lenten journal: ash monday

Ash Wednesday showed up early for me this year because I was given the chance, thanks to my friends Lori and Terry, to hear Garrison Keillor tell stories. Though I have listened to him on the radio for thirty years, I’ve never heard him live. Monday, he showed up unadorned, without any of his Prairie Home Companion peeps or props, without even an introduction. Promptly at 7:30, he strode onto the stage wearing dark pants, a sports jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie that matched both his red socks and red sneakers, and he began to chant. That’s the best way I can describe it. He told a story with the cadence and melody of a priest inviting congregants to the Eucharist, his rhyme and humor calling us into community. Then, for a little over two hours, he talked of family, faith, love, death, and sex in a more intimate and vulnerable way than I had ever heard him on any of those many nights when he began his tale with, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown . . . “ – a phrase he never uttered in our time together.

Through the course of the evening, he invited a bluegrass singer to join him on stage, and for us to join them in song: Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “It Is Well With My Soul,” and, to close the evening, “Angel Band.” Our voices provided the connecting soundtrack to his stories, which eloquently told how he got from there to here: from childhood to writer, from “sanctified Brethren” to Episcopalian, from son to father, from wherever he was before to our Monday night in Durham, reminding me again of the power and purpose of ritual, or sacred road markers like Ash Wednesday and Lent and Communion that call us to ask and answer the question David Byrne asked best: “Well – how did I get here?”

“We tell two kinds of stories,” Keillor said. “We either tell bragging stories to show we’re better than everyone else, or we tell stories of confession, which are, I suppose, a kind of ostentatious humility to show we’re more honest than everyone else.” From there he meandered into a maze of faith and family, both confessional seed beds, I suppose, commenting almost in passing that Christianity “is a religion of failure.”

With those words it became Ash Monday: Lent began for me.

In the jargon of my students, Lent might be renamed “Epic Fail” – the season of coming up short, the season of stark reality, and the season of forgiveness because it is in failure that both our compassion and redemption take root.

Yes, I know God is both great and good. Yes, I trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Yes, I know we are only weeks away from that Great Resurrection Morning when the stone gets rolled away and up from the grave he will arise to show that Death is not the final punctuation mark on the sentence that is our human existence. Even though Death has lost its sting, our story – all the way to that Land To Which We Go – is marked, quite indelibly, by failure. The tenacious love of God calls us to faithfulness, not success. Jesus bent down to wash the feet of the disciples because, John says, he knew “he had come from God and was going to God, not because it was all a brilliant strategy for success and conquest.

The disciples left the Upper Room and failed epically in the hours that followed their gathering only to find themselves still in the circle, still called, and still loved. For the rest of their lives, they did their best work when they simply told that story. The same holds true for us. We do our best work for and with one another when we tell and listen to our stories – and that thought takes me to familiar words worth repeating: Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As Keillor differentiated between the bragging stories and the confessional ones, he said the confessional stories were the ones you could count on to be “mostly true.” When we come to the place, however we get there, that we share our despair in order to find one another and remind one another we cannot run out of or away from the love of God, we are true – even in our failure. In the longings and the losings of life we come back again and again to stones we have stacked up and songs we can sing together.

when peace like a river attendeth my way
when sorrows like sea billows roll
whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
it is well it is well with my soul


I'm gonna love you
till the wheels come off
oh yeah

I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
I love you baby and I always will
ever since I put your picture in a frame

We are not beginning a sojourn to success. When we get to Easter morning, or any other day for that matter, we will still be people of constant failure. Jesus didn’t come out of the tomb to take his place on the medal stand. He went to the beach and made breakfast for his bleary-eyed followers who had failed, once again. He loved them and he fed them. And he told them stories.

May we go and do likewise.

Peace,
Milton

bless be the tales that bind

This has been a weekend steeped in stories.

Saturday night Ginger and I participated in the Inaugural Triangle Red Sox Nation Whiffle Ball Homerun Derby, which was a fundraiser for the Jimmy Fund, one of the Red Sox primary charities. I took my swings, hit four homers, won two pounds of coffee at the bean bag toss, enjoyed the burgers, dogs, and beer, and listened to different folks tell their Sox stories. One guy remembered the day in his childhood when he and his dad helped Ted Williams change a flat on a back road here in North Carolina, and, he said, “I’ve been a Sox fan ever since.”

Part of the evening was an auction of Red Sox memorabilia –even Sox-Yankees tickets – and one of the items was a framed copy of a photograph of Carlton Fisk trying to coax the ball he had just hit into fair territory during Game Six of the 1975 World Series. His homerun won the game, caused a Game Seven, and, as Sean, our state governor for Red Sox Nation said, “created the greatest moment for Sox fans until 2004.” Of the more than a hundred people gathered, most all of us knew the story, though only a small minority were older than thirty-five.

They knew the story because it had been passed on as one of the tales that bind. You didn’t have to be there to know the elation of the moment any more than you had to have seen Game Seven to have your heart broken. Again.

