lenten journal: much like any other day

Today is a day much like any other day.

In the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, this is the day in the middle. Most stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our Easter story goes the opposite direction, in a way, starting with the ending and then moving to beginning again. Either way, Saturday is the day in the middle. Much like any other day.

This morning, I sat around a table at church with ten Pilgrims (as we call ourselves) who had come to walk the Stations of the Cross set up in our sanctuary by our wonderful pastoral intern, Kyle. The stations were both thoughtful and tactile, involving a number of our senses to get the full picture. Before we gathered to eat, we gathered in the sanctuary for prayer and Ginger asked me to sing “Were You There?” Our connection to the song goes back to our days in Winchester, Massachusetts when Jim, a wonderful man with an amazing voice used to close the Maundy Thursday service with the first two verses of the song (as I sang them this morning):

were you there when they crucified my lord?
were you there when they crucified my lord?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble
were you there when they crucified my lord?

were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble . . .

He always stopped short of finishing the last verse and we left the service in darkness to go and wait for the ending to come. The question in the song is interesting because it begs to be answered. I don’t hear it as rhetorical. And the answer is, “No. I wasn’t there.” I try to get close, to learn, and to remember what has been passed down, but I was not there.

I am here in the in-between of Saturday afternoon, a day much like any other day.

And much like any other day, I have been mining for poems, which I believe to be why God created the Internet. I was looking for poems that spoke to the middle, to the unfinished, to living in the everyday. (I am also quoting excerpts; please follow the links to read them in their entirety.) I went first to an old friend, Stanley Kunitz. I actually met him at the one Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival I have been able to attend. It was a year or so before he died. “The Layers” is one of my favorite poems. The last part of it reads:

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

In the wreckage of the Crucifixion, I love the call to live in the layers of grief and hope and not on the litter of what might have been. We are not yet done. As I continued mining, I found another Kunitz poem that was new to me called “Passing Through.” The closing lines read:

Maybe it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

At the Waco Mammoth Site the other day we learned there were layers of mammoth bones, each one from a different cataclysmic flood event that drowned and buried the animals. The dust we borrow for our days has been handed down. Though we weren’t there when they crucified Jesus, those who walked with him have been turned into words that have resonated down the days through the passing of the Bread and the Cup, through the telling of the story, through the living of these days that are one much like the other. And so at breakfast this morning one of the women at the table began talking about the “Mary Magdalene Moments” she had had during the day, things that had made her stop and wonder, “I wonder if this is how Mary felt?”

We may not have been there, but we can find the feelings, the resonance, the continuity in the layers of life than make up our faith. One more poetic gem. James Galvin end his poem, “The Story of the End of the Story,” with these two lines:

Real events don't have endings,
Only the stories about them do.

We are five days away from marking six months since Reuben, my father-in-law, died yet his story is not over any more than our grief is complete. Though many years separate me from my days in Lusaka or Nairobi or Fort Worth or Boston or Winchester or Marshfield those stories don’t feel finished either. There have been endings, yes – and changes. And losses. Plenty of losses. But looking back on those days is more than an archaeological dig through bones of days gone by. Something still lives in those layers, something that gives greater significance to these days much like any other day, these days in the middle between endings and beginnings and beginnings again. I was not there when they crucified Jesus, or laid him in the tomb, or even when he rose up from the grave.

But I am here on this day, much like any other day.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in remembrance of me

We drove to Hampton, Virginia Sunday after church to surprise our friend Charles who turns fifty tomorrow. We walked into their house around suppertime, ate, and then sat around the table talking as old friends do. Our conversation turned to music and then to the music we grew up on, which is gospel. Thanks to Youtube, we were able to share a few of our favorites, starting with Vestal Goodman and Johnny Cook singing, “Looking for a City.” I know. I’ve written and linked before to several gospel video clips because I do find something there that moves me even though the theology of the songs doesn’t always match up with mine.

One of the singing experiences that had a profound impact on my life was being a part of a production of Celebrate Life, which was a youth musical by Buryl Red and Regan Courtney based on the gospels that was a centerpiece of Baptist youth choirs for many, many years. The songs are receptacles of memories and emotions from long ago; some of them remain essential tracks in the soundtrack of my faith. As Holy Week begins, one in particular appears -- a Communion song called “In Remembrance.”

