lenten journal: alive together

Last night I worked down at Fullsteam Brewery for their “Take a Pint Out of Crime” fundraiser to help replace the smoker someone stole a week or so ago. I was happy to help out because they are my neighbors and it is The Friendliest Room in Durham. I want to help make sure they are around for a long time. During the course of the evening, I got a text message from Leon, of Cocoa Cinnamon fame (they are $800 dollars away from $30K on their Kickstarter campaign that winds down at 2:45 EDT on Monday, in case you were wondering), asking if we were still in Waco. I wrote back and told him I was at Fullsteam until eleven; he showed up about 10:30 so we could have a beer together before I went home.

We are in the beginning stages of what I trust will become a friendship because of the resonance I feel with him even though I don’t know many of the stories that brought him to the stool next to me last night, nor does he know many of mine. But we did our best to tell at least a couple of them last night. As we talked about life and faith and coffee and beer and food and community, I said, “We do our best work when we start with what we share in common, with what bonds us to each other. Once there is trust and a relationship, we can talk about differences. We put up with a lot of crap from our friends we would never tolerate from strangers because they are our friends. We have already made the decision to stay.”

“You have that written down somewhere, don’t you?” he asked.

Well, I do now, Leon, I do now.

God didn’t roll away the stone on Easter morning so we could pick it up and throw it at each other. The gravity of faith pulls against the centrifugal force of most of the rest of life: we are called to be together, to include everyone, to love, love, love one another. The world doesn’t need any more self-appointed judges or experts, any more distributors of shame or guilt, any more zealots with clear consciences. We don’t need anymore fundamentalists, whether they are liberal or conservative. What the world needs are people committed to loving one another. The core message of the Resurrection is that Love conquers death. Not morality. Not orthodoxy. Not anything else. Love. Love. Love.

God is Love.

The point of our lives is not to be right or first or richest or more powerful. The point of our lives is to be together. To tell stories. To make memories. To drink beer and coffee and eat together. To feed and clothe one another. To make sure everyone is taken care of.

There you go, Leon – I wrote it down, my friend.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. – Over the next month my blog posting will be intermittent at best because I have to meet a manuscript deadline for a book on Communion that will be published in the fall. I will give more details as the time draws closer and, of course, will be happy to take preorders. Peace . . .

lenten journal: plotting the resurrection

First Fig 

 

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

 

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

I have kept my practice of a Lenten journal now for many years. This, however, is the first year I have tried to write and work two jobs. As I was driving home tonight, I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” which is a favorite and it led me to the following words.

plotting the resurrection

I’m not one to wax
eloquent about the
virtue of burning
out though I feel a
flicker of resonance
with her candle in
the way neither my
daylight nor dark
hold much room for
rest it appears
I have given up
sleep for lent sleep
for lent perhaps
on easter morning
I can nap in the
empty tomb no
one will be there

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #27

Mary came to the grave yard alone
expecting to pour out her grief;
and she met someone she should have known
even though their encounter was brief.

She stayed after the others had gone
back to town to tell Christ was alive;
in the light that came after the dawn
he called her – and her heart was revived.

And she walked with him and talked with him,
and he told her that she was his own;
her heart must have been filled to the brim –
more was rolled away than just a stone.

Share the words by which we are freed:
Christ is risen, risen indeed.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in tune with the land

When we moved into our house last summer, we moved into a home where the house had been fixed up (it was built in 1926), but the yard was – well – a trash heap, in the back at least. The front yard was mostly weeds, some prettier than others. Because we wanted Ginger’s dad to be able to enjoy the backyard, since we could secure it, we put our energy there, building a fence and a deck (thanks to our friend, Cameron) and, with the help and expertise of the folks at Bountiful Backyards, we turned the trash heap into an edible, beautiful landscape. This week, which has been my spring break from school, it was time to do something about the front. Ginger and I bought some plants, were given many more by Mary Anne, our generous neighbor, and I went to work.

I started this morning by digging a hole for a camellia and I kept hitting bricks. After about the sixth one (yes, I catch on quick) I realized I was hitting more than some random refuse. Rather than digging down, I started scraping the top layer off of what turned out to be a brick walkway that ran across half the yard. The bricks were in good condition and lined up beautifully. In the nearly ninety year history of our house, it has spent little time unoccupied. Granted, our neighborhood has been what is called euphemistically “transitional,” but people have been in the house. I had to wonder how people could forget a brick walkway. At the same time, I knew how people forget sidewalks and even cities. I remembered a passage from Annie Dillard’s wonderful book, For the Time Being.