On the drive home it wasn’t hard to make the jump from the Sox stories to sermon stories, since this morning’s passages talked about Moses and the “great cloud of witnesses” calling us on in Hebrews 12:1-2. Those verses have captured me since I was a kid because of that exact phrase: a great cloud of witnesses – everyone in heaven in the stands pulling for us. I was in high school, I guess, the first time I heard Bill Gaither’s “The King is Coming” (yes, I know somehow I seem to manage finding a Gaither Vocal Band video), and have often wondered if the verses from Hebrews were behind the lyric,

regal robes are now unfolding
heaven’s grandstands all in place
heaven’s choir is now assembled
start to sing amazing grace

Our first spring in Boston, we made our way down Boylston Street to the finish line the day before the Boston Marathon and saw the grandstands all in place, waiting for a fan front to blow in and the clouds to gather to cheer on those who made it home from Hopkinton. Though I am not, nor have I ever been a runner, I understand the fuel for both survival and solidarity is found in story. Even in the midst of the running metaphor, we are reminded Jesus is the author of our faith: THE storyteller.

Our opening hymn this morning was a tune I knew (“Lead on, O King Eternal”) and a lyric I did not: “Lead on, O Cloud of Presence.” I failed to write down the writer and composer’s names, but here is their excellent text:

lead on, o cloud of presence, the exodus is come
in wilderness and desert our tribe shall make its home
our slavery left behind us, new hopes within us grow
we seek the land of promise where milk and honey flow


lead on, o fiery pillar, we follow yet with fears
but we shall come rejoicing though joy be born of tears
we are not lost, though wandering, for by your light we come
and we are still God's people, the journey is our home


lead on O God of freedom, and guide us on our way
and help us trust the promise through struggle and delay
we pray our sons and daughters may journey to that land
where justice dwells with mercy, and love is law's demand

I’m a couple of days away from inviting my students to dive into some of my favorite stories with me to see what we can find. What I want to have happen is for Holden Caulfield and Stephen Kumalo to come alive for them, and for me. We, as readers and storytellers have the power to raise the dead. As I think listening again to Moses’ story, I realize that part of what happens in our telling and retelling is we breathe new life into those dry bones, if you will: we become the cloud of witnesses as we watch Moses and Miriam and Mary run the race that was set before them. When we tell their stories, we remember the circle is unbroken, both now and by and by.

One of the John Denver songs that helped me learn to play guitar says

I listened to what the good book said and it made good sense to me
talking ‘bout reaping what you’re sowing people trying to be free
now we’ve got new names and faces this time around
gospel changes, Lord, still going down

Let us keep telling the stories; blessed be the tales that bind.

Peace,
Milton

story time

a story has an arc, the teacher told us
and drew a line like a colorless rainbow
on the blackboard -- you remember, right?

exposition, rising action -- fueled by conflict
the climax at the top, and then falling action
falling so far that we spoke French: denouement

resolution to you and me and I wondered what
would happen if I changed one letter: arc to ark
and the story became a journey rather than a

rollercoaster, crammed full of critters and no map
there might still be conflict, but everything would
rise and fall on how well we learned to live together

whose turn is was to row – and to cook, how long
the doves would be gone and, without a doubt,
what we would do if the hippos got restless

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: show me a story

I guess because I grew up hearing sermons in church, I spent a large part of my life thinking of a sermon as primarily an oral presentation, rather than a written document first. When I began to preach with some regularity that perspective changed. I found I was a better preacher once I learned a sermon was a written document first – I needed to have worked out what I was going to say – and then an oral presentation.

When I was teaching high school in Boston to classes with seventy percent or more nonnative English speakers, I was daunted by the fact that Shakespeare was part of the curriculum. Most of the kids had trouble with modern English; how were they going to understand what Will wrote? I went to a workshop on teaching Shakespeare and was reminded that, though we were handing the play to the kids in book form, a play is intended to be performed, not read. Over the years, I taught the kids how to choreograph a swordfight on stage, how to figure out what was happening in a scene. From the opening line, we acted the play out in class and the language came alive. They got it. I did, too.

This morning, Ginger and I drove to Greensboro for a meeting of Baptist professors of religion who were gathering prior to a larger convention. Dalen Jackson, president of the group, had invited Ginger to do the devotion for the group at the beginning of their session. I went along for the ride. After the devotion, we hung around to hear Dalen’s paper, “’Clumsy Mark’ Again? Mark’s Gospel as the Transcription of Peter’s Public Performance of the Gospel Story.” It has been awhile since I got to be in on an academic discussion, and I learned something.

At the heart of Dalen’s paper was a discussion of performance criticism, which was new to me. He used a quote to describe the idea:

A performance was an integral part of every early Christian experience of the compositions that now comprise the writings of the New Testament. The New Testament writings were either written “transcriptions” of oral narratives composed in performance or they were composed in writing (perhaps orally by dictation) for use in oral performance.

I’ve always thought of the Bible as a book (more of an anthology, I guess). My experience with it is primarily in print. What Dalen taught me today was the gospels, along with most of the rest of it, were just the opposite of my sermons: oral before they were written. They were more like Shakespeare’s plays: intended to be performed, because that is how they were created.

Reading the gospels, for me, is sometimes like reading email messages in that tone is often hard to convey. Here’s one of the passages from Mark that I wonder about, for instance, Mark 3:31-35:

Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you."

"Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

How did Jesus ask who his family was? It’s not an easy answer – by that I mean this doesn’t feel much like a Hallmark card moment to me. The tone we infuse into the words makes a difference in how they can be interpreted. If the words stay in the two dimensional world of the page, tone stays out of reach, because it needs the three dimensional world of performance to have room to move. In a time before books, that’s how the stories got told. If we want to get to the heart of the stories, then we have to let them live off of the page; we have to incarnate them, if you will – perform them.

My favorite liturgist at church is a person named Suzanne. When she reads scripture she does It from memory. She tells us the story. She is a part of the Network of Biblical Storytellers who already know what Dalen is talking about, though they get to it down a different path. Rather than connecting back with long ago, they are looking at present trends. They describe themselves by saying, “We bring God’s stories to life for a post-literate, digital age.” Whatever the age, they are on to something: the gospel story is a living, breathing thing, not something static trapped between book covers. These are stories to be read (aloud) and wrestled with, to be talked about and talked through, to be performed and remembered.

My friend Beth is an actor in California. She wrote me the other day about a character she is going to play in an upcoming performance because there were some theological issues in her character’s background that were more akin to mine as a Christian than to Beth’s, who is Jewish. Our discussion was both fun and meaningful to me, in part, because I got to learn something about how Beth, as an actor, goes through the process of becoming a character, learning about her and then climbing inside her skin for the two hours she is on stage. It reminds me of one of the earliest and still most meaningful explanations of the Incarnation given to me along the way: Jesus was God with skin on. Jesus stepped into the human story as one of us.

Dalen’s invitation, as I heard it today, was for us to step into Jesus’ story by climbing inside its skin, if you will. The dictionary says the word perform comes from old words that mean to alter and to accomplish. When we tell the story – when we perform it – we alter it by breathing life into it again and we accomplish the task of letting it come alive in us.

I had fun learning today.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the gift of the magi

On this day in 1906, O. Henry published the short story, "The Gift of the Magi," which is a favorite at our house. In honor of the day and the story, here is the story.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."

The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."

"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.

"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."

Down rippled the brown cascade.

"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

"Give it to me quick," said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"

At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."

"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"

Jim looked about the room curiously.

"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."

The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

May we both give and receive generously.

Peace,

Milton

advent journal: sentiment and sacrifice

I spent the day running errands, mailing a few A Faraway Christmas CDs, and picking up what we needed to do a couple of things on the house before my in-laws come in a little over a week, which means I drove a lot and had incidental conversations with people I don’t know. My favorite was at Lowes, where I was buying paint.

“Do you want our Signature paint or the Premium?” the paint guy asked me.
“What’s the difference?” I replied.
“The Signature is our best paint,” he answered.
“What’s the difference between them? What makes it better?”
“It’s our best paint,” he said.

I left with my Signature paint and a couple of other things and came home. About six forty-five the phone rang and our friends Carla and Lindsey invited us to meet them at the Regulator, our very cool neighborhood independent bookstore, for a reading. I didn’t know any more than that as I grabbed my coat and hat and walked up to meet them. Turns out the bookstore wanted to do something to “get people in the Christmas spirit,” so they asked Allan Gurganus to come and read his story, “A Fool for Christmas,” which he read on NPR a few years back. He was not promoting a new book – or even the story; they just wanted to get people together for Christmas. They had hot cider, mulled wine (using Clarence’s recipe from It’s a Wonderful Life: “heavy on the cinnamon, easy on the cloves”), and several tins of Danish butter cookies and a roomful of folks who all seemed happy to be there.

The story was told in first person by Vernon Ricketts, the manager of a mall pet store, who notices a runaway girl hanging around the mall and offers her part-time work walking a cocker spaniel puppy, Butterbean, around the shopping center to entice people to come buy a pet for Christmas. The girl is pregnant and the story culminates in a strange nativity scene with him delivering her baby in the pet store surrounded by puppies and kittens and an African parrot.

I loved it.

In his introductory remarks before he began the story, Gurganus commented about the current economic state of things in a refreshing manner. “We are going to have to make some sacrifices,” he said, “and I’m ready,” going on to talk about how we have a chance to dig in and make something great come out of this time of hardship. Two things crossed my mind in quick succession: I resonated with what he was saying and I felt fortunate to be one of the ones for whom sacrifice is a choice.

I’m the only one in my kitchen at Duke who doesn’t work at least six days a week; I’m one of two who only has one job. And, day in and day out, the guys not only show up for work but come with a sense of humor and good spirit. They don’t get to choose to sit down, sip wine, and listen to stories very often. And they are not alone.

I’m a sucker for Christmas movies, Elf and Scrooged being two of my favorites, along with the aforementioned It’s a Wonderful Life. They all build to a call for us to be better, kinder, more compassionate people who understand the power of personal relationships, and to be people who realize the world is not primarily about themselves. They are all about redemption, even if they are sentimental Hollywood movies (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

A real part of the Advent/Christmas season is about looking for the connectedness reflected in those movies. We want to belong. We want to matter. We want to be together. What becomes difficult are the consequences of that connectedness. In the last section of “The Journey of the Magi,” T. S. Eliot writes:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Once the wise men got back home, they realized they had seen too much; redemption came with a price: they had to live and act differently long after the Christmas season had passed. Maybe that ‘s one of the reasons we celebrate it year after year: we need help remembering what it means to be redeemed, to be called to sacrifice.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: poems, prayers, and promises

