lenten journal: opening day

Ginger, Rachel, and I got up early to catch a flight from Love Field in Dallas back to Durham. The flight was fine, though the route required of us to stop in Austin and Nashville on the way. And all we did was stop. We never got off the plane. By the time we got to the house, it was around four o’clock and I had time to turn on the Opening Day game between the Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers. I started watching in the top of the ninth as the Sox came back from a 2-0 deficit to tie the game and raise my hopes. They went on to lose it in the bottom of the inning. I went on upstairs to change clothes and get ready for our Maundy Thursday service at church.

The Lenten road to Easter and Opening Day are intertwined rites of spring for baseball fans. Some years ago when I was serving as Associate Pastor of First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts we were beginning our morning worship on a Sunday that happened to mark the Red Sox opener when one of the men stood up with the hymnal open and said, “Here are the words we need for today” –

time like an ever rolling stream
bears all its sons away
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day

As one who finds deep meaning in the ritual of Communion as well as the game of baseball, I was grateful to also find a poem (poetry being the third member of my personal trinity, I suppose) that resonated.

Baseball
by Gail Mazur

(for John Limon)

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks
of in Breughel’s Icarus,
or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other and moving up and down
continuously for more beer

and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown,
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,
manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away

One thing can be said of both baseball and faith: if you make an error you can still come home.

Play ball. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: asked and answered

Brothers and sisters, from where have you come?

Such was the question that greeted us as we prepared to share Communion in our Maundy Thursday. Those of us scattered across the sanctuary had come from different places. The answer we were called to give in unison was compelling:

We have come from the dust, and from the earth, and from the breath of God.

I had spent the afternoon digging in the dirt, planting azaleas and hydrangeas and camellias and gardenias and all the other things that ought to grace the front yard of a Southern home. I looked down at my hands to see the dirt still under my fingernails. One of the reasons I love gardening is because of how it has helped me deal with my depression. Something about digging in the dirt centers me, encourages me – and it appears to be at an existential and theological level: I am handling the very building blocks of my existence. The difference between me and the topsoil is breath. God’s breath. Ginger begins most every service as she did tonight, inviting us to sit still and then “Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.” It is a distilled metaphor of the flow of life: from breath to love, all belonging to God. As we sat in the pew, I could feel the air in my own lungs and hear my breathing, thanks to my allergies. The questions continued:

And why have you come?

Again, none of us was there for the same reason, or so I assumed. I was one of the readers in the Tennebrae service; I was also there because I love this service as much as any during the year. And, again, we were called to answer in unison:

We have come to receive the bread and the cup: the bread and the cup of promise, the bread and the cup of remembrance, the bread and the cup of hope.

Tonight after church, Ginger and I went to Six Plates, a wonderful wine bar here in town, to celebrate our twenty-first anniversary. We ordered the cheese plate, as we always do when we go there. Tonight, Manchego cheese was one of the offerings. It reminded me of the Manchego crème brulee I had at the Magnolia Grill on my first birthday in Durham. It was amazing. When I mentioned it, we began recalling great meals and dishes we had had together. Life happens around the table, in the making of meals and memories, in the sharing of food and friendship. And, on this night, it all came down to a meal for Jesus and those who loved him.

What is the bread and the cup of promise?
The bread and the cup of promise is Christ Jesus our Lord. We come to receive the promise of his life in ours.

Twenty-one years ago, Ginger and I looked into each other’s eyes and made promises. Outrageous promises. We used time tested words about better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health without knowing what lie ahead. We were mostly committing ourselves to grow into the promises. I read the passage tonight that described Peter denying he even knew Jesus – not once, but three times, each one more vociferous. Then he heard the rooster and remembered he had promised he would be true to the end. In the next week or two, we will read the story of the next meal Jesus and Peter shared together – a meal in which the promise was restored because of who Jesus was in his life.

What is the bread and cup of remembrance?
The bread and cup of remembrance is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to remember Jesus and his life in ours.

Most any time I come to Communion and we talk of remembering, I think of a youth camp many years ago when Kenny, who was the camp pastor, asked us to identify the opposite of remember, to which most answered, “Forget.”

“No,” he said. “The opposite of remember is dismember: to take apart. When we re-member Jesus in this meal, we put the Body of Christ back together again. Last weekend, Ginger and I sat around a table with Jay, Cherry, Julie, and Diane, who are our accumulated and intentional family. Over the years, we have chosen to put ourselves together and the bonds run deep. The call to re-member we are one in the Spirit is a call to remember love is an act of will, not an emotion.

