until he figured out how they did – to rehearse, to create his rough drafts – so he could choreograph a dish for his customers that would inspire them. He danced with his food the same way Abel worked on his sauce, or I love working on my soups, cooking and stirring and adding and tasting, over and over.

Why Jackson Browne has my soundtrack this particular week, I’m not sure, but “For a Dancer” popped up in my play list as I was writing tonight, moving me from the kitchen to the dance of daily life that calls us to choreograph and collaborate at every turn.

keep a fire for the human race
let your prayers go drifting into space
you never know what will be coming down
perhaps a better world is drawing near
and just as easily it could all disappear
along with whatever meaning you might have found
dont let the uncertainty turn you around
(the world keeps turning around and around)
go on and make a joyful sound

into a dancer you have grown
from a seed somebody else has thrown
go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
and somewhere between the time you arrive
and the time you go
may lie a reason you were alive
but you'll never know

Hey, look at me. I’m dancing.



Peace,
Milton

gingerbread lessons

I’m back in full swing at the restaurant at Duke since the second semester is just finishing it’s first full week. The big news for us is Duke Dining dropped some serious change to renovate our dining room; now it looks like a real restaurant instead of, well, a college dining hall. I’ve spent a good bit of time and effort trying to come up with a menu that offers some fresh imagination as well. Putting meals together means thinking about flavors and ingredients, and it also means thinking about who is coming to dinner and how much things cost. I also have to think about what I know how to do, what I can learn how to do, and how we can put up good, flavorful, consistent meals with just two of us cooking and – as they did tonight – close to seventy people showing up to eat in a two and a half hour period.

A good dish is a food collage, in a way: culinary multimedia. I want you to look at it, smell it, taste it, feel the textures of it in your mouth, and think about it long after you have cleaned your plate. With all that in mind, one of my favorite dishes on the new menu is the Butternut Squash and Pear Ravioli. The name tells you two of the ingredients in our house made ravioli, which also includes roasted pecan pieces, Parmesan cheese, chili power, a little bit of brown sugar, salt, and pepper, all wrapped in cinnamon pasta. When the ravioli goes in the boiling water, we sauté some julienned shallots and pears, along with some more pecan pieces, until the pears and shallots are caramelized a bit, add a little white wine, then some cream, some fresh baby spinach, and then finally drop the ravioli in the pan and all of that goes in the pasta bowl and out to the table. I like the dish because I think the flavors mix well together, from savory to sweet, that some little things can catch you by surprise, and that it hits on all the senses.

Part of the reason it works is the flavor combinations make sense. I’m not necessarily breaking new ground by putting butternut squash, pears, cinnamon, and pecans together. It matters more to me to do the dish well than it does to feel as though I’m the only one in town doing it. That said, after I got off work last night, I called Ginger, who was also leaving work, and she suggested we grab a bite to eat, since neither of us had eaten dinner. She had a gift card ready to be used, so we went to Six Plates, a wine bar owned by Matt Beason, whose parents are in our church and who was kind enough to help me learn the culinary landscape when we first got to Durham.

The name of the place speaks to Matt’s concept, which is original: six small plates (think half an entrée), each matched with a wine by the glass. The menu changes often and if full of great things, including one “tenured item”: the Lamby Joes, which are unbelievable little sandwiches of ground lamb and chorizo. (I had them last night – five bucks on Wednesdays.) Ginger and I snacked on the cheese plate and a beet salad as well (with herbed goat cheese and blood oranges) and then the chef, Ted, came out with a dessert for us to try: a gingerbread tower with layers of passion fruit mousse with a small scoop of goat’s milk yogurt gelato on the side. I love gingerbread (Ted said his was made with molasses and stout) and Ginger is a big fan of the passion fruit, but I had never thought of the two together, much less to think of making ice cream out of goat’s milk yogurt. But it worked. Big time. Amazing.

Un-freaking-believable.

Tonight after work, Ginger and I walked over to Watts Grocery for me to drop off my inventory list for my chef and so we could get some late night sliders (we were both hungry again). Most of the folks at the bar were servers and cooks who had finished their shifts and friends or significant others. One of the latter offered us one of her cupcakes. (That’s right, I make it a point to never turn down a cupcake.) They were butternut squash cupcakes with cream cheese icing and they were delicious. She said, “I had all of this squash and I found a recipe for bread, but the recipe made three loaves and I only have one loaf pan, so I decided to make muffins, but they turned out so moist that I figured they worked better as cupcakes.”

I loved getting to follow the trail of her creativity. I wish I could have heard how Ted found his way to the gingerbread tower -- passion fruit, goat’s milk and all. What I’m sure of in both cases is they had some time and space – whether serendipitous or intentional – to let their proof, to use a baking term: to rise to their potential. You don’t come up with a fresh idea while ten tickets are hanging, the waiters are restless, and you’re about to run out of mashed potatoes. You might come up with a way to survive, but that’s about it. Creativity needs room to breathe, to grow, to get us to look beyond the heat of the moment.

