advent journal: log work

I spent the afternoon at a Mushroom Workshop with my friends from Bountiful Backyards and I came home with a couple of shiitake logs and a few words.

log work 

we took oak logs
and drilled small holes
filled them up with
mushroom spores and
sealed them shut with
beeswax so we
could take them home
and wait to eat
flavorful fungi
in a season
some months away

dinner tonight
will be someone
else’s harvest
the waiting is
an essential
ingredient
nothing that grows
comes fully formed
what’s true of ‘shrooms
goes for mangers too

Peace,
Milton

an altar in the field

We are suckers for Christmas movies around our house and, as a result, last night ended with us all watching Miracle on 34th Street (the John Hughes version) before we went to bed. In the commercial breaks, whatever channel it was kept talking about “The Countdown to the Twenty-five Days before Christmas,” which I could not help making fun of because they were finding a way to add days to their promotion. And then I thought, “At least they are having a countdown.” Marketing scheme or not, they are inviting us to get ready.

For Christians, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. Our church year draws to a close and begins again anew on the First Sunday of Advent, our season of preparation, of waiting, of telling the story of how our God, the Creator of the Universe and Ultimate Expression of Extravagance, thought the best way to incarnate Love was to come in the person of a baby born to a Palestinian peasant family. We know the story as well as we know the lines a redeemed George Bailey yells as he runs home through the snow in Bedford Falls, or Tiny Tim’s words as the Cratchit family’s dinner table. We have our own countdown to Christmas.

While we wait in the weeks to come, we will hear what our new strategy in Afghanistan will be, how serious our elected officials are about healthcare reform that is serious about taking care of people over profits, who will get Grammy nominations, how bad the economy is, how rich the big banks continue to be, and how divided we are as a nation. We won’t hear much about the wars in the Congo or Darfur, and we’ll see a lot of commercials and holiday specials, which is to say most of what happens in this Advent season will not help us get ready for Jesus to come again into our lives.

Two thousand years of Christmases and the tidings of comfort and joy don’t seem to come any easier. The wars are even in the same places they have been for all those centuries. Mary and Joseph had to go through checkpoints for the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria and Bethlehem is still barricaded tonight. As best I can tell, there has not been in a year in the little over half a century that I have been alive that the world has been without war, much less known much of peace.

So how then, do we interpret our coming back to the story, year after year after year, to speak and sing of the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger?

One of my favorite Bible stories is in Joshua, after the Hebrew people have crossed through the Jordan River following the Ark of the Covenant. When they get to the other side, Joshua tells them to stack up the stones:

Joshua called out the twelve men whom he selected from the People of Israel, one man from each tribe. Joshua directed them, "Cross to the middle of the Jordan and take your place in front of the Chest of God, your God. Each of you heft a stone to your shoulder, a stone for each of the tribes of the People of Israel, so you'll have something later to mark the occasion. When your children ask you, 'What are these stones to you?' you'll say, 'The flow of the Jordan was stopped in front of the Chest of the Covenant of God as it crossed the Jordan—stopped in its tracks. These stones are a permanent memorial for the People of Israel.'" (Joshua 4:4-7, The Message)

In the midst of a culture that values popularity over principle, chooses fear over faith, and puts stock in power over peace, I want to find the stack of stones (and add a few new ones) to remember what it means to see ourselves as namesakes of the one who grew up out of that manger and called us to be peacemakers. I want to stand in the eye of the hurricane of hope that is the Incarnation, that caught shepherds in its swirl and made magi change their way and wonder what new things God might birth in us this year.

Some years ago, Bob Bennett wrote a song called “Altar in the Field.” One verse says:

I build an altar in the field
in honor in memory
of the many graces I’ve been shown
and the ones I’ve yet to see
and so I leave this symbol
fashioned by my hand
the marker of a love
that I will never understand
I leave an altar in the field

I am waiting to begin waiting, and gathering some stones of my own.

