finding words

There are days I go out looking for words and, then, there are days that words come out looking for me, or at least stand hitchhiking by the road I’m on such that I can’t help but stop and pick them up. Today was a hitchhiking day. On my usual wandering through The Writer’s Almanac, I found this poem by Julie Cadwallader-Staub, who (from what I could find) lives in Vermont, works for a nonprofit, and writes poetry. Today was her first time to be selected by Garrison Keillor, and I am so glad he chose to let her poem flag me down this evening.

Reverence

The air vibrated
with the sound of cicadas
on those hot Missouri nights after sundown
when the grown-ups gathered on the wide back lawn,
sank into their slung-back canvas chairs
tall glasses of iced tea beading in the heat

and we sisters chased fireflies
reaching for them in the dark
admiring their compact black bodies
their orange stripes and seeking antennas
as they crawled to our fingertips
and clicked open into the night air.

In all the days and years that have followed,
I don't know that I've ever experienced
that same utter certainty of the goodness of life
that was as palpable
as the sound of the cicadas on those nights:

my sisters running around with me in the dark,
the murmur of the grown-ups' voices,
the way reverence mixes with amazement
to see such a small body
emit so much light.

The phrase that made me pull over and stop was “that same utter certainty of the goodness of life” because I’m acutely aware of the flow of sadness and struggle in the lives of so many folks around me these days. And I’m also aware of my propensity to allow the minutiae of my life to build up into a layer of funk and frustration that blinds me from gratitude. Our friends Lori and Terry came over for dinner last night. Lori was talking about the caladiums starting to bloom in their yard and Terry, who had spent the day power washing the mold and mildew off the side of their house, said he didn’t see the flowers because he was too fixated on the “gunk.”

“Once you start looking for it, you can get obsessed,” he said.

But he had his harmonicas with him and I pulled out my guitar and we played and sang our way to a couple of cicada moments, telling stories and sharing laughter late into the evening, giving us a chance to brush up against the goodness and lay the gunk aside, even if only for a few hours.

One of the questions I regularly ask myself is, “Why does my faith matter to me?” Why am I a Christian, a believer, a follower of Jesus? What difference does it make? (Perhaps that last one is better asked, “What difference do I let it make?”) For all of the great sweeping answers I might give about the fate of the world, I’m mostly asking on a day-t0-day level: what does it matter that I am a Christian while I chop celery and onions?

The poet reminded me of the answer: that same utter certainty of the goodness of life.

I’m not claiming hope as a uniquely Christian possession, and I am saying, to paraphrase an old hymn, my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus. (Wow. I’m not sure this blog has ever sounded quite that evangelical.) One of the underpinning message of the Incarnation is it is good to be human. We were birthed out of God’s imagination, breathed into existence as evidence of that same utter certainty of the goodness of life. Jesus came into this world as a human being to call us to be fully human: full of grace and gratitude, awake to all that God has for us to see and do. That sense of goodness doesn’t disregard the suffering or overlook the grief, but it does say I am here to do more than get mired down in the details or let my heart get covered over with gunk.

In my ramblings, I’m afraid I might be weaving two or three strands into a confusing cord (chord?), so I want to be clear. I am, as I said, aware of several close to me who are hurting deeply for various and very serious reasons. I’m not saying they are covered with gunk. I am saying the poem today did a little power washing of its own to remind me how easy it is for my eyes to get gunked up such that I can’t see those who need so desperately for me to remember I can be a carrier of compassion and redemption, should I choose to be the human being I was created to be. I, like the cicadas and the fireflies, have a chance to offer a glimpse of that utter goodness to loved ones sitting in the dark if I am willing to look at my life as more a gift and a call and less as a series of frustrations, which is another way of saying I can choose to incarnate my faith, to let reverence mix with amazement. Or not.

