lenten journal: this is a gift

Today was going to be a day to get some stuff done around the house, but the cold I’ve been fighting for most of the week set me down for the better part of the day – well, the cold and the Theraflu. As I dozed in and out, I caught up on a week of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, thanks to the magic of our DVR. His segments on the financial crisis and the Conservative Convention took me back to a sentence I read in Living Gently in a Violent World that has both stuck with and unsettled me. Hauerwas wrote:

It seems to me that democracies want to produce people who do not need to rely on trusting one another. (51)

I’m unsettled because the sentence is difficult to refute, based on the way we treat one another as Americans. Sharing with and caring for one another are not our strong suits. His statement was in the middle of a chapter talking about what it meant to be peacemakers. I got to his last chapter tonight – it’s a short book – and he had something else to say:

Long story short: we don’t get to make our lives up. We get to receive our lives as gifts. The story that says we should have no story except the story we chose when we had no story is a lie . . . Christian discipleship is about learning to receive our lives as gifts without regret. And that has the deepest political implications. Much of modern political theory and practice is about creating a society where we do not nave to acknowledge that our lives are gifts we receive from one another. (92-93)

I heard this week from an old college friend with whom I’ve had mostly incidental contact over the years. He wrote,

I wanted to let you know I've been reading your blog every day now for maybe a week or so. It has come to mean so much to me, to read your words and reconnect with you through them, knowing you as I have for all these years, and missing your presence.

The sentence was a gift all by itself because I don’t think I’m particularly good at keeping up the ties that bind. Most of my college friends are still in Texas and I moved away. In fact, moving away – or at least moving – has been the archetypal direction of my life. To have him reach across the years and not only find me, but recognize me was gift indeed. I’m working to take Hauerwas’ words to heart about receiving the gift without regret and respond in gratitude that miles and years have not broken a tie that binds, or at least retied it.

At the risk of using too many borrowed words, I’m going to lean into an old Rich Mullins song that could serve as soundtrack to Hauerwas’ thoughts:

Hello old friends
There's really nothing new to say
But the old, old story bears repeating
And the plain old truth grows dearer every day
When you find something worth believing
Well, that's a joy that nothing could take away

And so we meet again
After all these many years
Did we sow the seeds we're reaping
Now that the harvest calls us here
It seems that love blooms out of season
And much joy can blossom from many tears

So old friends you must forget what you had to forgive
And let love be stronger than the feelings
That rage and run beneath the bridge
Knowing morning follows evening
Makes each new day come as a gift

Today, through various channels, I heard from college friends, got news about my 35th high school reunion this summer, got a note from someone in the church where I was youth minister in the 80s, a friend I went to grad school with in Boston, and someone I knew in Africa. Also, today, as Ginger and I took Ella out for an afternoon walk, we talked about the growing possibility that we are going to need to move her parents here with us as her dad’s Alzheimer’s worsens. The move is not imminent at this point, but we feel as though it is a gift we need to be prepared to give. The story of my life is one of connections flowing back and forth across time, conduits of love and grace that remind me I am much more givee than giver when it comes to love and grace.

The first visual image that comes to my mind, as I think about all of the connections that tell my story, is one of an old time switchboard with all the wires coming out and going every which way, each one with a familiar voice on the other end of the line. The glorious tangle of wires is a wonderful picture of how a life gets put together, as well as how lives are tied together.

The second is the credit roll at the end of a movie. Both Ginger and I are both in the habit of sitting in the theater until the last name scrolls by and the screen goes dark because we feel like it’s our little way of honoring everyone’s work on the film. The credit roll at the end of my life will take years. I share my story with many, many co-writers.

That is a joy that nothing can take away.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: a friend of time

We run a two-person line in the kitchen at Duke, which means I have one other guy cooking with me at dinnertime. As the year has gone by and we have developed more of a customer base, the two of us stay quite busy; Wednesday night we served 104 dinners. One of the ways we are dealing with our growing business is to teach Tony, our dishwasher, how to cook with us on the line, which falls into the time honored tradition of how one works his or her way up in the kitchen. The cooking lessons happen on the nights when Abel is working because Tony is newly arrived from Honduras and speaks less English than I do Spanish. Both my and Tony’s vocabularies are growing because two of the four nights Abel is not there and we have to communicate with one another.

One of the words I learned first was espera: wait.

Our roasted chicken Marsala requires us to wait until the pan is smoking hot on the stove before adding the oil (and waiting for it to get hot) and then the chicken. When the dish is made with patience, the skin browns and crisps beautifully, but if we don’t wait, it sticks and tears.

Espera. Wait.

When the tickets are stacking up and we are trying to get the food out, it is tempting to push a bit, but then we are left with offering less than our best work, mostly because we failed to add enough patience.

One of my traveling companions for this Lenten journey is a new little book by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier called Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness. The title alone led me to believe it was a voice I needed to hear for these days. I’ve not been disappointed. In the introduction, John Swinton describes Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, as a gentle man and goes on to say,

Gentleness is a vital dimension of the kingdom of God (Matthew 11:28-30), but it is a learned skill that requires work and demands patience, slowness and timefulness. Such work means that we have to become “friends of time,” a patient people who recognize that “we have all the time we need to do what needs to be done.”

I am fascinated by time. I make time, take time, have time, lose time, waste time, save time, and spend time, but I’ve never thought of befriending time, or living with timefulness. What a great word. I couldn’t find the word in the dictionary, but I did find a reference to it in an online article that spoke of “yoking our awareness to the present moment.”

If I can go back to the kitchen for a minute, when the ticket prints, telling me someone wants the chicken for dinner, I make a choice. I can choose to let my sense of time be controlled by the little piece of paper saying they want dinner NOW, which leads me to rush the dish; or I can see the ticket as an invitation to take the time I need to prepare the dish well: taking a minute or two to get the pan hot, and more time for the oil to warm, and more time for the chicken to brown, and the sauce to reduce, until the dish that goes to the table does so with, well, timefulness.

As much as the latter choice seems the obvious one, I’m well aware of how hard it is for me to live timefully. Espera doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s the dinner rush or some other self-imposed deadline, I can quickly become consumed with The Task at Hand, and push time and everyone else around with the pugnacious impatience of a conductor determined for the train to leave on time at all costs. I know what needs to happen and I want it to happen now.

Time too easily becomes a force, rather than a friend.

As Vanier begins to tell his story, he invokes Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, focusing on Jesus’ words,

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

And then he says,

My life has been privileged enough that I never quite knew where I was going.

I laughed out loud when I read the sentence because it took me back to the parking lot of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas many years ago. Ginger and I drove there after a family gathering in California because neither of us had ever seen the city. I was taking our bags to the car about nine in the morning and followed two people out for whom it was still the night before.

One said, “I tell you one thing: you gotta know who you are and where you’re going.”

“Well, hell,” the other replied, “I’ve always knowed where I was, but I ain’t never knowed where I was going.”

I was still thinking about them when I read this paragraph:

What makes transformation possible? Jesus says that when we’re born of the Spirit, we don’t know where that Spirit is coming from or where it’s going – there is a reason for not knowing. Transformation gives us the audacity to advance along a road of unknowing. At the same time we can’t be totally unknowing. There must be points of reference . . . .” (27)

I wrote in the margins, “I may not know where I’m going, but I know who I’m going with.” Grammar aside, I can see the transformational possibilities when I can remember the who more than the where. To be friends with time is to choose people over tasks, shared moments over schedules, passion over punctuality. When I have the wherewithal to live with patience and intention – to let the pans get hot, if you will – much less of life is left stuck and torn.

Espera. Wait.

Peace,
Milton