New York City’s street level rises every century. The rate at which the dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortes walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago; the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall neat the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.

Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place but to forestall burial. (123)

I planted azalea bushes that are about eighteen inches tall, a Japanese maple seedling that after three years has almost grown two feet, a hydrangea that isn’t much taller. Our neighbor to the right has one azalea that almost covers the whole front of her porch. She has no idea how old it is because it preceded her. Whoever planted them is long gone. Spending my day digging and planting was an exercise in mortality, in all that is temporal. I was not doing eternal work. I was planting living things whose days, like mine, are numbered. And, somehow, I was enlivened by the process. After seven hours of hard work, I came in energized as much by the process as whatever I might have accomplished.

About the time I bought Annie Dillard’s book, I also heard Dave Mallet sing. I used to volunteer to run sound at Club Passim in Cambridge MA and he was one of the performers I worked with. He had a number of very cool songs, but the one he is perhaps most remembered for is called “The Garden Song,” or as it is often referred, “Inch by Inch, Row by Row.” One of the verses says:

Grain for grain, sun and rain
Find my way in nature's chain
Tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land

The last two lines describe how I felt digging around today: in tune with the land, with the eternity that lives in passing moments and daily gestures of mortality, with the hope I find in planting something I will not see full grown, with the connections in the conversations with passing neighbors, with the holy that lives in hard work. I have spent the day in the dirt, the very stuff we are made of, planting things that will bloom and die.

I am ready for resurrection.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #25

First the news of Lazarus dying
before Jesus had time to get there --
Then the image of Jesus crying
must have giv’n the disciples a scare . . .

He got to the tomb and called out his friend,
with the others saying, “He stinketh” –
they had no idea death was no end,
Jesus said, “Death is not what you thinketh.”

God showed Ezekiel a valley of death
then gift wrapped bones in new life and skin –
God’s subversive pow’r in every breath:
in our endings is where God begins

touching that miraculous circumstance
where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance*

Peace,
Milton

*with grateful appreciation to Mark Heard

the last word

I preached this morning at our church here in Durham as the culmination of a study we did on the Book of Job. This is the text of my sermon, "The Last Word."

Only four Saturdays have passed since a group of us gathered to study the story of Job together, and yet way more than a month of life seems to have passed by since then. One of the things that has changed for me is I have returned to teaching high school English, which means I’m once again reading books with my students. My ninth grade class is reading Night, Elie Weisel’s personal account of surviving not one but five concentration camps as a teenager, finally being freed from Buchenwald by the Allied forces, but not before having lived through brutal and dehumanizing things that hit at the core of his faith. As he describes one experience he writes:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never.

We read those words in class and I thought of Job and the string of surviving servants who showed up to tell him who and what had been destroyed. I thought of Job sitting on the garbage heap, scraping his open sores with a piece of broken pot as his wife implored him to “curse God and die.” I returned to our discussions around the tables in the Fellowship Hall where we listened to Job’s friends try to explain his suffering by blaming him or giving some sort of pat answer, but never really listening, never being willing to share the pain with him. And I wondered why his tragedy didn’t murder God or destroy his faith. “I know my Redeemer lives,” he said, even as he struggled to find God in the midst of his anguish.

We don’t have to look back to Job, or even look far to find similar examples of devastation. This morning, people in Mississippi are digging out from under the damage of the tornadoes that touched down there. The families and friends of the miners who died in West Virginia are gathering for a memorial service. They have still not found the eleven workers who were on the oil rig that blew up earlier this week. Though the stories are no longer attractive to our media, Haiti and Chile and China still live in the aftermath of earthquakes. Ginger and I were in New Orleans this week and heard people tell their stories of life after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. And we have not even talked about Darfur and Congo, AIDS, malaria, or those who starve to death daily in our world, as wellas the personal and overwhelming pain that comes with depression, or Alzheimer’s, or financial hardship, or severe illness.

It doesn’t take long in this life to get to a place where we ask where God is, as Job did, or seek to offer some sort of explanation as to why life has turned sour, as his friends were quick to do. “You’ve done something wrong,” they said to Job. “This must be your fault somehow because God wouldn’t do this to a good person.” “It’s your fault; repent and God will fix everything.”

Isn’t it great to have friends who care?