The lesson carries beyond the kitchen. The Israelis and the Palestinians won’t find meaningful change if life is always lived battle-ready. Our two political parties are not going to govern creatively when their first concern is staying in office and their second is making sure the other party fails. Churches in the midst of these bleak economic times stand little chance of being captured by the creativity of the Spirit when their first question is, “What are we going to cut from this year’s budget?” rather than, “What do you think God wants us to do this year?”

I know new recipes are easier to come by than peace in Palestine and new culinary combinations are easier to talk about than church budgets. Still, tonight, after a week that has swung from long days to gingerbread and cupcakes, they don’t feel so far apart.

Peace,
Milton

choosing peace

A little over a month ago, my friend Billy sent me a link to a talk given by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who spoke at the TED Conference, which I had never heard of before but evidently involves a whole bunch of really smart people. The folks at TED want to get good words out to as many folks as possible, so they allow people to embed their videos as long as we link back to them. You need some time to take it in – because her talk is eighteen minutes long – and it’s worth taking the time.



In her closing comments, Taylor says, “We have the power, moment by moment, to choose who and how we want to be in this world.” The context of her words is her years of researching the two hemispheres of the brain and her surviving a stroke. The choice she lays out is between the right hemisphere of the brain, which connects us “with the life force power of the universe” and helps us feel our interconnectedness and the left hemisphere, “where I am an individual separate from everything else.” She goes on: “The more we choose the peaceful circuitry of our right brain hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world.”

The distinction she makes resonates with me because I know what it feels like to feel connected, whether I’m cooking or writing or painting or singing or just walking in the neighborhood with Ginger and Ella. I also know, when I turn into my task-oriented self, how easily I can see nothing but my stuff and my schedule and my way of doing things, which creates peace in no one, including me. Her words leave me these questions:

Is there a way I can choose to live my life in such a way as to see all of it as a creative choice to wage peace?
Can I chose to expand my consciousness to recognize when I have ceased to be a peacemaker without facing some major calamity?
Why is it so hard for us to be peacemakers?

Peace,
Milton

P. S. There are new recipes here and here.
P. S. My Red Sox are showing. Take time to see this video of Manny catching a fly ball, high-fiving a fan in the bleachers, and then making a double play all in one motion.

lenten journal: collide-o-scope

I don’t remember where I got the idea.

What I do remember is it wasn’t original to me. I handed out Post-It® notes to the twenty or so young people gathered in the large room of our retreat cabin and told them to rename the items they saw in the room. I led by example, writing the word “tree” on the small yellow square and pasting it to the lamp on the table.

“This is a tree,” I said.

Before long, the table became an aardvark. For the next ten minutes, we moved around the room renaming everything. The activity spilled into the sleeping quarters and even out onto the front porch. After everything was named, I told them to take another ten minutes to study what they had done and to pay attention to what they could see with the new eyes they had been given because of the new names. We moved from there to talk about how we could “break some stained glass” and open our eyes to new names for God in the world around us.

The experience came back to me last night as I was talking to Kyle, one of the servers at work who is also a student at Duke and involved in the theater department there. He told me about one of the drama professors who begins class each semester by going around and asking each student to say his or her name. Kyle said one of his friends said her name, Elizabeth, and the professor stood for a moment and then responded, “No, that doesn’t work for me. I need to call you Jane,” which he continued to do for the rest of the semester. The point of the renaming, which he did with most all of the students, Kyle said, was to shake them up and make them look at themselves differently.

As I drank my coffee this morning, I read my friend Billy’s introduction to his Blue Rock Review; this issue focuses on seeing. He centered his remarks around Marvin Gaye’s classic protest song, “What’s Going On?”:

But it’s the title line that truly catches my eye: “Talk to me so you can see what’s going on.” The song suggests that talking produces seeing. The claim is audacious – you cannot see but that you talk to me. “Can I get a witness?” says the preacher. We are somehow strategic in the clarity of each other’s vision. I see something possible, or hidden, or lovely, or frightening. Do you? “Do you see what I see?” asks the carol at Christmastime. Talk to me. What’s going on?

Dialogue is a kind of collision of visions. What you are holding now is a “collide–o-scope.”

Heidi is someone with whom I’ve become acquainted since I moved to Durham. She grows pea shoots, among other things. We use them at the restaurant in our salad mix and also as a garnish. Last week, I made a grilled salmon stuffed with spinach, sundried tomatoes, and pine nuts. It sat atop a serving of red beet risotto that was the most beautiful crimson color and was topped with a lemon-thyme beurre blanc and, finally, some pea shoots. The plate looked beautiful to me. About five minutes later, one of the servers came back and said abruptly,

“The girl wants to know what the green stuff is on top of the fish.”

