lenten journal: about time

Lent is almost over and I am just now digging into the stack of books I got for Christmas. The one on the top of the heap was About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang by Adam Frank. Ginger gave it to me because she knows how fascinated I am with time and how deeply tied it is to theology for me. Her gift was a true act of love because I don’t have to talk about time for very long before her eyes start to roll back in her head; my interest is not shared. Appreciated, but not shared.

The book fits in well to my life these days because I have to be keenly conscious of time and how I spend it. I am working two jobs, trying to keep up with lesson plans (I’ve never kept up with grading), finish a book manuscript due in a few weeks, stay true to my Lenten practice of writing this blog daily, do more than merely smile at Ginger as I pass by, do my due diligence with the Schnauzers, keep up with the cooking, try to stay familiar to at least some of my friends, and hope to get at least six hours of sleep a night. As I said, I am keenly conscious of time. Tick, tick, tick.

In the two years I have been teaching at my little school, I have never had a wall clock that worked. There has been a blank space where a clock was supposed to be or a clock that neither keeps nor tells time has been hanging next to the door, as is currently the case. Every so often, one of my students awakens to the reality that the reported hour has nothing to do with our time zone; today was such a day.

“Mr. B-C,” she said, “why don’t you just take it down?”

“Because,” I answered, “I’ve decided to view it more existentially – as a work of art. I mean, do any of us actually have any sense of what time it is? We make our own time.” She rolled her eyes in a move vaguely reminiscent to Ginger. I chuckled to myself and by myself as they humored me. Yet, if the clock were “correct” it would only be so because I set it to what time we have collectively decided it should be so we can be on time, know when to expect one another to show, or rush outside to meet the carpool at the end of the school day.

It has not always been so. The word timekeeper first appeared in 1686.

Frank builds his argument on the premise that cosmological time (how we think about the universe) and human time (how we think about our lives) have “always been intertwined, and there was never an age when they could be closely separated.” However, in these days we are living “the time we imagine for the cosmos and the time we imagined into human experience turn out to be woven so tightly together that we have lost the ability to see each of them for what it is.” (xv)

As I read those words, I thought of Psalm 8:

when I look up at your skies,
at what your fingers made—
the moon and the stars
that you set firmly in place—
what are human beings
that you think about them;
what are human beings
that you pay attention to them?

When I read those verses, two things happen. First, I hear the Chapel Choir from University Baptist Church singing “The Majesty and Glory of Your Name,” an anthem based on the psalm and one of my favorite choral pieces. Second, I lament I was born in a time of human history when gazing into the night sky doesn’t offer the chance to be put in my place that it once did. And so I live caught between the stars and the Bull City, if you will, trying to find the rhythm of my life. As I try to come to terms with the differences in the meaning of time for the Psalmist and me, I learn from my Christmas gift:

Changes in material engagement redefine culture by altering what are called its institutional facts. Institutional facts define the human world into which we are each born. . . . With the advance of material engagement came new ways of experiencing time. . . . Just as each invention made new forms of culture possible, cultural imagination also developed alongside the technology. Because time always exists at the interface between the physical and the imagination, it would be closely tied to material engagement and the changes it drove in culture. (20)

I can feel the eyes beginning to roll back – and not just Ginger’s. But don’t bail on me just yet. Give me just a little more, well, time. Another of my students is obsessed with time. He has Aspergers and a strong need for order; knowing the exact time matters because, it appears, he worries about being able to get finished with his work on time. Part of my job is to offer grace the clock cannot. When he asks for the time, I look at my smart phone. I used to carry a pocket watch, but that has given way to the phone which is sent the time from a satellite somewhere, as are all the phones and computers in the school; we all agree down to the minute. Our schedules thrive on the specificity. Second period ends at 10:25. The day is over at 3:15. I have to be at the computer store at 5 o’clock. Tick, tick, tick.

Changes in our material engagement make it difficult for us to see beyond the immediate. The exactness of our timekeeping puts the dead in deadline. We are scheduled down to the minute because we can be. And we are still figuring out what it means to our humanity. Or perhaps I’m just figuring out what it means for me. I started by saying time has theological implications. That’s the place where I find Frank’s words compelling because if every material engagement changes what it means to be human then it also changes how we see God. The Psalmist could gaze into a night sky devoid of ambient light and see layers of light; I can see street lights, hear sirens, a catch a couple of stars. Seasons like Lent and Advent have become more crucial for me because they set my heart to a different beat and lift my eyes to see beyond the curse of the second hand to remember to sing along.