in remembrance of me eat this bread
in remembrance of me drink this wine
in remembrance of me pray for the time
when God's own will is done

in remembrance of me heal the sick
in remembrance of me feed the poor
in remembrance of me open the door
and let your brother i, let him in

take eat and be comforted
srink and remember too
that this is my body and precious blood
shed for you, shed for you

in remembrance of me search for truth
in remembrance of me always love
in remembrance of me don't look above
but in your heart, in your heart
look in your heart for God

do this in remembrance ofme
do this in remembrance of me
in remembrance of me

After the weekend with Julie and Jay here, a great night with Charles and Jennifer and Samuel in Virginia, and the chance tonight to help out some of my Durham friends on their food truck, I feel full and fortunate. I am grateful that I can look around me and quite easily see the love of God in the faces looking back. As we move through this significant and holy week, I’m carrying this song, and the line in particular that sings:

in remembrance of me always love.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: found in translation

One of my friends from the Durham restaurant, Leonora, told me about a poetry class she has been taking at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. The class itself doesn’t have much to do with making documentaries, which I suppose means more than anything that the folks at the CDS are mostly looking for new ways to see things, whether or not it ends up on film. In one of the exercises she described, the members of the class were given a copy of a poem in Polish. No one in the room spoke or read Polish and no translation was offered. Their assignment was to decide what the poem meant to them, making whatever associations they could. When they came back the next week, they each presented what they had written and then were given the actual translation to see what connections there might have been.

As I’ve tried to focus my heart and mind on Holy Week today, in the midst of cooking, it strikes me that Leonora’s assignment is not a pretty good metaphor for reading the Bible: we have to take the words and make our own meaning. Yes, I know there are centuries of interpreters who have preceded us and plenty of commentaries and ecclesiastical councils to tell us what we are reading, just as there was an actual translation to her poem. There are also the readings where a “new” phrase appears as something we have never seen before, no matter how many times we have read the story, or we come away with questions we’ve not asked previously because of how we came to the text. Then there are odd little moments in the story, little bits of Polish to unravel, if you will, like this one from Luke 22: 7-12:

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover."

"Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked.

He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there."

Jesus’ instructions carry a bit of intrigue because of the little details. When they entered the city, presumably unannounced and unscheduled, they would see a man carrying a jar of water; follow him home and ask for the guest room, which he will show you; go in and get supper ready.

Was Jesus doing some sort of Jedi Mind Trick? In a city with no running water, would there really only be one man with a water jar? And what if they had stopped for a falafel and beer on the way in; would they have missed him? How did he know the man? How did he know about the room?

My translation of the Polish in the passage is I think Jesus had friends the gospels never mentioned. We get a healthy dose of life with the disciples, with Mary and Martha and Lazarus, with Mary Magdalene, as well as the occasional contact with folks like Zacchaeus, but what we are not told is there were more folks who mattered to Jesus. There are stories we don’t know. And in these verses we get a peek at one of those people, the way you get a passing glance at someone famous driving by leaving you to wonder if you really saw who you think you saw.

What makes my translation more than recognition of an oddity is what the understanding means to me. I need to tell another story to explain. The first year I taught Honors British Literature in Winchester, there was a guy who sat silently in the back of the class most everyday. He turned in adequate work, but I could not engage him for the life of me. One day after school, I walked out to the sports fields to watch him and others in the class play lacrosse. I recognized him by his physical appearance, but there were no other connections between the kid in the back of the room and the passionate athlete on the field. After the game I went up to him to congratulate him on the win, and then I said, “I have one question. How do I get the guy who was out there on the field to come to English class?” Who I saw for my forty-five minutes a day of his life was not all of who he was, or even a reasonable facsimile.

Admittedly, I have more information about Jesus than I did about the boy in my English class, yet I think the parallel holds up. We have four fairly brief and often repetitive accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry on earth. We’ve got a pretty good telling of his birth, nothing much about childhood or adolescence, and a whirlwind tour of his three years out on the road. John says, at the end of his gospel, that we couldn’t build a library to hold all of the stories if they were told. But they weren’t. What we have is a representative slice of the life of Jesus, and some of it in theological Polish to boot.

Which means, to me, I need to live expecting Jesus to surprise me. As many times as I have headed into Holy Week filled with intention and focus, I must be ready to caught off guard by the guy with the water pot, whom I always assumed to simply be an extra brought in to fill out the scene. The more I think about him, I begin to imagine the disciples following him home only to be invited in for tea. As they talked about Jesus wanting to use the Upper Room, the man began telling stories of who Jesus was to him: how he had spent the night in that room many times, how he had healed one of his children, how hard he laughed at the dinner table, how much he talked about his disciples.

“I’m glad to finally get to meet you,” he would say. “Jesus has told me so many stories.”

I know about the Triumphal Entry and the Last Supper and the Trial and the Cross, but even in Holy Week there were lower case events, incidental encounters that were more than filler, and that remain unexplained and untranslated: Jesus’ Polish poems.

How did you translate them?