I woke up this morning with an old hymn in my head and found myself singing in my mind:

stand up stand up for Jesus
ye soldiers of the cross
life high the royal banner
ye must not suffer loss
from victory unto victory
his army shall he lead
till every foe is vanquished
and Christ is Lord indeed

The odd thing is we didn’t sing that hymn last night and the whole battle metaphor doesn’t do much for me spiritually. With all my heart I know we must suffer loss after loss after loss if we stand up and follow Jesus. My faith isn’t worth much if it’s focused on looking for a fight. I’m grateful, then, that this poem flagged me down in the waning hours of this early evening and asked me to hear a different song, a cicadian rhythm of redemption accompanied with a firefly light show inviting me to welcome the gathering dark with reverence and amazement.

You’re welcome to ride along; there’s plenty of room.

Peace,
Milton

P.S. -- There are new recipes here and here.

goutez, goutez, goutez

I have a growing shelf of books about the experience of being a chef, thanks to my friend Mia who is kind to send one at every birthday and Christmas, and sometimes in between. This Christmas’ offering was The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. The book has both interested and encouraged me.

I had to run an errand on the way to work one day last week and ended up with a few minutes in the parking lot before I had to be in the kitchen, so I pulled the book out to read for a bit. In the middle of the chapter I was reading, Flinn described the Chef making a consommé:

Chef carefully removes the clarifying ingredients and pours the consommé through a passoire. He tastes again with his spoon. Satisfied, he adds perfectly diced vegetables.

“Goutez, goutez, goutez,” Chef begins. “C’est tres important . . .”

Anne translates. “Always taste, taste, taste, as you cook. Chef Guillard believes this is very important. If you wait until a dish is done, then it is too late to fix the seasonings. You must taste everything as you go along, every ingredient.”

Thursday night it was Chef #2 and me in the kitchen again. Tuesday night I had made a concerted effort to approach things differently. I had a much shorter prep list for him and worked hard to frame things so I didn’t play into an adversarial relationship. He seemed more accommodating as well, and the evening went OK. Part of the change I made was to take the lead in calling the tickets as they came in and give him a more limited responsibility, and he responded well, leading me to rethink my assumption that the problem was his lack of passion; perhaps he was just struggling to keep up. Thursday night, we saw our first customer a little before six (we open at five) and our last just after eight – in between there were sixty-seven others who came, unannounced, for dinner. In that time frame, also, the printer in the kitchen became temperamental after we changed the paper and a couple of tickets got lost. One of our servers, in particular, became discombobulated.

Duke Dining Services sends anonymous students in from time to time to evaluate all the eating establishments on campus. (You can see this coming, can’t you?)

The server came back first to ask if a customer could get an appetizer portion of the Butternut Squash Ravioli. My answer was yes. Several minutes later, she came back with a ticket for said ravioli to be served with a medium steak. A crucial detail is I make the ravioli myself, but I can’t make them to order, so I freeze them. They have to be in the pasta water for a good four minutes to thaw and cook; when I pull them out of the water, I always press them to see if they are cooked before I drop them in the sauce to finish the dish. About the time we started the ravioli, six dessert orders came in, so I asked Chef #2 to finish the dish. He timed it with the steak, which had already been cooking, and sent them out together.

The ravioli came back. It was still frozen.

When the server returned, she said she had forgotten to write a Roasted Chicken Marsala on the ticket and needed one, as we say, on the fly. Once again, I needed Chef #2 to get it done. I was finishing the desserts as the dish went out. A few minutes later, one of our other servers came to tell me one of his friends was eating dinner with us and was doing an evaluation. I went out to see how their dinner had been and, yes, they were on the receiving end of all that I have just described.

Needless to say, we got a poor evaluation, which listed, among other things, that the ravioli was still cold and the Marsala was bland. I could hear the French Chef saying, “Goutez, goutez, goutez.”

My mind was full of woulda-coulda-shouldas. I should have gone out when the ravioli was sent back. I should have double-checked his dish before it went out. Then I moved on to the reality of our needing to send an order out every two minutes for two hours. Those things crossed my mind before I even got back to the kitchen. As I opened the kitchen door, I made a decision not to say anything to him about what had happened. Part of my choice was driven by my need to finish the inventory before I went home; part of it was I wasn’t up for a confrontation; part of it was I’d been in his shoes. I picked up my clipboard and finished my tasks.

We had had a good night. One table – a table with an evaluator – had gone bad. Next Tuesday, I thought, as we are getting ready for service, I will go over the evaluation and remind him to taste, taste, taste.