She didn’t see what I saw. I’ll admit my first response was to turn into the stereotypical chef who stormed out of the kitchen, grabbed the plate from before the young woman and said something like, “You don’t deserve my food.” (Of course, I would need to say it in a fake French accent.) But I understood what she saw because I’m married to someone who has wondered out loud on many occasions why chefs feel the need to add unnecessary green stuff to the plate rather than serving simply what she ordered. She talks to me, so I can see what’s going on in the mind of those who order food to eat it as opposed to those of us who make it to be both edible and artful.

To rename such conversation as collision helps me see some new things. We talk about collisions mostly in the context of violence and accident: cars crashing together because someone didn’t see the other coming. But in this context, new vision comes out of crashing together with intention, hoping that the shards of curiosity, creativity, and even confusion reconfigure into patterns of hope and light so we can see what’s going on beyond the limitations of our labels, laments, and longings.

When my friend Doug was giving me a painting lesson a couple of weeks ago, he set up the still life and then began to talk to me about how to create the painting. As I began to draw and then paint, he would comment about how the shadows were falling differently than what I was articulating with my brush. A couple of times I said, “But that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.” He was only two feet to my right and things looked different from there.

None of us has the definitive view. None of us has the answer or the truth left to our own devices and perspective. Yet, when we come crashing into the intersection of faith and life and relationship (can there be a three-way intersection?), we find new eyes, together: a collide-o-scope, for sure.

Rich Mullins -- a person, like Marvin, who was as complicated as he was gifted, sang:

And the New Jerusalem won't be as easy to build
As I hoped it would be
As I hoped it would be easy to build
But the New Jerusalem won't be so easy to build
There are many bellies to fill and many hearts to free
Got to set them free

But I see a people who've learned to walk in faith
With mercy in their hearts
And glory on their faces
And I can see the people
And I pray it won't be long
Until your kingdom comes

In the collision of our devotion and our despair, in the tension of the now and the not yet, in the crash of what is, what has been, and what is yet to come, and in the glow of the indefatigable light that cannot be put out by the gathering darkness, talk to me so we can see what’s going on.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- I've posted the aforementioned recipes here and here.

the art of living

I intended to write more this evening, but instead I got to paint.

My friend Doug is in town and he is an artist. I asked for a painting lesson, so tonight we sat down in the dining room and he constructed a still life centered around a ceramic Winnie the Pooh I have (at Ginger’s suggestion) and we painted. First, he painted a study to show me how to do it and then he instructed me as I did my own version. Here are the finished products. (Mine is the one on the left.)


The experience was full of so many good things for me, not the least of which was getting to hang out and do something creative with my good friend who is really good at painting. I got to learn something new, too, which is always worth the trip. What I loved most was listening to Doug talk about how a painting comes to be. He talked about values and colors and light and shadows. His instruction was about painting and was also parable for me because it led me to think again about how the creative tensions in our lives are what make us grow and thrive.

Painting is full of polarities: light and dark, cool and warm colors, translucent and opaque. When Doug talked about the colors, he even spoke in opposites. When we started painting, it was the collusion of the opposites – the mixing of colors, the grasping of shadows – that brought the image to be on our boards. Our creativity was fed as we worked with the tension between the poles instead of choosing one side or another.

The point of this little painting parable is one I think you can see coming, but I’ll say it anyway. A big part of what stagnates us as a country is we, as Americans, deal with most issues as either/or: we are attracted to the poles in most any discussion. We take our sides on either end of whatever the discussion and then yell back and forth at each other as if that counts as conversation. Rather than moving to a more creative place, we end up hoarse and hostile.

I’m not saying the answer is some sort of middle way that “tolerates” everyone and accomplishes very little. I am saying we have the possibility of being creators when we are willing to listen to both poles and live in the creative tension that grows when we don’t move too quickly to claim our values are absolute. Whatever the issue -- global or local, institutional or relational – we all have something to learn, something to teach, and room to grow.

The art of painting means learning how to integrate the opposites in a way that creates something beautiful. The art of living is not so different.

Peace,
Milton

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

advent journal: nothing to lose

When I went to work in the afternoon at the restaurant in Plymouth, I usually saw the pastry chef who did most of his work in the morning so the rest of us could have access to the prep area. He and I had worked together at another restaurant a couple of years back, so we had a good relationship and talked a lot about food. One of the comparisons I made was his job as a pastry chef was analogous to that of a scientist: he had to measure things exactly and weigh them out the same way each time in order for the tortes and tarts to come out the whey he wanted; my job as a line cook was more akin to improvisation: I knew my ingredients, I knew my kitchen, I knew the recipes – though those were given without amounts or measurements – and I responded to the tickets as they came in.

I thought about my analogy as I began working at the restaurant here in Durham: new menu, new people, new kitchen, new region – most all of it calling me to use what I know in new ways. My job for most of Wednesday night was to “run the line” or “expedite” the food, which means I took the ticket when it came in, called out what had been ordered, made sure the food went out on time, and told the food runner the table for the order and the places at each table for each plate. I had a blast. About nine-thirty, as business started to die down, we sent one of the line cooks home because he was working lunch the next day and Sous asked me to cover his station (I was going to get to cook!). At the same time, the floor manager came back and asked me to make her some dinner: “Anything you want,” she said. “I eat it all.”

