lenten journal: hold on, hold on . . .

Next Sunday I am going to be a part of a bluegrass group that will be the service musicians for our morning worship. Most of the group is one family – parents and three boys, all of whom play instruments. The youngest one, who is six or seven, plays the mandolin likes it’s part of him, smiling through his spectacles as he strums away. As we have been practicing, I’ve been mindful of the ongoing celebration of what would have been Woody Guthrie’s one hundredth birthday (July 14, to be exact) and, somehow, I go from my diminutive mandolin player to Woody to John Berger, who described the Okie folksinger. “Now I can make is simpler,” Berger begins and then goes on.

Guthrie was a charismatic performer and guitar player and a natural improviser. He sang old songs, and he sang many new songs written by himself to old tunes. One of these is entitled, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” He puts these words into the mouths of the thousands who had to take to the road from the city of Pampa on the west Texan plain during the Depression.

On the radio I heard recently a recording of him singing this song, whose refrain he had changed to: “Hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you.” Or so I thought. Perhaps I misheard. No matter. Like this, it’s a refrain which addresses the subject of any drawing which has insisted upon being put on paper.

“Hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you.”

Tonight I have the privilege of going to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert. I am driving with friends to Greensboro, North Carolina, for what will most certainly be a memorable evening. Bruce is a descendant of Guthrie’s in many ways, even covering some of his songs. I watched the video of Springsteen’s keynote address at SXSW this past week and he said,

The purity of human expression and experience is not confined – there’s no pure way of doing it; there’s just doing it . . . . At the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that is what’s valuable.

I must add one other musical piece that has set my week swirling in thought and melody. Last Thursday Ginger and I sat on the front row of the Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt concert at the DPAC (or the Tupac, as we like to call it). On our very first date I took Ginger to see Lyle – twenty-three years ago – at a little club in downtown Fort Worth aptly named the Caravan of Dreams; thus began our journey. We’ve seen him every time he’s come to our town – whatever the town – since then. The two men sat side by side and swapped songs, some of which pulled up moments from our past that still hold on and others that were harbingers of future memories yet to take hold.

I realize this post so far follows a rather impressionistic melody line, rather than offering clear verses, yet I keep coming back to Berger’s chorus, if you will:

hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you.

One of the moments I am looking forward to on Sunday is the music we will offer in response to the Prayers of the People, which is the part of our service where people offer their joys and concerns, as we say. I am singing with the little mandolin man. The lyric is the last half of one of the verses from “Sweet Hour of Prayer” –

and since he bids me seek his face
believe his word and trust his grace
I’ll cast on him my every care
and wait for thee, sweet hour of prayer

I love the hymn, and I love singing it, but what I’m looking forward to is the dynamic between me and my companion. He is about half my height and stands and gazes up at me while I sing; he never looks at his hands. Something in the exchange at practice yesterday made me want to sing to him,

hold on, hold on . . .

I’ve had Bruce’s new record, “Wrecking Ball,” playing in the car all week in lieu of NPR getting ready for tonight. The chorus of one of the songs that’s kept me singing is

big wheels roll through the fields
where sunlight streams
oh meet me in
a land of broken dreams

Or so I thought. This morning was the first time I had a chance to sit down with the lyrics to find nothing was broken; the last line reads

a land of hope and dreams.

No matter. Any of the songwriters mentioned in this post offer an invitation to engage, to do more than listen, and to make something out of both the beautiful and the broken pieces of this thing called life. All of them have also wound their songs in and out of my days for the better part of my life. Thursday night, I called out for John Hiatt to sing one of my favorite songs, which was deep enough of an album cut that he could not remember the lyrics – “Before I Go.” The last verse says,

ghosts on the trees, there's ghosts on the wires
asking questions and showing signs
shivering with truth, they're lighting fires
lighting fires all down the line

and I will try, and I will stumble
but I will fly, he told me so
proud and high or low and humble
many miles before I go
many miles before I go

I feel like this post rambles along like a Dylan lyric (fifty year anniversary of his first record, by the way). I mean that in a good way. These songwriters, among others, are those who have held on to me and made me glad to have known them. Tonight, I will dip myself in the stream of the music that has washed my soul once again, sing along at the top of my lungs, and do my own share of shivering with the truth, doing my best to be thankful down to the bone.

Hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you.

Peace,
Milton

sunday sonnet #12

The lectionary it seems uses the last few weeks before Advent to dish out some difficult passages. This morning's came from Haggai.

The children sang, “If you’re happy clap your hands”
and Ginger gave a nod to “Glory Days,”
We sang “Wayfaring Stranger” with piano – not a band
and then wrestled with the prophet’s turn of phrase

as he talked about the Temple and replacing old with new,
that we’ve been called to what we can’t expect;
clinging to control we, as the faithful, cannot do
and still hope our dry bones God will resurrect.

Haggai hits hard with a simple proclamation:
Glory Days, they’re gonna pass you by;
for memory is more than the seed of resignation,
the future more than a mansion in the sky.

Temples built of volition and intention
host folks filled with compassion and redemption.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. Since it made the sermon, I might as well let it end the post as well.

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