About that time, one of the other servers came in to tell me there was someone else in the dining room who wanted to speak with me. I went over to a customer seated close enough to the evaluator for him to have heard what had happened.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “I had the ravioli and it was amazing. The cinnamon pasta. The filling. I’ve never had anything like it.”

His order went out after the frozen one. While I was still doing desserts. And Chef #2 cooked it. I was grateful I had chosen not to speak to soon.

On Friday, I stopped by the used bookstore in our neighborhood because of a comment on my “Redemption Center” post that mentioned Flannery O’Connor. I got two of her books for about five bucks and came home to read the story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which tells the story of Julian and his mother, whom he despises for her unwillingness to change with the times. The story is set in the South, in the thick of the Civil Rights struggle. Julian and his mother are white, and they are riding on public transportation, which means blacks are on the bus as well. When she embarrasses him by her actions, he comes down both angrily and condescendingly. When the story ends, he is on the precipice of what O’Connor describes as “his entry into the world of guilt and shame.”

Perhaps the parallel is a bit overstated for what happened Thursday night, still it strikes me that the entry into the world of hurt presents itself, sometimes, as a clear gateway and other times as a trap door. I had decided Chef #2 was low on passion and high on attitude; I watched and listened a bit longer and found he’s trying to adjust to an environment that may not match his skill set. He does have some of the attitude, but not for the reasons I assumed.

We are often offered opportunity to enter the world of grace, and take those around us along. As I learned again Thursday night, most of the time I find that door by stumbling in.Like the chef tasting and tasting along the way as he prepared the soup, I had managed to find some redemption in the evening by moving slowly and not over-seasoning my responses.

At least I can see that looking back.

Peace,
Milton

redemption center

About a month ago, as I was sitting in church, my mind bounced from one hymnal to another as we sang something familiar from our song book and the next thing I knew the song playing in my head was an old Sunday night favorite from my Baptist days:

Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it
Redeemed by the blood of the lamb
Redeemed by his infinite mercy
His child and forever I am

(The tune most people know is this one, but my favorite is Aubrey Butler’s version.)

I spent about a week working through a blog post on what the word redeemed means to me, starting with licking S&H Green Stamps for my grandmother so we could go together to the Redemption Center and turn them in for stuff. When I was in seminary, I used to drive by the an S& H Redemption Center and imagine lines of people waiting to be changed, in much the same way I wish, when I hand my parking ticket to someone and ask to be validated that they would say, “You’re awesome.”

Every time I have tried to write about all of this over the last few weeks, I get here and I don’t know where to go. Though I love the melodies, I have always struggled with the sacrificial atonement as it was taught to me because I never understood who needed to be satisfied. (A discussion for another post or seven.) Somewhere along the way in my life, the word took on real meaning for me because of a phrase in the King James Bible that occurs twice (Ephesians 5:16 and Colossians 4:5):

redeeming the time.

I always read the phrase to mean making meaning out of what was happening. I came back to the phrase and my vain attempts at writing about redemption after reading the article on Bruce Springsteen in the new Rolling Stone that called out at me in the supermarket line this morning as I stopped to buy cereal and applesauce on the way to work. As he talked about how he grew into his life as a rock singer, he said,

But if you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just being you, you start to communicate. I wanted to be a part of the world around me.

Wait – there’s more.

All you want is for your voice to be part of the record, at a particular time and place. You try to be on the right side of history. And maybe some other kid will hear that and go, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like the place I live.”

At the risk of being overly quoteful, one more:

And the fire I feel in myself and the band – it’s a very enjoyable thing. It carries an element of desperateness. It also carries an element of thankfulness. We are perched at a place where we want to continue on – with excellence. That’s our goal. And all the rest of the stuff – we’re gonna figure it out.

Though I wonder if Fanny Crosby and Bruce have ever been mentioned together in a blog post before, I have no doubt she knew of the creative tension between desperation and gratitude that Springsteen so beautifully names. If the two were street names, we would know the address of the redemption center: that place where we continue on with excellence, figuring the rest of the stuff out.

Peace,
Milton