lenten journal: telling stories

I spent the morning and early afternoon at the Third Annual Jack Crum Conference on Prophetic Ministry at Avent Ferry United Methodist Church in Raleigh. My primary connection to the event was through my friendship with Ryan Rowe, who is a member of the church and the organizer of this year’s conference. He asked me to help with the food.

The conference is named for a former pastor of the church who was responsible for helping the church to galvanize its identity in the midst of the civil rights struggle. In 1958, they were meeting in a dairy barn that belonged to a rich benefactor. The church was an all white congregation. Crum invited James Lawson, an African-American and fellow Methodist, to come a preach. The man who owned the barn, and who was also going to donate land to let them build a church, said if Lawson came he would evict them and take back his land.

Ryan read part of the sermon Crum preached the following Sunday, prior to Lawson taking the pulpit. “Money cannot buy our witness,” he said. And then he repeated himself. Then Crum went on to say the second galvanizing principle was to stand against those who were wrong but “to love them in the midst of their wrongness.” “Speaking the truth without love,” said Crum, “is not Christian.”

And then, fifty-three years later, James Lawson himself stepped once again into the pulpit of Avent Ferry UMC. This man who went on from that Sunday in 1958 to pastor in India, to study with followers of Gandhi, to help found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to train civil rights activists in nonviolent actions, to ride in the last stages of the Freedom Rides when the early riders had been beaten down, to pastor in Memphis and work with Martin Luther King to organize the sanitation workers stood up today to stand with those working to keep a well integrated and successful school system in Raleigh from being taken apart by forces reminiscent of those who opposed him fifty years ago. He spoke with a gentle and calm authority, not as one who had something to prove nor as a hero in the fading light, but as one who knew how to speak the truth in love and still had some truth to speak.

He talked about how hard it is to read the gospel stories of Jesus because we find it hard to let him be human, to really see him in the stories. “If you want to understand the stories of Jesus,” he said, “read a biography of Gandhi or Martin Luther King.” The fact that we were sitting in a room with no stained glass windows seemed perfect to me in that moment: he was calling us to see in new and clear images.

His words reminded me of something I read in Nathan Brown’s book, Letters to a One-Armed Poet, which chronicles his grief in the loss of one of his best friends. In a piece called “Nip and Tuck,” he writes,

I’ve buffed out so many scratches and dings in the paint of our stories, I now worry about their cosmetic integrity.

At the same time, “the truth” has always felt like salty taffy in my mouth – the way it yanks on loose teeth and takes forever to digest. And “the facts” of any matter seldom make people lean forward in their customary seats . . . seats on the front rows of lives that are filled enough already with the hassle and boredom of “what actually happened.”

Right now I’m reading The Great Gatsby with my American Literature class at school – me for about the tenth time, they for the first. Though I’ve read it with students several times, I’ve also reread it four or five times on my own because I am captured by the writing and the way the story unfolds. No matter now many times I read it, there is always something new to find there.

I love to tell the story
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest

So sings one of my favorite hymns. Thinking about what Lawson had to say this morning, what Gatsby thinks about looking across the water at Daisy’s green light, what Nathan meant by “buffing and shining,” I wonder what are the stories of Jesus – the ones with the scratches and dents of humanity and hope?

We’ve often done a pretty good buffing job on the gospels over the years to make them fit nicely into our anthology of culture and faith. We can talk, for instance, about the gruesomeness of the Crucifixion and focus on Jesus’ suffering because he died for us and also, perhaps, because we don’t have to feel it firsthand. When the call of the story is for compassion and voluntarily taking on the pain of the poor and marginalized, we’ve move more quickly to metaphor. When it’s something we can’t fit comfortably into our categories, we explain it away as being added by church tradition or later inserts. When it comes to our weekly lectionary readings, we just skip over the hard parts. The prospect of a “taffy” truth that leaves us toothless and disquieted is more than we want to face on most days.

I was reading Marcus Borg’s blog tonight, looking for information on his new book, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored, and found these words:

But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make the afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.

Violent revolution? No. Non-violent revolution? Yes.

Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.

Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.