What is the bread and the cup of hope?
The bread and the cup of hope is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to renew our hope in him and his life in ours.

Jesus shared the bread and cup with his disciples and was dead by the middle of the next afternoon. They knew nothing of Easter. They only knew the one they had trusted had been executed among common criminals. They ran. They hid. They went fishing. They went to the tomb. When it comes to acting out the Easter story, we know the Cross is not the Last Word. As Tony Campolo has preached more times than he can remember, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming . . . . In our daily lives, we, like the disciples, have no idea what tomorrow holds. We know only the pain and promise we find in today, and the hope we have mustered and saved from days gone by, based on the love we have found to be true. Or, perhaps untrue. Hope is keeping on. We hope when we set the alarm clock for tomorrow morning, when we plan whatever’s next, when we look beyond all that so easily besets us, when we sit down together for dinner.

After we answered the questions, we prayed and then we sang:

Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
In my heart in my heart
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart

And then we shared our meal of promise, remembrance, and hope together and went out into the night, knowing tomorrow is the day that marks God’s magnificent defeat,
and knowing we will gather again on Sunday morning for Resurrection and pancakes.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: traveling mercies

Several years ago, Ginger and I went to Las Vegas because we had never been. We were already in California for a gathering with my side of the family and we tacked on a couple of days and drove from San Diego to Vegas, staying – of course – at the Hard Rock Hotel. On the morning we were packing to leave, I walked down to put the suitcases in the car and ended up following three people, two men and a woman, out of lobby and out into the parking lot. For them, it was still the night before. As they walked, the woman said, “Well, I’ll you two things you always gotta know. You gotta know where you’re going and you gotta know where you’re at.”

“Hell,” said one of the men. “I’ve always known where I’m at, but I ain’t never known where I was going.”

Maundy Thursday is one of the markers in my life that reminds me, to borrow their grammar, where I’m at. Fifteen years ago, as best Ginger and I can remember, we got to go to Israel and Palestine and had a chance to, as the old song says, walk that day where Jesus walked. One of those places was the Garden of Gethsemane, where we were given a good bit of time to sit among the ancient olive trees, which our guide told us had root systems that could have dated back to Jesus’ time. Whether her information was factual didn’t matter; I was captured by the thought that we were in the same garden, the same piece of earth, where Jesus had prayed with his disciples. I sat on one of the benches in silence with one of the other folks on the trip for a while and then we began to sing one of the songs from Godspell, “On the Willows.” (I had recently sung the song in a production of the play at Cambridgeport Baptist Church, so it was fresh in my mind.)

on the willows there
we hung up our lyres
for our captors there
required of us songs
and our tomentors, mirth

saying sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
sing us one of the songs of Zion
how can we sing
sing the Lord’s songs
in a foreign land?

The roots became a metaphor of the thread of love and sorrow that reached across the centuries to find us in that garden, that place where Jesus had been in his darkest hour, after he had washed the dust of life from the feet of his friends knowing, as John so beautifully says, “he had come from God and was going to God.” He knew where he was and where he was going. That night, neither one held much comfort.

I came home from the Duke restaurant tonight to find a message from someone I have reconnected with, thanks to Facebook, who asked for the lyrics to a song Billy and I wrote years ago called "Traveling Mercies." She is going through a difficult time in her marriage and, she said, the song just popped into her mind today and she couldn’t find the old CD and did I have the words. By the time I read her words, a couple of other friends with whom we share history had “replied to the thread,” as Facebook calls it, leaving the lyric:

take bread for the journey and strength for the fight
comfort to sleep through the night
wisdom to choose at the fork in the road
and a heart that knows the way home

go in peace live in grace
trust in the arms that will hold you
go in peace live in grace
trust God’s love

All I had to add was

and for the faithful
and for the weary
and for the hopeful
here is my prayer . . . .

Maybe it’s not so much we have to know where we are as much as who we are. The gospel GPS that let Jesus know he had come from God and was returning to God served to be more identifier than locator: he was Love Incarnate, God made known in a way that had never happened before. Remembering who he was, he washed their feet, he prayed for them in the Garden, and then he went to the Cross because the thread of Love had to go through death to show us Love is the Last Word.

So, on this Maundy Thursday, I know who I am and who I’m with. That’s enough.



(Go in) Peace,
Milton