Mondays are busy at the restaurant anyway, but today had its own pace. Because of the holiday and the fact that the Duke students were gone, we had been closed since Tuesday night; everything had to be made new today. Still, when I left the house this morning, I put my two Advent books in my bag. I was determined to find even a few minutes to read. A little after three o’clock I made my way across the Plaza to Joe Van Gogh: The Art of Coffee for my afternoon coffee and I took Oates with me. The chapter was short: “First Loves: From “Jabberwocky” to “After Apple Picking.” She began:

There are two primary influences in a writer’s life: those influences that come so early in childhood, they seem to soak into the very marrow of our bones and to condition our interpretation of the universe thereafter; and those that come a little later, when we are old enough to exercise some control of our environment and our response to it, and have begun to be aware not only of the emotional power but the strategies of art.

I was in second grade when I memorized my first poem: “Missing” by A. A. Milne. I can still recite it.

Has anybody seen my mouse?

I opened his box for half a minute,
Just to make sure he was really in it,
And while I was looking, he jumped outside!
I tried to catch him, I tried, I tried....
I think he's somewhere about the house.
Has anyone seen my mouse?

Uncle John, have you seen my mouse?

Just a small sort of mouse, a dear little brown one,
He came from the country, he wasn't a town one,
So he'll feel all lonely in a London street;
Why, what could he possibly find to eat?
He must be somewhere. I'll ask Aunt Rose:
Have you seen a mouse with a woffelly nose?
He's just got out...

Hasn't anybody seen my mouse?

I learned the poem because my mother told me my father had memorized it when he was in second grade and I wanted to surprise him for his birthday. Perhaps Oates is right about those early influences soaking into our marrow; my father and Winnie the Pooh are still with me.

The first time I remember a painter capturing my attention was my sophomore year in high school, when Don McLean sang “Vincent.” That’s right. I found art through AM pop radio. My freshman year in college, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stopped me in my tracks. I was a teenager, struggling to come to terms with myself (whom I didn’t like much), my rootless life as an MK, and my faith. To hear that one could feel no hope left inside on a starry, starry night, or that the serenity of a snowy night might lead to reminders of promises to keep and miles to go taught me that faith, like art, has its strategies.

Strategy. It seems an odd word to connect with art and faith. for me because I hear it first as a military word and then a business word, neither of which do much for me as metaphors for either faith or art. (Spend some time here and you’ll see what I mean.) And – not but; and – if we choose to make meaning of our world, our lives we begin to format a perspective, a response, a way of being. Art and faith, at their best, call us to a strategy of openness, of vulnerability, of compassion, which means we are not necessarily in it to win it as much as we are in it, period, and not alone.

Oates has her own Frost connection. She points to “After Apple Picking,” finding resonance in the lines:

For I have had too much
Of apple picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

“The poem’s powerful subtext,” she says, “is the inevitability of loss. . . In its understated way the poem is a tragic work of art. Yet there remains a defiant human resilience beneath, as in us all.” The short story of the day, which I read when I got home from work, was Richard Bausch’s “Design,” which was his own expression of the inevitability Oates recognized, as he tells of two ministers coming to terms with their own mortality.

I’m three days away from my one year anniversary at the restaurant, eleven days from my fifty-second birthday, and another fortnight beyond that from getting to the Manger. Each of those markers is filled with hope, loss and resilience.

Ginger came to eat at the restaurant tonight with our friends Jay and Eloise, who have been with us for Thanksgiving, as they are most every year. About an hour after they left, my phone rang and Ginger said, “Have you seen the sky?” with an air of expectancy in her voice. She went on to describe what it looked like to look up and see the moon, Jupiter, and Venus aligned more closely than they will be for another forty years.

“It’s a Bethlehem Star kind of night,” she said.

My windowless kitchen doesn’t afford me a celestial view, so the three heavenly bodies passed by each other while I cooked. I walked out under the night sky a few minutes ago to see what I could see and there was Orion, my favorite constellation, hunting without the benefit of the bright lights, keeping his promises. As I tried to imagine what the spectacle might have looked like, I thought of Yeats talking about his “mind’s eye” as he described the Magi:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

From magi to shepherds, from starry nights to simmering sauces, from celestial spectacles to familiar formations, everything is being pulled to the magnet of the Manger, to the uncontrollable mystery of a God whose name – whose very being – is Love.

Perhaps I’ll listen now.

Peace,
Milton

(I love the synchronicity of the image being created with the help of www.starrynight.com.)

advent journal: fifty-two christmases

It’s been a long time since I felt ready.

Perhaps it’s because this past year has been one of settling in, rather than moving on. Maybe it’s because I’m an hour and a half away from December and I don’t feel depressed (which is new for this time of year – at least in recent memory). Then again, it could be because I’ve spent the better part of the year working hard at my job and not reading as much as I’m accustomed to do, or writing as much as I wanted, and I’m ready for a centering season to remind me who I am and who I want to become. Perhaps all of the above are true. What I know is I am stepping into the season with energy and expectation, rather than the desperation of Advents past, which is enough to release a river of gratitude.

I feel awake. I feel alive. I feel thankful. And I’m determined to read.