Job took all that was heaped upon him, including the lectures and advice, and kept calling God to show up and answer for what was going on. Finally, God did show up – or perhaps we are better to say God revealed God’s self because when God spoke the voice came “out of the whirlwind” – from the center of the struggle. God was in the middle of the storm, not as the cause, but as a Presence. And when God spoke, God did not say anything about Job’s sin or who was at fault or why Job had managed to pull the house down on himself and his family. God didn’t give any advice or offer any explanations at all. God asked questions.

Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? . . . Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?

God called Job to a different sense of perspective.

Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Telescope (as a follow up to our wedding, I’m sure). NPR has a wonderful story asking different scientists to pick out their favorite Hubble image over the years. One chose “The Ultra Deep Field,” which was taken by aiming the telescope at what appeared to be an empty patch in the night sky and left the lens open for about eleven days, soaking up all the light it could see and capturing the oldest light ever seen by humanity. The frame is full of tiny dots of light, each one, the astronomer said, containing a hundred million stars – all in a space we thought was empty.

“When I gaze into the night sky,” the psalmist wrote, “and see the wonders of your hand, who are we as humans that you are mindful of us?”

We are called to hold together the depth of pain and suffering that makes up our world, as we see at Auschwitz or in Rwanda or in the poverty of Haiti or the aftermath of Katrina along the Gulf Coast or in our personal struggles, and the wonder we have been shown by Hubble reminding us that if we leave our eyes open long enough in the dark the light, the ancient light as old as creation, will finally shine.

Francois Mauriac wrote in the foreword to Night,

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to God.

All is grace. Listen closely: all is grace. We do not earn suffering anymore than we earn the love that God pours out on us from the moment we are breathed into existence. Life is difficult, sometimes even crushing, but not because we deserve to be crushed.

And our God is one who is acquainted with grief, who bears our grief, who never stops making stars, and who speaks out of the storm. Our God is one who responds to our cries, rather than simply answer our questions. Our God is stronger than death and destruction, more tenacious than any cancer or circumstance, more loving than any sense of alienation or worthlessness.

This is our Resurrection Story: all is grace; the last word for each of us belongs to God. And that word is Love: unfailing, unflinching, unending Love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: resurrection

we stood in the columbarium
well after sunrise
to speak of resurrection
with the names of those
who share death in common
as our backdrop
the whistle of trees
our soundtrack and
the promise of pancakes
waiting for us inside

as we retold the story I heard
the passive verb:
the stone was rolled away
as though coming back
to life were as easy as
sliding a door to find
the tomb as empty
as a bag of oreos
only the wrapper left
next to a smiling angel

later thomas would ask to
see Jesus' pierced palms
but they only show he died
you must turn the hands over
look at the heart whose
knuckles are skinned
tiny cuts of commitment
fingernails filled with hope
coming back to life means
putting your shoulder into it

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: getting started

Yesterday, Ginger, Cherry, and I took part in an “urban hike” through our neighborhood of Old West Durham to learn our way around a bit more and to learn some of the history of our neighborhood. John Schelp, the president of our neighborhood association, led the hike and dispersed the information. He did an amazing job of mixing old stories and facts with architectural notes about some of the houses and discussing current issues for our neighborhood. I learned, for instance, that John Loudermilk, who wrote “Tobacco Road,” was born in a house that stood at the end of our block, that Duke Tobacco was the only tobacco company in America before the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the dry cleaning industry grew out of the demise of icehouses. The tour led me back to the OWNDA website, where I found this quote:

For each home ground we need new maps, living maps, stories and poems, photographs and paintings, essays and songs. We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart.
-- Scott Russell Sanders

Some years ago (OK, many years ago), Skip Waterbury, the senior pastor at the church in Winchester, preached a sermon on the first sentence of the Gospel of Mark: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Actually, the point of his sermon was that those words were not the first sentence but more like a title for the whole document. Jesus’ life was the beginning of his gospel and we continue it. Or not.

In the middle of a wonderful Easter service today, both Scott and Skip joined me in worship as we sang the second verse to Charles Wesley’s wonderful Resurrection hymn, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”

Love’s redeeming work is done, alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, alleluia!