I began to look around the line. I put a piece of salmon on the grill and, while it was cooking, took some of the diced roasted butternut squash we had and mixed it with some of the risotto. I also took some Brussels sprouts, maple syrup, and apple cider vinegar and fixed the little green guys my favorite way. None of what I did was on the menu, yet everything was right in front of me. The recipes came from what I already knew, but seemed new in my new environs. I didn’t make anything up, I just put the pieces I had together a bit differently. Such is the nature of improvisation.

As Wells talks about improvisation as his metaphor for Christian ethics, he says we have to get past some misconceptions about improv to make the metaphor work. Two of them are:

improvisation is about being original;
improvisation is about being witty or clever. (67)

The first thing that came to mind is my favorite piece of dialogue from the movie Fight Club:

JACK
Tyler, you are by far the most
interesting "single-serving" friend
I've ever met.

Tyler stares back. Jack, enjoying his own chance to be
witty, leans closer to Tyler.

JACK
You see, when you travel, everything
is small, self-contained--

TYLER
The spork. I get it. You're very
clever.

JACK
Thank you.

TYLER
How's that working out for you?

JACK
What?

TYLER
Being clever.

JACK
(thrown)
Well, uh... great.

TYLER
Keep it up, then. Keep it right up.

I’ve turned those two things over in my mind a great deal today because they tempt me both: I like to feel original and witty, if not clever. Smart, too. The reality is, at the point where I dropped in to human history for my few minutes, there ain’t a whole lot of original, witty, clever, smart, or even funny that hasn’t already been done and done well. The best I can hope for is to learn from those before me and maybe, every so often, reconfigure things in a way that adds to what it means to be human.

Here’s another food example, which I use only because I was so knocked out by this dish. A new friend here in Durham opened his wine bar the night after we got to town last week. We went to check it out and it’s awesome. One of the dishes he had on the menu was cinnamon-crusted scallops. I’d never heard of the combination before. As I was writing this afternoon, I typed those three words into Google and was told I could find them on at least 214,000 web pages. As my seminary preaching professor once said, “Being original means knowing how to hide your sources.”

Thinking of him brings to mind another seminary moment. A large number of those in my circle of friends there had gone to college together, which means we had stayed up late together and had gone to a lot of movies together. By the time we got to seminary, a fair amount of our conversation was communicated in movie lines. (I still work that way.) One of the new additions to our circle in seminary said to me one day, “I need you to make a list of the ten movies I need to see so I can talk to you guys.” I still know him and most of the others and we still use the same lines, with a few new ones thrown in. We’re always looking for new material.

The thing that made it so easy for me to cook for the manager the other night, more than anything else, was her saying, “I eat it all.” The pressure was off. She wasn’t testing my abilities; she wanted dinner. I know how to make a good meal, so I did. The night went well calling the tickets because the folks I was working with on both sides of the line were pulling for me. The point wasn’t to see if I was going to screw up; the point was for us to work together to get good food out to the good people who had chosen to come to our place for dinner.

Last night on Grey’s Anatomy, one of the patients asked the doctor to wait to perform a rather precarious procedure until he wasn’t scared. One of the other doctors said, “It’s good that you’re scared; it means you still have something left to lose.” The sentiment worked in that moment, but it’s not a life lesson. Our Creator, the Grand Improviser who has the corner on Clever, Original, and Everything Else all the way down to Forgiveness and Grace, has left us nothing to lose. We are loved. We are valued. We are together. We are here on the human stage for our part of the play and we know, as I have said before (and John said of Jesus before me), we have come from God and we are going to God. Like JT says:

the secret of love is in opening up your heart
it’s okay to feel afraid
but don’t let that stand in your way
‘cause anyone knows that love is the only road
and since were only here for a while
might as well show some style
give us a smile

Remember: we’re surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, not hecklers.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- I've posted two new recipes -- here and here -- and neither one is original.

itunes and interstates

According to Google Maps, my journey from Marshfield to Birmingham is 1201 miles – all of it on interstate highways. The path I chose to drive has taken me through one-fifth of our United States: yesterday I saw Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania; today I added Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. And I’m still not to Birmingham. I got so sleepy I had to stop ninety miles short of Ginger.

I’ll be up early. Trust me.