My practice in Advent has been to pick a couple of books as traveling companions, and I usually chose ones of a theological nature. This year, I invited one and one invited me to take a bit of a different road to Bethlehem. My friends Lori and Terry gave me God: stories, which is a collection of short stories that have spiritual themes edited by C. Michael Curtis. From my bookshelf, I chose The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates, a book I don’t remember acquiring. I want to grow as a person, a Christian, a writer, and a reader during these days, and I’m hopeful my traveling companions will help me find my way.

I was the prophet today during worship, as I am each Sunday of Advent, walking down the aisle singing, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” and then delivering the prophetic passage for the day, which was Isaiah 64:1-9. Isaiah’s prayer/sermon was first spoken during the Babylonian exile during a time when the people of God had chosen to be held captive by their fear rather than being compelled by their calling. It’s not one of the passages that rings with resonance because of a phrase made famous; it’s not even that easy to understand in some places.

The opening story in Curtis’ book is “Exodus” by James Baldwin. It centers around Florence, the daughter of a freed slave who, after hearing her mother’s story of walking off the plantation one day, dreams of the day of her exit, and finally chooses it, even though she must leave her mother on her death bed.

Oates’ tells first of “District School #7, Niagara County, New York,” the one room schoolhouse where she began her education and learned to read. Though her recollections gave me pause to reflect on my first school days, she described a world I have never known.

I was not moved, particularly, by any of the stories I read today. I didn’t come away with a quote or anecdote to share or remember. All three feel like people who get on the bus at your stop and ride with you awhile, rather than ture traveling companions. And so I’ve taken time to notice them a bit, in the same way I used to study people riding on the bus in hopes of remembering them for characters in my stories at a later time. I see a story of a prophet calling out to people who feel trapped and have allowed themselves to resign to it; a woman who feels trapped and chooses to break out at great cost; and a woman who looks back on a trap she escaped without knowing she was ever in it. When I look at the stories that way, I’m familiar with all three, for I have stories to tell of living in all three conditions.

As a high school student I learned about the arc of a story, which had not changed by the time I became a high school English teacher: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument – all of it driven by conflict (person vs. person, person vs. nature or technology, person vs. his or herself). Tonight I start my Advent story with much conflict to speak of. Since I’ve been using a bus metaphor, so I’ll stick with it, for now. My story opens on a season of open road, riding on a bus with two books I don’t know well on a journey that leads to an ending I already know.

This ought to be riveting, don’t you think?

I used to play golf. My last summer of college was the best of my golfing career. The reason was we played everyday. A group of us took early classes and then headed for the links every afternoon. Since it was summer in Waco, we had no trouble getting a tee time; it was one hundred and fifty degrees. Playing the same course everyday gave me a chance to grow as a golfer because I learned from both my mistakes and my successes. That summer – and only that summer – I was an under 90 golfer.

After fifty-two Christmases, there are still things for me to learn from walking the same road to Bethlehem, singing the same songs, hearing the same words, and welcoming Jesus into our hearts and our world, again. Well, that’s not exactly right. I will do well to remember the destination may be the same, but the journey will not. I am starting from a different place, both physically and personally, and I have some different companions. And I feel ready, which, as I said, is a new starting place for me.

We’ll see where the story goes.

Peace.
Milton

tell me a story

I come from a family of storytellers.

Actually, I come from a family of slightly exaggerated storytellers. We tell good stories and we feel free to alter the details to spice it up a little, too. I love to listen to a story, or read one, or even watch one, almost as much as I like to tell them. A great story leaves an indelible mark on our hearts. Like a great melody, it inhabits and haunts and pulls up feelings with a simple phrase, reminding us we have been changed by our listening. We are no longer the same.

Today was “Mountain Sunday” at our church (as well as Stewardship Sunday and Thanksgiving Sunday and the Last Sunday in Ordinary Time). The title refers to the music we sang and heard today, which came mostly from Appalachian and gospel traditions, both of which know of and speak from a deep acquaintance with both suffering and gratitude. And so, our service began

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
traveling through this world of woe
but there’s no sickness toil or danger
in that bright land to where I go

From there we wandered across rivers and up and down mountains through our songs and scriptures, until it was time for Carla, our associate pastor, to preach. She began her sermon by talking about stories and then saying she was going to tell part of hers, I leaned in. She told us about how her family settled in Charlotte and survived the coming and going of the textile mill, and how they built homes to be close to one another. As she talked about their Thanksgiving traditions, she told of one tragedy that had befallen the family – the death of a child – and how that marked the holiday for all the years after. As she described one of her relatives, she used a descriptive phrase that turned the story from information to incarnation as she spoke of the “sacred sorrow so bound up with his gratitude.”

Her words landed on me with resonance and power. In the same moment, I knew she was right and I wondered how it is the two are so inextricably tied together. From my English teacher days I remember a story needs conflict or suffering to move it along and to move it toward redemption or reconciliation or even disappointment. What the stories tell us is we were built to learn from our suffering, not simply to endure it. Perhaps that is how stories were born in the first place – the good ones, anyway. Carla had a phrase for that as well: good stories are those that shape our souls into vessels to hold our gratitude.

Her words made me wonder what kind of story I’m telling and how well the stories I hear and tell mold my soul into a thanksgiving tank, if you will. So many of the gospel hymns tell stories of heaven. We even closed our service with a rocking rendition of

some glad morning wihen this life is o’er
I’ll fly away . . .