Ginger will be the first to tell you I am not a fan of altering hymn lyrics, even though it is quite fashionable for hymnal committees to do so (and most of the changes read like poetry written by committee). Still, as we sang those words I wanted to change them because, even as much as Jesus’ Resurrection cosmically changes things, Love’s redeeming work was not done that first Easter morning. Even Jesus wasn’t finished yet. And I thought of Skip’s take on Mark and then rewrote the line in my head:

Love’s redeeming work’s begun, alleluia!

Of course, my lyric shows the danger of playing with hymn texts because Love’s redeeming work began long before Jesus, going back to, well, “In the beginning, God . . .” I will, however, leave that tangent for another post. Tonight, I’m sticking with my words and how they call me to see myself – to see all of us – as participants in Love’s redeeming work on both sides of the equation. Like Russell said, we need new maps and stories, new art and action, that “we may dwell in our place with a full heart.”

At our sunrise service this morning, we sang:

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me

If Love’s redeeming work were done, there would be no need for such a prayer. But Jesus started it and then left us here in the ‘hood to draw new maps, build new homes, write new hymns (!), and redeem one another, even as we are redeemed. Celebrating the Resurrection is not merely celebrating a done deal but opening our hearts to brought back to life everyday. In the face of all there is in the world that says death is the final word and violence is what humans instinctively do to one another, we are called to bring God’s redeeming word of Love.

Love is the last word, not death.

Yet we are far from the last word and need to remember that from now until then Love is the word. We are called to love the world right down to those people we look in the eye everyday. Christ the Lord is risen today, which means we must commit ourselves to beginning Love’s redeeming work once again.

Alleluia.

Peace,
Milton

P.S. – Thus endeth this year’s Lenten Journal. I’m taking tomorrow off.

symphony

I turn down our tree-lined streets,
the empty branches reaching skyward
yearning skeletons just now beginning
to show signs of new life, the groans of
creation tuning up like an orchestra
preparing to play a new symphony.

Yet, the trees have not been silent all winter.
Their shadow song is harder, but a melody
nonetheless. The strains of pain and silence
are not easy playing or listening, yet an essential
movement to inform the resurgent joy that
comes with recreation, reawakening, rebirth --

and I am Nicodemus, wondering how we, as
collective Creation can carry all our weight
and worry back into God’s womb and come
forth singing a new song. Biology breaks down
in ways melody does not. We aren’t going
back, but forward, from womb to womb,

birth to birth, song to song, from God to God,
moving symphonically from stark to lush,
from solo to emsemble, from pianissimo to
forte and back again. Newborn babies cry –
as do widows and orphans, the homeless and
the hopeful: tears are our shared melody.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: my redeemer lives

I've been staring at the screen for awhile now, trying to think of a way to bring this year's Lenten Journal to an end and I have not found them -- at least, I haven't found words of my own. What I have found are words I first heard on Bob Bennett's record, First Things First: the hymn, "My Reedemer Lives," written by Samuel Medley in 1775.

I know that my Redeemer lives;
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
He lives, He lives, who once was dead;
He lives, my ever-living Head.

He lives triumphant from the grave,
He lives eternally to save,
He lives all-glorious in the sky,
He lives exalted there on high.

He lives to bless me with His love,
He lives to plead for me above.
He lives my hungry soul to feed,
He lives to help in time of need.

He lives to grant me rich supply,
He lives to guide me with His eye,
He lives to comfort me when faint,
He lives to hear my soul's complaint.

He lives to silence all my fears,
He lives to wipe away my tears
He lives to calm my troubled heart,
He lives all blessings to impart.

He lives, my kind, wise, heavenly Friend,
He lives and loves me to the end;
He lives, and while He lives, I'll sing;
He lives, my Prophet, Priest, and King.

He lives and grants me daily breath;
He lives, and I shall conquer death:
He lives my mansion to prepare;
He Iives to bring me safely there.

He lives, all glory to His name!
He lives, my Jesus, still the same.
Oh, the sweet joy this sentence gives,
"I know that my Redeemer lives!"

I'm going to rest a day or two.

Peace,
Milton

unbreaking the circle

Back in the early nineties, the town of Waxahachie, Texas almost became famous for something other than the fact that my grandmother lives there. It was to have been the home of the Superconducting Super Collider, a fifty-four mile underground oval where super charged protons would be sent around in opposite directions and then collided when they made the circle, offering scientists to the chance to see what particles came out of the collision.