Who am I that you are mindful of me? Alleluia.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Here's one of my favorite time songs for good measure.

lenten journal: blessed are those . . .

I spent the better part of the morning with some friends from church as a part of a Lenten Bible study. We are focusing on the Beatitudes. As I was preparing to lead the group, I was struck by the fact that Matthew takes just four chapters to move from Jesus’ genealogy to his birth to his baptism to the temptations to calling the disciples and then spends the next three chapters on one sermon. I’ve been reading through a couple of commentaries that talk about understanding the blessings of the beatitudes as Big Picture: an eschatological perspective of the realm of God, which is both now and not yet. I thought about the commentator’s word when I sat down this afternoon with Stephen Dunn again and his essay on “Poets, Poetry, and Spirituality.”

The classic spiritual journey is from travail to understanding to acceptance. (168)

That classic journey is the one on which I was raised. As the old gospel song says,

farther along we’ll know more about it
farther along we’ll understand why
cheer up my brother live in the sunshine
we’ll understand it all by and by

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews proclaimed, “the evidence of things not seen.” Yes and I have come to see that life is more nuanced and more complicated that the stepping stones in the classic journey. Dunn offers another thought:

Spirituality in poetry. Here’s another attempt at a definition: A journey from travail toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” (170)

Though Dunn is not writing from a Christian perspective, he informs mine because he asks good questions. I have found that I need the questions of those who are not insiders to my faith perspective to challenge me to see more than I can find on my own or within my community of insiders, particularly when it comes to dealing with pain and struggle. Take, for example, Tom Waits’ song, “Georgia Lee”:

cold was the night, hard was the ground
they found her in a small grove of trees
lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
she's too young to be out on the street.

why wasn't God watching?
why wasn't God listening?
why wasn't God there for Georgia Lee?

When I was in the deepest part of my depression and trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to begin to make meaning of it, most Christian writers were not much help because they had a hard time coming to terms with despair without offering how I let Jesus fix me. I didn’t need someone to fix me. I needed someone to listen, to resonate, to sit there in the dark with me and admit it was real and that I could survive. Dunn, again:

I know that despair often can be a ticket to an unchosen journey, and to survive it is to come back with glimpses of what was not available to us before. (160)

As Lent began this year, I observed – no, I celebrated two years that I have been off of my antidepressants. Life is lighter these last two years than the eight years before them and I am grateful. I worked hard to understand what depression was and how I could deal with the darkness and I don’t understand how or why it let up on me in many ways. I live now with the prospect that this is a season of relief, which may last a long time and which may not, and I must continue to let my faith and my life be informed by what I saw and felt and learned while riding the monster. I see what Dunn means by catching glimpses of “what was not available to us before,” just as I have a deeper appreciation for the prepositional phrases that complete each of the Beatitudes:

blessed are the poor in spirit FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven
blessed are they that mourn FOR they shall be comforted
blessed are the meek FOR they shall inherit the earth
blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness FOR they shall be filled
blessed are the merciful FOR they shall receive mercy
blessed are the pure in heart FOR they shall see God
blessed are the peacemakers FOR they shall be called the children of God
blessed are those persecuted for righteousness FOR theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Jesus’ words feel like an invitation to the journey Dunn described: “from travail to toward an understanding that leads back to mystery.” To begin to grasp the blessing means to be first acquainted with grief, with loss, with suffering. To begin to understand the substance of things hoped for is to find resonance first with the pain that is the substance of human existence. Such is the paradox of blessing, the opening to the deeper mystery of God.

After eight years of depression, I know experientially more about emotional pain than I did before. I also know that love did not let go of me. I didn’t learn that because someone told me to trust Jesus or told me that love wouldn’t let go of me. I learned it because people who love me – Ginger being at the top of that list – didn’t let go. They didn’t try to fix me or correct me; what they did best was not leave. They incarnated love in a way that gave me room to trust that I would be comforted, that God was somewhere in the dark as well. As REM sings in one of my favorite hymns,

when your day is night alone
and you feel like letting go
when you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on
‘cause everybody hurts
take comfort in your friends
everybody hurts
don’t throw up your hands
don’t throw up your hands
if you feel like you’re alone
no, no, no – you’re not alone

Despair is the seedbed of hope. Hope is more profound than explanation or reprieve. Love never lets go.

Someday we shall see face to face.

Peace,
Milton

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