These kinds of road trips are best suited for college students and not fifty-year olds, I think. Somewhere around Wytheville, Virginia my hips started to petrify so I decided to stop and walk for a bit. I went to the visitors’ bureau to find out what was around and discovered the Appalachian Trail crossed I-81 just south of where I was. I added a few miles to my journey and got off the interstate, winding my way up the side of a hill, only to find the park had closed about fifteen minutes before I got there. I looked around and saw the trail going up the hill on the other side of the road, so I parked the car and headed up the hill. I wasn’t too far away from the road when I realized there was a thin layer of snow on the leaves. I kept walking for about twenty minutes when I realized the sun was falling quickly behind the mountain and I wasn’t in the mood to participate in a casting call for the road company of The Blair Witch Project. I retraced my steps and continued my journey on wheels.

My friend Doug commented this week that the way we travel these days is unnatural. To be able to fly across country (or countries) in a matter of hours, or drive through ten states in a little over a day are actions our bodies and our minds don’t know how to translate. I’ve known a couple of people who have walked the Appalachian Trail from end to end, which is something like a six month venture. They started in the early spring in the south, so they could get ahead of the heat, and finished in early fall up in Maine, hopefully a little ahead of the winter. They made plans for shoes and supplies to be mailed to them along the way. And then they took off walking, taking in each step of the journey, feeling every bump of the trail.

My friend Billy and I used to make mix tapes whenever we got together. (We didn’t live in the same town.) When I talked to him yesterday and mentioned a mix CD I had made off iTunes, he asked if it was as fun as making a tape. It’s more efficient, but it’s not as fun. Making a cassette meant we had to record in real time – we had to listen to the songs. He and I would take turns choosing songs to add, making the mix a conversation of sorts, each song responding to the one before it and issuing a challenge to the song to follow. We never knew what we had made until it was completed. iTunes is the interstate of mixing: I compiled some great traveling music and I blew right by all the conversation.

Had I not stopped to unfreeze my hips, if you will, I never would have met the dear white haired woman in the visitors’ center who showed me where the Appalachian Trail was and I never would have walked among the tree skeletons, their fallen leaves crunching under my feet and their barren limbs reached skyward receptively.

I’m grateful for the highways that make it possible for me to have a late breakfast with Ginger tomorrow, which we will have to share with the Schnauzers. I understand there are some journeys that need to be mapped. And – I pray for more days lived in human time, sacred time, full of wander and wonder, listening and waiting for the next song.

Peace,
Milton

running the numbers

“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” (Albert Einstein)

______________________________________

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3,4)

______________________________________

Ginger’s on vacation, so my Sunday morning has meant time for reading my Utne Reader. Go get you one. The current issue is awesome.

Anthony Doerr writes a short article refleting on this deep space image taken by the Hubble Telescope.


Doerr puts words to the picture’s significance:

Here’s a way of looking at it: There are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.

Another article in the same issue is called “Running the Numbers” and shows the work of artist Chris Jordan as he seeks to humanize the overwhelming statistics of our existence. Every thirty seconds, for example, Americans discard 106,000 aluminum cans. Jordan took an equal number of cans and created a reproduction of George Seurat’s, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

Here’s a close up of the detail:


In the middle of the issue are two or three features calling aging baby boomers to action. (Hey! That’s me!) We, the generation that thought we were going to change the world a generation ago, now have the experience and resources to do it. They call us to mentoring, to reflection, to community, to action. Perhaps we begin by gazing into the night sky and then pulling our eyes down to see the cans that need to be picked up. The dance between the wide expanse of the universe and our narrow slice of experience is what we were created to do.

Peace,
Milton

that'll leave a mark

On the same Saturday morning, while I was out running errands, I learned of two endings: the Weekly World News is ceasing publication and Annie Dillard is not going to write anymore.

For those of you who may not frequent supermarkets, the Weekly World News is the tabloid of tabloids, leaving behind celebrity gossip for tales of the apocalypse, Elvis sightings, and miracle cures. Where else could you learn that Moses wandered in the wilderness for forty years because he lost the map? Once it’s gone, who will tell us beavers have OCD? Or give us pictures like this?


As I’ve stood in checkout lines over the years, I’ve wondered who bought the paper. (OK, I bought a couple of them for youth group gags.) I don’t think I ever saw someone put one in his or her cart, but the paper was there week after week, billing itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper.”

Who will we rely on now?

Scott Simon played his interview with Annie Dillard (which she notes was recorded some time ago) since she has a new novel, The Maytrees. Dillard’s writings have spoken to me over and over again through the years, her thoughtful and often audacious take on the world challenging both my faith and intellect. These passages from Holy the Firm are good examples.

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness . . . The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

The creation is not a study, roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine... Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens. You open the door and all heaven and hell break loose.

I’d never heard her voice before. She sounded harsh and crusty, like the rocky New England shoreline on which she lives. The last section of the interview caught me by surprise:

“So, do you write everyday?” Simon asked.

“I do when I’m working.”

“So you’ll take some time off?”

“I’m tempted now to take the rest of my life off.”

“You don’t have another book working at the moment? You don’t want to?” He spoke with tenderness. She did not.

“This one just about killed me. It took ten years. And you write and you write and you write and you throw it away and you throw it away and you throw it away,” she said laughing. “And in those ten years I probably could have done something more useful, although I’ve always wanted nothing more than to add to the literature.”