I have no idea what I’m taking about, but I did find this explanation from a guy who worked on the project (which was scrapped in 1993):

Imagine two rings of metal pipes, eighty-seven kilometers (fifty four miles) in circumference, running through a concrete tunnel several meters below ground. The pipes themselves, separated vertically by seventy centimeters (about two feet), are only a few centimeters in diameter. They are under high vacuum and encased in powerful electromagnets held at an ultra low temperature.

Inside the two pipes, narrow beams of protons whirl around the tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. The particles in these beams have been accelerated to an energy of twenty trillion electron volts. This is a huge energy for a single particle to carry: particles emitted by radioactive minerals reach energies less than one millionth as great.

At a few special points around the ring, in cavernous underground experimental halls, the beams are made to intersect. Although most of the protons simply pass by each other, there are so many protons in the beams that head on collisions occur a hundred million times every second. In each collision, energy of motion is turned to enormous heat in a tiny fireball.

From within this minute cataclysm, a shower of sub-nuclear particles among them, perhaps, a new and exotic one speeds fleetingly outwards. Sophisticated electronic detectors catch these evanescent particles, recording their speeds, directions, and types; and physicists around the world analyze these records for clues to the innermost nature of matter and the forces that hold it together.

Ginger and I went to the funeral of the spouse of a friend who lives in a nearby town. The last time we had been in that room was for their wedding two summers ago. Ann and Becky (not their real names) had been together for years and had two children, Massachusetts’ validation of equal marriage allowed them to become legally what they already were practically and spiritually. Last summer, Ann found out she had a rare form of cancer. This summer, she died.

Becky, the pastor of the church where the service was held and one of Ginger’s friends and colleagues, started the service with what she called “The Opening Act,” a sing-a-long with the choir and her playing guitar. And we sang,

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by

“That’s a question,” I thought to myself -- and then I thought of the Super Collider and what new things we see when things collide at the speed of life and leave us reeling in the wake of the explosion. I didn’t know Ann well, but the more I listened to her friends and family talk about her, the more I wish I had. We would have liked each other. She was a cook, a lover of food, a voracious reader, a teacher in both her character and her vocation, and one committed to hospitality. The four hundred or so people who packed the little church sang and talked and laughed and cried and told story after story. The altar was decorated with particles of the various aspects of her life. On most every wall were pictures of her with her kids, with Becky, with friends, at church. She was smiling in all of them. One of the things people talked about over and over was Ann’s determination to find meaning in her cancer. She wrote, she read, she talked, she prayed, and did everything she could think of also looking for “for clues to the innermost nature of matter and the forces that hold it together.”

And we sang and talked and prayed and laughed and cried trying to make meaning of her death. We left the church and stopped at a Dunkin Donuts so we could debrief and shift gears before I had to go to work and Ginger had to come home to finish working on her sermon. As we relived the service, I said, “As I watched us join together in the ritual of remembering, the phrase that kept running through my head was ‘hopeful futility.’” She nodded and we talked awhile longer.

Ann left behind a twelve-year old daughter and a nine-year old son. “Mama Ann,” as they called her, will not be there as they grow up no matter how many pictures are on the walls and how many stories Becky tells. Ann won’t be baking any more cakes or be there to be the catalyst for church dinners. She is gone. Dead. Therein lies the futility – a powerful word, but not the final one.

Hope inhabits the stories and the pictures, the joyful singing as tears ran down faces, the incarnational collision of grief and grace that creates possibilities for what “eye has not seen and ear has not heard.” Ann is with God. One day, we will be, too. Therein lies the hope. We will be with God. That’s the second half of the verse:

will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by
there’s a better home a-waiting
in the sky, Lord, in the sky.

I kept thinking about the question in the song as I cooked tonight, and began to hear it asking God if the circle would be repaired, or healed, on day: will it be un-broken? Will we realize how connected we are to God and to one another? Will we see what God can create out of the particles left from the collision of existence? The image that comes to mind is all of humanity sitting in a circle with God. There might even be a campfire. (Ohh – S’mores, too.)

My faith matters to me, mostly, because of what it means to me as I live these days. If Heaven were the only reason for believing, I don’t think I would make the choice. Today, as we sang of “being there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,” which sort of freaked me out as a kid, I realized I like the circle image better than the calendar. We all came from God and we are all going back to God. When the circle is unbroken, when it is complete, who knows what new possibilities will spring forth.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- I've posted the Chicken Marsala recipe.

lenten journal: life, clearly

I began my evening by checking in on Bloglines to see what various people had to say about their Easters. I found these words from Diana Butler Bass quoted on Scott’s blog, Nachfolge:

The resurrection is not an intellectual puzzle. Rather, it is a living theological reality, a distant event with continuing spiritual, human, and social consequences. The evidence for the resurrection is all around us. Not in some ancient text, Jesus bones, or a DNA sample. Rather, the historical evidence for the resurrection is Jesus living in us; it is the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, bringing back to life that which was dead. We are the evidence.