Many of those songs were born out of suffering, yet their response is more than asking for relief. It’s not about getting out, it’s about getting through. Gratitude grows when we trust that suffering is not the last word.

The story is not yet over.

Suffering that doesn’t breed thankfulness turns to despair. Gratitude that is not informed by grief may quench our souls only briefly, but quickly evaporates. Memory – remembrance is the thing that binds the two so essentially and stories remind us to remember, as the saying goes, who we are and whose we are.

And I remembered this morning, thank you.



Peace,
Milton

a story for christmas

Several years ago, Ginger asked me to write a story for Christmas Eve. What came out of me was a Dr. Suess-ish sort of tale that has found a life in many places on Christmas Eves since. The story begins this way:

As we gather together on this Silent Night,
To sing ‘round the tree in the soft candlelight,

From a Faraway Christmas, from time that’s grown cold,
Comes a story, you see, that has seldom been told.

Of all of the legends, the best and the worst,
From Christmases all the way back to the first,

This little tale isn’t often remembered
From then until now, down through all those Decembers.

But I found an old copy tucked away on a shelf,
And I turned through the pages, and I thought to myself,

Of all of the times between now and then,
This is the Christmas to hear it again.

This year, you can hear the story in a different way -- on audio CD. My friend Terry Allebaugh added a wonderful harmonica soundtrack, my friend Claudia Fulshaw created beautiful artwork for the cover and the insert, and I read the story and added a couple of other touches. I'm proud of what we did and excited to share it.

In the sidebar to the left is the PayPal button that will make your purchase possible. The CD is $10.00, plus $2.00 for shipping. If your order is over $50.00, shipping is free. (That's in the U.S.) I will sign, seal, and deliver (or at least mail) the CDs myself.

Entrepreneurship is not my gift. I'm grateful to Gordon Atkinson for his encouragement and technical advice, to Claudia and Terry, and to Ginger for calling the story out of me in the first place.

The story runs on several different levels and is appropriate for most any age. I hope you enjoy it.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: tell me a story

When we lived in New England, one of the staples in my day was listening to a show called The Connection, a call-in show hosted by a man named Dick Gordon who had a marvelous way of drawing people into conversation and making connections for those who both talked and listened. One morning, he was no longer on the radio. WBUR made some (bad) choices based on the bottom lined and killed their best show. And I wondered what happened to Dick Gordon.

Soon after we moved to Durham, I was in the car listening to WUNC, our local and excellent NPR station, and heard a familiar voice say, “I’m Dick Gordon and this is The Story.” I had no idea he had come to prepare a place for me, or at least to help me feel more, well, connected to my new town. His new show is not a call-in, but an interview with a single person, usually, simply because he feels they have a story worth telling. Some of them are sensational, some quite emotional, some humorous, some wrenching, and all of them helping to paint a picture of what it means to be human.

Today, as I was driving to work, I came in on the story of Peter Turnley, a man who has been a photojournalist for a quarter of a century, and he was telling the story of his experiences as the first non-Soviet journalist allowed to see and record the aftermath of the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988, when it was still part of the USSR. He talked about several things, but the enduring part of the story that was still very fresh to him as he told it, was one particular encounter (What follows is what I remember from listening and quotes from Turnley’s website):

I will never forget the man in Armenia in 1988 who had only the day before lost his wife, children, and his home, all casualties of a massive earthquake in which 35,000 people lost their lives. As I drove with my twin brother David in a Russian taxi in this devastated region, we stopped to pick up an elderly man who was hitchhiking. He sat in the back with me. I was so tired after days and days of work with little rest I was falling asleep and then I realized he was motioning to put my head in his lap and sleep. I put my head down and listened, first, as he recounted to the driver that he had lost everything and then, as I drifted off, he began to stoke my head and sing softly and beautifully in Armenian. (Turnley paused, his voice full of emotion.) I think he just wanted to be connected to life.

When we arrived at his village, Sptiak, he directed the driver tot he spot where his house had once stood; all that remained was a pile of rubble. He fell to the ground sobbing and pounding the earth for minutes. He then rose to thank us for the lift. We told him how sorry we were and that we had to go, but wanted to know if we could be of any help. The temperature was below zero Celcius, and the only things the man had were the clothes on his back. Still, he was determined to stay near the ruins of his home for a while longer. As we got ready to leave, he hugged us both for a long time and then offered me the wool scarf from around his neck. I declined politely. I’ll never forget that gesture.

Turnley was beginning to tell how that encounter had changed his life and the way he thought about his profession when I had to get out of the car and go to my job, so I didn’t get to hear the punchline, but I walked through the old stone buildings on the Duke campus a little changed myself.

Somewhere along the way today, I started thinking about this story, from Matthew 26:

While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. "This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor."

Aware of this, Jesus said to them, "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her."

How ever cosmic the epic is, whether the aftermath of an earthquake or the road to the Cross and the Resurrection, the best stories gets told in the one on one encounters in the midst of the struggle and grief, where we fight to find our connection to life in things like lullabies and physical touch. One of the things I loved about Turnley’s story is he never talked about the pictures he took or how he photographed the man as he wept and wailed in front of the wreckage of his home. In fact, in the segment I heard, he never mentioned his camera. He just told the story of how he was changed by what the man did.