Yes, and we have church buildings and jobs and families and debts and obligations and other stuff we want to do. In the jukebox that is my mind, I cue the Beatles:

you say you want a revolution
well you know we don’t want to change the world

My friend Burt called tonight while I was cooking dinner. We’ve been close friends since college – a long time ago, now. It had been awhile since we talked, so we both had stories to tell along with new scratches and dents to share. When we were younger, we thought we would change the world.

I think there’s still time.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in the middle

The Fifth of April is an unusual first day of school, but today was just that for my students and me as we began our new chapter and sat down together for our first class in our new building. In each of my three English classes, we were also beginning novels. Here are their opening lines:

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

(I’ll post the book titles a bit later; see if you know them.)

Reading the first lines of novels always reminds me of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks for “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” The contest is named for Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote this jewel before there even was a contest:

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. (Paul Clifford, 1830)

In 2010, this sentence won the prize:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

Speaking of bad beginnings, as I write my beloved Red Sox, picked by many to win the AL East if not the World Series, lost another game, which means they are now 0-4 to begin the season. All of us good Sox fans are quick to lean into what the old song says, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”

In the middle of this first day – during my free period – I read Letters to One-Armed Poet, which is the wonderful work of my friend Nathan Brown chronicling his grief before and after the death of his dear friend and fellow poet, Jim Chastain. In a piece called “Walking Shadows,” Nathan writes,

And I’d’ve liked an ending more like Butch and Sundance –
revolvers firing and flashing as we strut and fret our way out into a certain, yet glorious death.

But the disease forced you to follow the script, even though none of the actors in the screenplay liked it.

So, we played our parts. . . planted our poems like literary landmines in the red dirt and brimstone of the Southwest . . . until . . . your hour upon the stage was up.

Sometimes the endings aren’t what we hoped either – and often for reasons beyond our reach.

Here’s a shout out to the middles.

Nathan quotes from Jim’s poem “Folding the Laundry” in another piece:

Today is the future
if tomorrow never comes.

Why not insist on
a few interesting moments


                             every


                day?

We have moved far enough into Lent for Ash Wednesday to be a memory, yet Resurrection Morning is still several sunrises away. This is gut check time for me in my journaling: am I going to keep my promise to write every night? In this particular venture, I don’t get a shot at a make up. Either I wrote every night or I didn’t. Granted, there’s not a whole lot riding on my writing, other than my promise to God and to myself. Still, the exercise and discipline has far reaching implications, should I be willing to lean in and learn, or re-learn, I should say. Every beginning has a back story, every ending a trail of preparation. In the middle is what makes all the difference.

My friend Joy Jordan-Lake has a blog where she explores the writing process. Recently she wrote about Kate DiCamillo, who wrote Tale of Despereaux.

If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.

One hour.

Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.

One hour. Two pages. Coffee.

After my new first day of school, I went to get my prescriptions refilled, got some milk at King’s Red and White, happened upon my friends Mike and Becky and their new “Pie Pushers” pizza truck and got to see what it looks like in person, and then picked up my father-in-law from the Senior Center where he goes during the day as his Alzheimer’s continues to disappear him a little at a time, and then came home to cook dinner. The day held beginnings and endings, pasts and pendings, hopes and hurts and home, like most any other day in the middle of my life as far as I know.

It was a good day.

Peace,
Milton
P. S. The novels are Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and The Great Gatsby.

lenten journal: an open letter to an old friend

for David Gentiles

it’s not the anniversary
of anything other
than the second March
without you here
still you showed up
unexpectedly at a meeting
I had with some people
to talk about a dream

and then again tonight
in Nathan’s new book
though I had a hunch
you might be in there
but you snuck up on me
when I sat down to write
with the innocence mission
as background singers --

one friend writes,
everything is changing
while the day sky stays blue
changing around him
and me without you
waiting for you to arrive
where does the time go
where does the time go

-- and then I remembered . . .
it’s opening day
your Indians are in first
for at least a few days
at least that’s what I said
to the picture on the desk
both of us smiling at Christy’s
wedding like old friends

Peace,
Milton