I love the heart of what she is saying and I got tripped up by the word evidence because I’m not one who feels my faith is something that needs to be proved or defended. When we studied apologetics in seminary, I never got past the idea that we were somehow saying we were sorry for something, even though apology has more than one definition. I think of evidence, first, as a courtroom word, but it, too, has more meanings: the etymology of the word from the Latin means “obvious” and “clear.”

We are those who make the Resurrection obvious or clear.

Here is what was clear to me today. I woke up this morning thinking about the last time we celebrated Easter. Ginger and I were in Athens as a part of her sabbatical on Orthodox Easter.

About ten till twelve, the priest went behind the doors and all the lights went out. Then he emerged with a big candle -- a torch, really -- and those closest clamored to light their candles from his and then began to move through the rest of the congregation. When all the candles were lighted, we all began to file out into the square in front of the church. The priest followed, chanting the whole time, until midnight came. He cried out in a loud voice, the bells rang, and fireworks went off in the street behind us. Everyone began to turn to one another:

“Christos anisti!”
“Alithos anisti!”

The translations are (according to the guy at the hotel):

“Christ is risen!”
“He has really done it!”

(I kept imagining a Greek teenager translating that: “He is so resurrected!”)

The day here was clear and cold. The winds of resurrection had a bite to them, but that didn’t stop my favorite tradition at our church. We have two services on Easter: a reflective service with Communion at nine and a family service at eleven. Ginger introduced the second service by saying, “If you came for a reflective service, this is not it.” After the service comes the best part: the egg hunt in the cemetery. In a tradition that long proceeds our time here in Marshfield, the children pour out of the church building and into the graveyard looking for the brightly colored eggs the youth group had hidden, if by hidden you mean left in fairly plain sight. Even in the cold, the parents and other adults stood as the children let life loose among the tombstones. (Note to self: ask for a good digital camera for Christmas.)

Many of the names on the markers are pivotal to the history of our congregation; some can still be found in those who fill the pews. The children in the cemetery made clear what’s been handed down, what is alive among and within us. We live among the tombs, well acquainted with death. We have all come, as Julie Miller sings, by way of sorrow. The graves are real and they are not the final word. Life goes on beyond the grave, beyond ourselves, beyond all we can imagine.

One of the kids was baptized today. In our UCC tradition, one would normally assume I was talking about a baby, but the little girl is almost ten. Her family was not in church when she was born and she asked to be baptized. I had the privilege of sitting next to her during worship. I, too, was baptized on Easter Sunday. When Ginger asked her if she wanted to follow Christ, the girl nodded her head energetically before she remembered she was supposed to speak the answer: “I do.” Her actions made her heart clear before she even opened her mouth.

Easter is the one holiday I don’t cook at home. The day is so full Ginger and I have not figured out a way to do everything and get home and eat before we fall asleep for the afternoon. Our intentional family here in Massachusetts is a little scattered, so we met in Boston at Stella for brunch. The food was yet another testimony to life (if you live anywhere near Boston, go eat there. Really. Quit reading and get to eating), as was the Easter Hippo I got in my basket. We sat at the table for a couple of hours, as is our custom, eating and drinking, talking and laughing, marking another moment in our lives together that makes clear we are better together than any one of us would be on our own.

I closed my Ash Wednesday reflection with these words:

One of my favorite benedictions in church is “The Lord bless you in your going out and you’re coming in.” When you think about it, that’s pretty much what we do on a daily basis: we go out and we come in. Either way, we’re blessed. I like the image of God in that blessing because God's presence is infused into every small and seemingly insignificant move we make filling our lives with the substance and flavor of Love, over and over and over again.

The truth in those words is clearer to me now than it was some forty days ago. Here are a few more words I wrote this morning before church, at Ginger’s request:

In the Garden

“He is not here,”
the angel said --
speaking of Jesus --
the only time those words
held any comfort.

“Where did he go?”
she asked, confused
and mostly afraid
that things had gone
from dead to worse.