“I just wondered – not to turn myself into a career counselor . . .” They both laughed.

“I’m not being totally truthful with you. I can’t write anymore. My fingers can no longer type, they can no longer write by hand; I don’t know how I’d be as a chisel. But the fact is that was the great story – The Maytrees was the great story -- and I’ll never get another story that good. People want people to keep doing what they want. People want to change and grow.”

“You want to do something different?”

“I want to change and grow.”

Ginger preached on the Lord’s Prayer (Luke’s version) this morning, informing us she was going to look at the spirit of the prayer in its totality rather than going phrase by phrase. At one point, she quoted the African proverb, “When you pray, move your feet,” and then read the prayer again:

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.

In a world where thousands upon thousands die of hunger everyday, how do we pray, “Give us our daily bread?” Who is “us”? Who am I praying to be fed? How are our feet moving to feed “us”? In a world in which violence is the primary currency, how do we pray, “Your kingdom come?” How willing are we to wage peace?

“We’re all going to leave a mark,” she said.

What came to my mind first was someone crashing into something and the other person saying, “Ouch! That’s going to leave a mark.” What kind of mark will we leave?
It could be a wound, or a scar; we could be doing damage. It could be a mark like a child writing with a Sharpie on the living room wall, an unappreciated creative expression. It could be marks of growth moving up the doorjamb of existence. It could be a handprint on the hearts of those we have loved.

Two of Dillard’s statements have haunted me since yesterday:

“And in those ten years I probably could have done something more useful, although I’ve always wanted nothing more than to add to the literature.”

“I want to change and grow.”

I felt sad when I heard her say she could no longer write. What she wanted out of life was to add to the literature, which she can no longer do. Her words have fed me and now I know there will not be any more of them. Yet she is resolved rather than resigned. She wrote “the great story” and now is ready to see what the days ahead can hold, even if she can no longer write or even travel.

I struggle with her stance because, I think, I have yet to find my great story. It’s taken me half a century to figure out my best creative medium; I’m just now starting to draw on the wall. I, too, want to change and grow. And I trust, as one created in the image of the Creator who marked up the universe with uncalled for extravagances and intimacies, that there are great stories still to tell.

Peace,
Milton

taking a train to church

One of the things I love about the connections created by blooging is the chance to take part in, or at least listen in on, conversations I might otherwise miss. And, once again, it also means there is more to learn. One of the words I read a lot, in relation to conversations on the church, is emergent, which, I confess, I’m still trying to understand. Since moving out of Southern Baptist life and into the United Church of Christ over fifteen years ago, I’ve lost track of much of what was being discussed in evangelical life mostly because I was so discouraged by watching Baptists beating up on themselves and so encouraged by the new home I found in the UCC that I just didn’t listen. Writing this blog and reading others has reconnected me to some of that conversation as well as finding out about some of the others taking place in and between other denominations.

And I keep hearing the word emergent, alongside of words like organic and evolutionary. I resonate with the desire to see the church be vibrant, essential, and effective in our world and I struggle, some, with what I read as I try to understand. In all the talk about emergent I have listened to, one of the things I hear underneath (whether it’s being said or not) is that churches like mine don’t measure up somehow because we aren’t “emerging.” I feel a little bit like Jefe in this exchange with El Guapo, his leader, from the movie Three Amigos:

JEFE: I have put many beautiful piñatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little surprises.

EL GUAPO: Many pinatas?

JEFE: Oh, yes, many.

EL GUAPO: Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?

JEFE: A what?

EL GUAPO: A plethora.

JEFE: Oh, yes, you have a plethora.

EL GUAPO: Jefe, what is a "plethora"?

JEFE: Why?

EL GUAPO: You told me I have a plethora and I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora and find out that that person has no idea what it means to have a plethora.

JEFE: Forgive me, El Guapo.

As I was Bloglining this morning, I came across this quote on Randy’s blog (where he was quoting this guy who was reviewing a book by this guy):

If the people who built the railroads in the United States were actually interested in transporting people, they would now own the airlines.

What I hear when I read those words is the railroads are antiques at best and useless at worst. If I translate the metaphor to apply to the church, which it was intended to do, I go to a railroad church that doesn’t get it and has lived out it’s usefulness. We need to learn how to fly if we expect God to do anything in and with us. While we’re looking out the windows of the train, faith is flying overhead.

If we’re going to talk about organic churches, I go to one. My little church began as a neighborhood church in 1735, breaking off from the First Church of Plymouth, Massachusetts (as in First Church, Pilgrims, you get the idea) because they wanted to worship closer to home. From it’s birth it was a community church and it has remained true to that vision. It’s never been a big church, but the community has never been big either. We’re too comfortable being a community church and have a hard time when we talk about growing, and we are church in the truest sense. Maybe the fact that the Northeast is one of the few areas in this country where the trains still play an important role in our transportation is not for nothing.