One afternoon in Marshfield, I got to speak to Dick Gordon. I called in because his guest was Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia. In October of 1964, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia became the free nation of Zambia, and Kaunda was our president. I say “our” because I was there. We went to City Stadium early on the evening of October 23 and watched all kinds of dances and exhibitions. A little before midnight, the band played “God Save the Queen” and we watched the Union Jack come down for the last time. At the stroke of midnight, the Zambian flag was raised and we all sang our national anthem together (we had been practicing in school):

Stand and sing of Zambia proud and free
Land of work and joy in unity
Victors in the struggle for the right
We’ve one freedom’s fight
All one strong and free

A year or two later, at Christmas, my cub scout troop went to carol at State House, the presidential residence. President Kaunda answered the door as we began to sing and, after we had finished, invited us in for tea and biscuits (cookies, to you Americans). While we sat in the big living room munching away and trying not to spill anything, he said, “You have sung of our Savior’s birth; now I will sing to you of my faith.” He sat down at the piano and sang and played “Psalm 23.” That moment indelibly shaped my life in Africa and, on that afternoon in Marshfield, I finally got the chance to say thank you.

I started listening to a story today of what happens when people connect and went from Durham to Armenia to Palestine to Zambia to Marshfield and back home. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old hymn, “for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”

May those appetites never be satisfied.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: unsummarily speaking

One of my least favorite things is to enter a theater after the movie has begun. I don’t just like to be there for the start of the film, I like to be seated and settled for the previews and even some of the ads that flash by while the projectionist is killing time. I want to be in the room for the start of the story, rather than having to lean over and whisper, “What did I miss?”

Truth is I’m always missing something. My life story is a patchwork quilt of unfinished and interrupted stories combined with other continuing tales that I’ve entered long after they began. It’s hard to get the whole picture.

One of the more curious things about being a part of the blogging world is the meme. Part of the curiosity is the word, as it’s spelled, harkens back to my French class days where it is translated as “same.” In blog land, it’s all about answering the same question: sort of a cyber-icebreaker, if you will. I will admit I don’t usually respond when tagged for one (such interesting vocabulary), but Jason at Ogrepraxy invited me to participate in the 1-2-3 meme and it kind of fits with where my mind is this morning. The task is to grab the closest book, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and then share the next three sentences. (A little complicated – do I include the fifth sentence? – but here it goes.

The book closest to me this morning came in the mail last night. My friend Billy is the owner and creative director of the Blue Rock Artist Ranch (does that make him an artist wrangler?) and Studio in Wimberley, Texas. Once a year, he publishes the Blue Rock Review, an interesting collection of writings and interviews from folks connected to the place. Page 123 is the middle of a short story, “Chlora Plays Poker,” by Ginger Henry Geyer. Here are the three sentences that follow the fifth, plus one:

They chuckled about smoker poker as they puffed on their cigars and pipes. The room swelled with a sweet haze of cherry tobacco. It lingered, blended with the musty smell of old books, and embedded in the mahogany walls and drapes. The room was like a small cathedral coated with centuries of incense that carried the prayers of the people into every nook and cranny that God stuck his nose into.

I’ve never been much of a poker player and my pipe and cigar days are long gone, but I know what it feels like to be in a room with people I care about – most such memories are around the dining table – letting our laughter and love infuse everything around us with meaning and friendship. When we lived in Charlestown, our Thursday Night Dinners were gatherings of anyone who wanted to come eat. We had a group of twelve or sixteen people who would come over in various collections on any given Thursday and we would eat and drink and talk late into the night each week. On its own, each evening could have been described as just a meal together, in the same way as I’ve pulled four sentences out of the middle of the longer piece, yet together they told a story that didn’t require one to come in at the beginning but simply to pull up a chair and join us.

My breakfast reading this morning was the most recent AARP Magazine (damn, I lead an exciting life), which had an article called “Movies for Grownups Awards.” What caught my attention, more than the “winners” themselves, was the one sentence summaries they gave for the runners up:

• The Kite Runner: A childhood friendship transcends war, time, and even death.
• Atonement: A love story told on an epic scale.
• The Bucket List: Dying friends learn to live for the moment.
• The Savages: Selfish grownup kids learn that a parent’s mistakes are no license to screw up their own lives.
• Juno: A pregnant teen and an adoptive couple have a lot to learn from each other.

For all I don’t want to miss, hearing only three or four sentences of the story is much more compelling that being told the whole thing in one. In short: summaries suck. The true story is told in the details. Put years and miles between friends, and it gets tough. My friend Burt and I have been playing phone tag for a week. He’s in Texas and I’m here in Durham. We both have new jobs in the last couple of months, we both have lots going on, and, when we finally do get to talk to one another, we will have to work to not settle for summaries and lean back into our history of details to find each other again.

For many years, Billy and I talked everyday. We were writing songs together and inextricably connected in our details. The wonderful thing he has going at Blue Rock is in a different orbit than mine as a chef and a writer. We are both doing interesting and meaningful things that are less connected than we once were. We, too, have to fight the slide to summary when our lives intersect. We are lifelong friends, which means, for me, I’ve got a couple of nights ahead when I need to dive into the details of the Blue Rock Review to find my friend and let him know I found him and I’m with him.