“Mary,” he said
and she came to life
among the tombs,
the stone rolled away
from the door of her heart.

Christ is risen. He really did it!

Peace,
Milton

PS – for those of you who found this blog during Lent, my writing continues beyond the season, usually five or six days a week. I hope you’ll continue to check in. Peace.

lenten journal: dawn on me

I see more sunsets than sunrises at this stage of my life.

Tonight, I stepped out of the kitchen to take a short break just as the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Just above the silhouettes of the rooftops, the sky was still bright, but as my eye moved upward the brightness turned to a burnished orange and then through whatever spectrum of shades it takes to get to azure blue. From the azure, the blue deepened, as if my eye were sinking into the depths of the ocean rather than the expanse of the sky, until the blue was black enough for the stars to shine. Night fell softly like snow or a gentle rain rather than a guillotine.

Daylight comes the same way, just in reverse.

Most of the nights during Lent have required of me to write in the dregs of the day, so I’m usually under a deadline since we choose to say our days begin once the clock strikes twelve. The reason our days begin then is it was the only way to standardize time – or so said Sir Sanford Fleming, who developed the idea so trains could run efficiently. To standardize things required an arbitrary starting point: midnight. We‘ve continued to play with our clocks over the years, acting as if we can make time do what we say, but a day doesn’t begin in the middle of the night.

My days usually begin with Gracie, our youngest Schnauzer, pawing at my head to wake me up. If that doesn’t work, she lets out one pointed yelp right in my ear and then licks me when my eyes open. All of this happens somewhere between six-thirty and seven. As the days grow longer, her paw will move into action earlier, I assure you. Summertime around here means the windows are open all through the house. Most New England homes don’t have central air, so we turn on fans and pray for a sea breeze. Those early summer mornings are filled with waking sounds of birds and waves and people in our neighborhood, all sliding gradually into the beginning of the day.

In the world Jesus knew, days began and ended at sunset. What came first everyday was rest. Or maybe they ate and then went to bed. Halfway through the day, they got up and worked and walked and did whatever they needed to do before the day was over. We think of light as the beginning of the day; for Jesus, the day began in darkness and finished with light. They ate supper first and sang lullabies first. Dawn came later.

I wonder why we changed. (Actually I kind of wonder – my comment is mostly rhetorical.)

The day was half over when Mary went to the tomb to care for Jesus’ body. I can’t imagine she had rested well. The stone had been moved and Jesus was not where they had laid him, but the light fell gradually on Mary until it dawned on her what had happened when Jesus called her name. And just as it takes a while for the morning sun to vacuum up the shadows left from the night before, so the light moved gradually across Peter and John and the other disciples, finally landing on Thomas.

One of the reasons I’m glad life circles around to the Resurrection every year is I know I need to hear the story again because there is still much about faith and life that needs to dawn on me. Here in the dead of night, halfway through the day, I’m waiting again for the dawn, for my every morning metaphor of midday sunrise, to call me again to trust and follow the Risen Christ.

And this night, most of all.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: every last one of us

Of my two days off during the week, Thursday is usually the run-the-errands-and-hang-out-at-Panera-with-Ginger day. Not his week. I met with my spiritual advisor this morning because he’s going to be gone for the next couple of weeks, then I went to work because there was a function this evening (I was off yesterday), and then I came home to hang out with Ginger and watch Grey’s Anatomy, which was a rerun but one we’d not seen.

I jumped the gun a little bit in spiritual direction. When Ken asked me how Lent has been for me I ended up talking about resurrection, even though we’ve still got a week to go. Actually, I think he brought it up. I talked about my realization this week that I had made it through the winter without a major depression. What I see looking back is I started seeing Ken in October 2005, when he challenged me to figure out what I most wanted to do with my life, determine what it would cost to do it, and then figure out how to pay the bill. In December 2005, I committed to writing regularly – five days a week. In October 2006 I chose to step out of professional ministry and be the spouse of the pastor rather than the pastor. I also became a full-time chef. Though I can see only through a glass, darkly when it comes to where this road is going, I like and trust the direction in which I’m headed.

“It sounds like resurrection to me,” he said.

The conversation that ensued will show up again in my writing, I’m sure, because it was rich. What comes to mind now is a comment he made a few moments later:

“I think most people are afraid of resurrection.”