The problem with the train-plane analogy for me is I don’t think the church has to choose to be one or the other. If you were to drop our church into the middle of Boston or any other big city, we would neither survive nor minister effectively because we would not be an organic expression of faith in those places, just as an edgy, postmodern, urban fellowship would not draw a crowd in our little town for very long. Both expressions of faith and community, along with a plethora of others, are needed if we are going to give voice to the many dimensions of God’s love and grace. I can’t ride the train from here to Singapore and I would be stupid to try and fly the fifteen miles from my house to Quincy. To borrow from another Steve Martin movie, perhaps we would do well to think of planes, trains, and automobiles.

The first place I read the word emerging in relation to the church was in Marcus Borg’s wonderful book, The Heart of Christianity, where he talked about the church in North America having both an existing paradigm and an emerging paradigm. He was clear to say from the beginning that he was not trying to create a dichotomy as much as describe these two genuine expressions of faith as it gets lived out in the church existing alongside of each other. Though his take on the emerging paradigm is not the same as the current emergent movement, his point is still valid. It’s hard to build a community of faith when the founding vision is “at least we’re not those guys.”

One of the other blog conversations I listen in on centers around eating locally grown food as much as possible. One new word I’ve learned is locivore, as in one who eats locally. I wonder if it, too, might be helpful as an ecclesiological metaphor. One thing I do hear in the emergent emphasis on an organic church. For all that can come out of worldwide connections, the power of the church to live out its faith happens locally. The creative paradox of our calling is we will change the world by meeting the needs in front of our face.

I’ll give you a specific example. I think our church would be transformed if we did two small things: moved all our committee meetings to one night of the month and allowed people to serve on only one committee. Those changes would mean we would either involve more people and/or let go of the stuff that no one feels called to do, and create time when we could get together for discipleship and fellowship. Right now, we get together for worship and committee meetings; there’s no time for anything else. If we created the space and time to be together, we would change ourselves, deepen our commitment to Christ and to one another, and have room to dream about how we can reach out to love our community and our world. It would be an organic and evolutionary move.

Would that make us emergent?

Peace,
Milton

thanking an old friend

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

So goes the opening sentence to Snoopy’s always-in-process novel back in the Peanuts days. He sat at his typewriter, ready to be the next great American novelist and that was the best he could do.

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

George Bulwer-Lytton used the sentence to open his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University, was inspired by the heinous nature of the sentence to begin a contest to find the best worst opening line in fiction that has been going now for twenty-five years. Liane Hansen talked to him this morning on NPR. Though Bulwer-Lytton wrote some impressive books of history, his legacy lives on as a bad beginner of fiction, thanks to those who enter the contest. Here are some of the past winners:

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.
Larry Brill, Austin, Texas (1994 Winner)

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.
Rephah Berg, Oakland CA (2002 Winner)

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.
Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, AL (2003 Winner)

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Jim GuigliCarmichael, CA (2006 Winner)

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

So begins one of the books that has shaped my life: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

When I was a fourth grader at the Lusaka International School, Mrs. Reedy motivated us by promising a story at the end of the day – if we got our work finished. A Wrinkle In Time was the book she read to us. We surprised her with our work ethic because we loved the story so much. The book grabbed me in those days and has never let go. The next two books in the series came out when I was in high school, the third my senior year in college, and the last two in the late eighties. I’ve read them all more than once, but I still keep coming back to that dark and stormy night.

L’Engle will turn eighty-nine this year and is still writing.

About the time the fourth book came out, I sat down one day and wrote her a letter that began something like, “Dear Madeleine, you’ve been my friend for a long time even though we have never met.” I told her about Mrs. Reedy and all that her writing had meant to me and I sent it to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux without much expectation of it ever finding her. A month or so later, I got a handwritten response that sounded like a letter from an old friend. We wrote back and forth for a short while. Once, when I was thought I was going to New York, I wrote and asked to meet her and she sent me her home phone number. I didn’t get to make the trip. When her husband Hugh died (he used to be Dr. Tyler on All My Children); I received a form letter that marked his passing and that was the last time we corresponded. Even in that letter, I learned from her: it was my introduction to the power of keeping time by the church year.

“He got sick just after Epiphany,” she said, “and he was gone by Pentecost.”

Her words were full of holy and heavier things than to say, “He got sick in January and died in May.” She is also someone who relishes belonging to an untamed God. In an MSNBC interview, she was asked, “So to you, faith is not a comfort?” and she answered:

“Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.”

In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, she said,

Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it. Probably this group here tonight is the least grown-out-of-it group that could be gathered together in one place, simply by the nature of our work. We, too, can understand how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; how often have our children almost done this themselves? And we all understand princesses, of course. Haven’t we all been badly bruised by peas? And what about the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and the other whose lips issued forth pieces of pure gold? We all have had days when everything we’ve said has seemed to turn to toads. The days of gold, alas, don’t come nearly as often.