Lent, also, is a descent into the details. For me, “Jesus died for our sins” is summary that leaves me lacking what I need from this part of the journey. I want specifics. I want to read of them gathering in the upper room, much like grandpa and his buddies gathered for smoker poker; I want to listen closely to his words, to follow his steps, even as I listen to the words of those around me this year here in Durham and to the farthest outposts of friendships.

I’ll skip the summaries, thank you, because I don’t want to miss the real story.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: post-it-modernism

After rereading my first couple of posts for Advent, I called my friend Gordon to ask if they made sense. What prompted my call was his comment at the end of what was a rather heady post on my part: “REALLY looking forward to hearing about your first Sunday there.” Without assuming what I inferred was what he was necessarily implying, I took it to mean my posts were a little out of balance. Not bad or wrong; just out of balance. About half way through the post in question, I remember thinking, “This will be the place where Ginger rolls her eyes and says, ‘OK, Geek Boy, get to the point.’” I’m a better writer when I trust her instinct. (Smile.)

I started reading this morning and both my Advent books were talking about metanarratives. I sent Google looking for links and then, just for fun, I asked it to search for images and came across an old friend: Opus.

I would be the one with the eraser. (Another smile.)

I started reading my books again this morning and found the philosophical terms swirling around in my head like some sort of theological tornado. When it finally put me down, I had this image of two guys talking in what we call the Middle Ages, wondering aloud what they were in the middle of. I suppose they considered themselves contemporary and intelligent rather than stupid and stumbling around in the dark. Whatever had come before, whatever was going on in their time, and even whatever was to follow, they were a fresh as history got in their day. Their world was small by our standards, but it was the world they knew and the world to which they responded.

I find it ironically symbolic that we live in a time when Post-It® notes were invented – by accident, to boot.

Everyone knows what Post-it® notes are: They are those great little self-stick notepapers. Most people have Post-it® Notes. Most people use them. Most people love them. But Post-it® Notes were not a planned product.

No one got the idea and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in the 3M research laboratories in 1970 trying to find a strong adhesive. Silver developed a new adhesive, but it was even weaker than what 3M already manufactured. It stuck to objects, but could easily be lifted off. It was super weak instead of super strong.

No one knew what to do with the stuff, but Silver didn't discard it. Then one Sunday four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church's choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver's adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Success! With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the pages. 3M began distributing Post-it ® Notes nationwide in 1980 -- ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today they are one of the most popular office products available.

The irony, for me, is we use a lot of “posts” to describe where we feel like we are in terms of history – postmodern, post-liberal, post-Christian, Post Toasties – when we, like Arthur Fry, find our place when we learn how to look at what we have around us. It’s how great recipes are born. Some of the most imaginative flavor combinations have come about not because the chef was theorizing, but because he or she was trying to work with what was already in the kitchen or connecting the dots between otherwise disparate dishes. One of my last meals in New England, I had fried calamari with cashews, grapefruit segments, diced papaya, wilted spinach, and a Thai sweet chili glaze. I’m telling you: no one built that from scratch; they found it by surprise – by improvising.

In my reading today, James Smith has been discussing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (I think I’ll call him “Stretch” – get it: “Stretch Lyotard”?) take on postmodernism as “incredulous towards metanarratives.” Smith makes his point by quoting a scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

DELMAR
A miracle! It was a miracle!

EVERETT
Aw, don't be ignorant, Delmar. I told
you they was gonna flood this valley.

DELMAR
That ain't it!

PETE
We prayed to God and he pitied us!

EVERETT
It just never fails; once again you two
hayseeds are showin' how much you want
for innalect. There's a perfectly
scientific explanation for what just
happened -

PETE
That ain't the tune you were singin' back
there at the gallows!

EVERETT
Well any human being will cast about in a
moment of stress. No, the fact is, they're
flooding this valley so they can hydro-
electric up the whole durned state...

Everett waxes smug:

Yessir, the South is gonna change.
Everything's gonna be put on electricity and
run on a payin' basis. Out with the old
spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and
the backward ways. We're gonna see a brave
new world where they run everyone a wire and
hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable
age of reason - like the one they had in
France - and not a moment too soon...

Everett’s take is an example of a modernist metanarratives because he assumes his “criteria of legitimation [to be] understood as standing outside of any particular language game and thus guarantee universal truth” (67). I turn to my scientist friend Randy for further clarification. He often questions the conventional wisdom, or at least the conventional media coverage, when it comes to issues of climate change. He’s not saying there is no change, he’s just saying the explanations – the legitimation – is not necessarily accurate: the metanarrative of the global warming crowd sees their perspective as universal truth rather than a narrative that requires some level of faith to believe, as do all of our stories.

We aren’t going to find a universal theory of everything that holds the universe together in an easy-to-grasp explanation anymore than Spencer Silver was able to come up with his super strong adhesive. We are Post-It notes on the pages of history, living in a world connected by hands and hearts holding on to one another, not by ideology or institutions. Whether we are pre- or post- or once again in the middle, we are a people grounded in the story of an imaginative God who breathed us into existence and calls us to incarnate what we trust to be true about the life we have been given and the world we have to share.

Peace,
Milton