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: good friday

We have a fair number of pieces of furniture in our house that have come from those stores that provide the experience of allowing me to assemble the furniture once we get the box home. The furniture is usually made in Indonesia or Thailand, comes with instructions that are illustration than illumination, and involve the use of an Allen wrench. Today, it was a chest of drawers, which meant I put together each of the six drawers and then the frame that would hold them. When I got through, the chest was sturdy, looked like it was supposed to look, and I had a handful of screws, washers, and tiny wooden dowels left over. Though I knew I had put the thing together well and that they probably sent extra stuff just in case, I couldn’t help but second guess myself and wonder what I missed because there is a certain level of precision necessary for the chest to be usable. Then I imagined some underpaid assembly line worker in Indonesia smiling to himself (more probably herself) at the thought of my bewilderment.

I smiled, too and decided what mattered was we had a chest of drawers that worked.

Tonight, I started reading Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work by Gary Alan Fine, a book I picked up simply because I’ve never seen a sociological study of my workplace and it looked interesting. It is. He begins by talking about the pace of the kitchen line during service and the necessity for good preparation

The challenge of cooking (and much work) is less what is done than the relationship among acts . . . The nearly impossible is routine because cooks are experienced enough to adjust their speed and sequencing to meet demands of the arc of work – the totality of tasks . . . Cooking under pressure demands attention to an internal agenda. (21-22)

He went on to define three ways that cooks get the job done under pressure: approximations (techniques that “defy the primacy of formal rules”), shortcuts (“improper” that bend or break the rules), and tricks of the trade (contained within the boundaries of the occupation as “subcultural knowledge”). As he continued describing approximations, Fine talked about the idiosyncratic changes in a recipe from one batch to the next is not discernable to most customers.

The evanescent character of cooking, distinguishing it from most other arts that are either material or can be captured in written, auditory, or visual record, allows for imprecision that is not possible elsewhere. Memory is a capricious judge.

That I spend my days in the kitchen rather than the woodshop makes it no surprise that cooking is a more accessible metaphor than carpentry, so I’ve been intrigued with the thought of approximations, shortcuts, and tricks of the trade being part of the way we put our lives together. I understand Fine’s distinctions between the three in this way:

• approximation: what we have to change when we don’t have everything we need to accomplish what we need to do;
• short cut: what we do when we allow ourselves to believe the end justifies the means;
• tricks of the trade: the things we’ve handed down about how to get through this thing we call life

I find it interesting that he lists all three as if equal (or at least I read it that way) and yet only two of them feel legitimate to me. Life lived well relies on intentionality more than precision, so there is room for approximating and knowledge passed along, but there’s not room for shortcuts because they undermine our integrity. Some things you just have to do.

One of the most intriguing details around Jesus’ death is what happens to the disciples. They were, understandably, grief stricken and scared. They didn’t know Easter Sunday was only a couple of days away. So they went back to their old jobs: they went fishing. In the face of their despair, they leaned into their muscle memory, to the things their bodies could do without thinking, got in their boats and went back to their old jobs. They were not prepared for the change of circumstance and had little, if anything at all, to lean into as far as precedent. They had hung their lives on Jesus’ words and actions and he was dead. They were left with handfuls of pieces that didn’t fit anywhere and, as far as anything they had built, they only had each other.

As we mark these days when Jesus lay dead, it seems we, like the disciples and the cooks Fine describes, have to come to terms with “the relationship among acts” and how we move from the shadow of the Cross to being Resurrection People. In faith, too, we are faced with the prospects of accommodations, short cuts, and tricks of the trade, with much the same consequences I described earlier. There are no shortcuts from Friday to Sunday that are worthy of making. Our faith has been handed down to us in the sharing of Communion and the singing of hymns, in the smiles and hugs and words exchanged in parish halls and parking lots. We live lives of accommodation because we live our faith out in relationship to God and to one another. That we gather together in these days to await the Resurrection in the face of a world that knows mostly of death, well, sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: holy week

I realize my posts have leaned heavily towards the poetic, over the past several days in particular. Yes, it is National Poetry Month, but that’s not the reason. Part of the reason is it’s easily eleven-thirty before I even begin to write at night and I am finding it increasingly challenging to stay up long enough for a thousand coherent words to show up. Part of it is I’m being fed by reading and writing poetry these days. So here, in the dregs of my day, is tonight’s offering.

holy week

is slipping by
while I’m at work
(so are a lot of things)
and I wonder how it felt
the first time around
looking for donkeys
and upper rooms
holy errands, yes but
still things to do
by the time they sat
down for dinner
thursday evening
I wonder how much
they spent talking shop
until Jesus took the bread
and broke the whole
thing wide open

or perhaps it’s just
what I hope will
happen to me

Peace,
Milton