His words were like a finger on the “Play” button and my mind was the CD player. Resurrection is about more than death. Jesus pushed beyond the known boundaries to show what was on the other side. When we talk about what is happening in Darfur and feel overwhelmed or helpless or even indifferent, resurrection calls us to push on through to find what is on the other side of those feelings, just as Jesus pushed beyond the tomb or walked through the walls to get to where the disciples were. Resurrection means we are not confined by the boundaries to which we have become accustomed, or which make us comfortable. Ken responded by quoting the story, "The Truth Shop" by Anthony de Mello by heart:

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the name of the shop:

THE TRUTH SHOP.

The saleswoman was very polite: What type of truth did I wish to purchase, partial or whole?

The whole truth of course. No deceptions for me, no defenses, no rationalizations. I wanted my truth plain and unadulterated.

She waved me on to another side of the store.

The salesman there pointed to the price tag. "The price is very high, sir," he said.

"What is it?" I asked, determined to get the whole truth, no matter what it cost.

"Your security, sir," he answered.

I came away with a heavy heart.
I still need the safety of my unquestioned beliefs.

When I came home tonight, I found this comment on an earlier blog entry:

Milton, would you think about, and comment on, the story that aired tonight on All Things Considered about the UCC congregation and the man who is a registered sex offender?

I always appreciate your insight,
Charlotte

Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Carlsbad, California is struggling with how to respond to a twice-convicted sex offender who asked to join the church. The man visited the church for a few weeks and then came to the pastor and told him who he was, what he had done, and that he wanted to join the church because it was a community where he felt safe. The pastor introduced him to the congregation at the end of worship one Sunday, explained the situation, and then asked the man not to come back until the church had figured out how to respond.

I’m writing about this as a fellow struggler and a fellow traveler in the UCC, not as a critic, judge, or any kind of expert. Ginger and I have no children of our own. I was not abused by any adults as a child, though we have a number of people close to us who were. I’m aware of the damage that lingers in their lives alongside of the healing.

When I asked Ginger about it, she said, “I’ve thought about this a lot. That’s why I went to the police station to find out who is on the sex offender registry in Marshfield. If someone came to us, I would want us to welcome them and I would want us to be very clear about what the boundaries were: they could never sit near children or sit near where the kids come for the children’s message; they could never teach Sunday School or be in the Sunday School area; they could never talk to a child one on one; I would assign a deacon each week to stay with them during Coffee Hour and to help them keep the boundaries.” She continued, “We are called to welcome everyone and we also know the high rate of recidivism for sex offenders. The issue is how do we make everyone feel safe, the offender included.”

She was talking about resurrection: beyond death, beyond violence, beyond abuse, beyond despair, beyond comfort. No wonder it scares us. The watchword of the UCC these days is “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” Situations such as this provide the opportunity for us to step into the heart of those words. Whoever and wherever are expansive and exhaustive. The whole truth of Jesus’ resurrection is God’s grace is unlimited and unearned for all of us.

Every last one.

I will pray that Pilgrim Church will be able to incarnate that grace as resurrection people in wonderful, frightening, and uncomfortable ways. And with that prayer, I send them a song I remember from my days leading youth camps. It was recorded by the Lost Dogs ten or fifteen years ago and is a wonderful expression of the wideness of God’s mercy.

"Breathe Deep (the Breath of God)"
music and lyrics by Terry Taylor

Politicians, morticians, Philistines, homophobes
Skinheads, Dead heads, tax evaders, street kids
Alcoholics, workaholics, wise guys, dim wits
Blue collars, white collars, warmongers, peaceniks

Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God
Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God

Suicidals, rock idols, shut-ins, dropouts
Friendless, homeless, penniless and depressed
Presidents, residents, foreigners and aliens
Dissidents, feminists, xenophobes and chauvinists

Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God
Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God

Evolutionists, creationists, perverts, slumlords
Deadbeats, athletes, Protestants and Catholics
Housewives, neophytes, pro-choice, pro-life
Misogynists, monogamists, philanthropists, blacks and whites

Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God
Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God

Police, obese, lawyers, and government
Sex offenders, tax collectors, war vets, rejects
Atheists, Scientists, racists, sadists
Photographers, biographers, artists, pornographers

Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God
Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God

Gays and lesbians, demagogues and thespians
The disabled, preachers, doctors and teachers
Meat eaters, wife beaters, judges and juries
Long hair, no hair, everybody everywhere!

Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God
Breathe deep, breathe deep the Breath of God

Yes. Every last one of us.

Peace,
Milton