What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

(As you can tell, her writing runs in more directions than fantasy. Walking on Water, A Circle of Quiet, and That Irrational Season are all worth reading and re-reading.)

On this bright and sunny day, an old friend came to mind thanks to a dark and stormy night. We have yet to meet, but my life – particularly my writing life – has her fingerprints all over it.

Thank you, Madeleine.

Peace,
Milton

artful analogies

One of the things I have been turning over in my mind for the last couple of days is this post from Back Road Journey:

This past Sunday in worship we were asked the question, “What is the opposite of war?” and before I could even think of the standard response of “peace,” we were offered a refreshing response, “art is the opposite of war.” Art. Art… How does this work? The pastor continued, “the opposite of destruction is creativity.” Well of course. I rather like this way of thinking.

The analogy takes me back to SAT days:

war : violence :: peace : creativity

Whatever violence is, it is not creative. As I wrote in response to the post, creativity begats life; violence begats violence. Whatever shape it takes – war, destruction, personal attacks, abuse, power plays (the list is by no means exhaustive) – violence doesn’t offer hope or humanity. War is destruction, regardless of the reasons for waging it or the spoils collected from winning it. When we fight, we become cannibals, feeding on ourselves. The people on the receiving end of our destruction are not “them”; they are us. The only way the enemy stays an enemy is for us to give them a caricature rather than a face.

We are created in the image of God, the Bible tells us almost from the first, which means we are spitting images of the One who dreamed up whales and wallabies and gave us minds to dream up whipped cream, wall paper, and wine. (I was trying to stick with w’s.) I realize there are several stories in the books that follow that tell of God telling the people to invade other lands (Canaan in particular). I’ve often wondered if what they heard and what was said was the same thing. Even if they heard right, the violence was not creative for very long. Finding the lineage from life in Gaza these days back to those biblical scenes is not so far fetched. But I digress: I’m not trying to write a treatise on nonviolence as much as I want to talk about how the post intersected my life this week.

One of the realities of any youth camp or mission trip is there is going to be a Last Night. Our group had worked hard and had endured several days of temperatures in the nineties and they were tired, but that didn’t stop them from planning to stay up as late as they could last night. We, as the adults on said trip, had to decide how to respond factoring in we were staying in someone else’s church, we had to drive the vehicles home this morning, and the kids would be able to stay up later than we could. That may seem a far cry from war and violence, but bear with me. If creativity is the opposite of destruction and violence, then we are talking about more than war: to teach creatively, speak creatively, work creatively, relate creatively, even write creatively means to do so without violence, without doing damage.

We could have waged war against the all-nighter, as have many youth workers over the years, but Ginger had a more creative idea: why not take everybody out to eat at an all night diner? It’s a pattern we have followed on many youth trips: take the thing that carries the most potential for destruction and turn it into a creative act. If they were going to be up late (and they were), why not make a memory out of it. When we had finished our evening session and completed the beginnings of our packing and cleanup, we piled in the vans and drove to the Goldroc Diner, an 24/7 Hartford institution. (We did call and tell them we were coming.) At fifteen minutes after midnight, thirty-five of us sat down to breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on the person and we ate and talked and laughed until nearly two o’clock when we go back to the church. Though some still wanted to watch a movie, no one stayed awake long and no one had to play night watchman.

creativity : destruction :: all night diner : last night of trip

During the Balkan war, I remember hearing a story about cellist Vedran Smajlovic:

In the spring of 1992, a mortar shell hit a bread line in Sarajevo, killing 22 people. The next day, Smajlovic put on his work clothes - black tie and tails - and took his cello to the bomb crater and played Albinoni's Adagio. He continued to play one day for each of the dead. After that, he played at sites of bombings throughout Sarajevo.

creativity : destruction :: cellist : bomb

One of the best things about getting away on a trip as we did is you get some days where being together is the primary way of being. The news that mattered to us was what we did together that day. We worked together, played together, ate together, lived together. Creativity thrives in community. As the various cars pulled out of the church parking lot taking the kids back to their various homes, the bond we forged couldn’t help but unravel somewhat. We are no longer together. We are back in our lives, bombarded with violence. Creativity can still thrive, but not without intentional commitment. We are still together if we choose to be, and we have room for others to join the circle. If we allow ourselves to believe that separating violence is the status quo, then we lose sight of the One in whose image we are created and we lose sight of ourselves.

Violence is a far easier path to take than the creative road because it’s what we think of first. Creativity is not a knee jerk reaction. It is thoughtful, intentional, tenacious, resilient, inclusive, inviting, faithful, and foolish. In a world full of violence, it’s hard to believe that which way the world goes depends on an all night diner or a cellist.

The best way to get through the night together is to go to breakfast.
The only way to play in a bomb crater is to believe it makes a difference.

diner : cello :: love : hope

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Creativity also surprises. I have a new recipe that grew out of a mistake.