Peace,
Milton

weighting room

it’s not the same you know

waiting in line
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting (waiting) for the world to change

tonight I am not passing time
or fostering impatience
I am waiting for news
No – I am weighting for news
time is not passing
time is falling in layers
each one heavier than the last
each one heavy with hope
and uncertainty

I am weighting for the phone to ring
and, yes, for the world to change

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: don't just do something

The music director at our church, James, was in a car accident and severely injured last weekend. He has an old Cadillac that he was driving to see some friends in another state. Unknown to him, the car had some sort of carbon monoxide leak and he passed out at the wheel. The car crossed the median and dove into a cornfield, setting the corn and the car on fire. He was able, somehow, to get out of the car, get to the road, and flag down help that got him to a hospital. He did not have skin burns, but inhaled a great deal of soot and smoke that burned his lungs. Since Sunday he has been in the hospital in another city, intubated and heavily sedated while they daily go in and try to clean out his lungs. The news today is they have made good progress and the lungs are becoming clear and appear to be healing themselves. There are other questions still to be answered, but we are grateful for the hopeful words.

But being far away, waiting for the next word sucks.

The question bouncing around in my mind and also within our congregation is, “What should we do for him?” It’s an honest question with an answer that is hard to hear: right now all we can do is let him and his wife, Amanda, know we are with them. The feeling reminds me of advice I got from my Director when I began my Clinical Pastoral Education internship. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to live be words from Alice in Wonderland: ‘Don’t just do something; stand there.’”

I understand and I struggle with trusting a “ministry of presence” is enough.

No, that’s not it. I know from experience that having someone who stays through tough times without doing anything other than not leaving is more than enough. It’s just damn hard work. And it doesn’t feel like enough.

I need to do something tangible to make me feel like I’m helping. To make me feel not helpless. The hard reality I must face is doing something so I feel less helpless is not necessarily doing something that truly ministers to them. Our congregation has done a good job finding things that do help. The choir, for example, has come together to pay to board the couple’s pup while they are away. That’s good work. We have some family connections in the other city that have brought meals and support. But, as Ginger said in her email note to our congregation today, what we can best do is pray and support one another in “this difficult waiting room of life.”

And so we wait. And pray. Together.

Please join us.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a friend of time

We run a two-person line in the kitchen at Duke, which means I have one other guy cooking with me at dinnertime. As the year has gone by and we have developed more of a customer base, the two of us stay quite busy; Wednesday night we served 104 dinners. One of the ways we are dealing with our growing business is to teach Tony, our dishwasher, how to cook with us on the line, which falls into the time honored tradition of how one works his or her way up in the kitchen. The cooking lessons happen on the nights when Abel is working because Tony is newly arrived from Honduras and speaks less English than I do Spanish. Both my and Tony’s vocabularies are growing because two of the four nights Abel is not there and we have to communicate with one another.

One of the words I learned first was espera: wait.

Our roasted chicken Marsala requires us to wait until the pan is smoking hot on the stove before adding the oil (and waiting for it to get hot) and then the chicken. When the dish is made with patience, the skin browns and crisps beautifully, but if we don’t wait, it sticks and tears.

Espera. Wait.

When the tickets are stacking up and we are trying to get the food out, it is tempting to push a bit, but then we are left with offering less than our best work, mostly because we failed to add enough patience.

One of my traveling companions for this Lenten journey is a new little book by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier called Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness. The title alone led me to believe it was a voice I needed to hear for these days. I’ve not been disappointed. In the introduction, John Swinton describes Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, as a gentle man and goes on to say,

Gentleness is a vital dimension of the kingdom of God (Matthew 11:28-30), but it is a learned skill that requires work and demands patience, slowness and timefulness. Such work means that we have to become “friends of time,” a patient people who recognize that “we have all the time we need to do what needs to be done.”

I am fascinated by time. I make time, take time, have time, lose time, waste time, save time, and spend time, but I’ve never thought of befriending time, or living with timefulness. What a great word. I couldn’t find the word in the dictionary, but I did find a reference to it in an online article that spoke of “yoking our awareness to the present moment.”

If I can go back to the kitchen for a minute, when the ticket prints, telling me someone wants the chicken for dinner, I make a choice. I can choose to let my sense of time be controlled by the little piece of paper saying they want dinner NOW, which leads me to rush the dish; or I can see the ticket as an invitation to take the time I need to prepare the dish well: taking a minute or two to get the pan hot, and more time for the oil to warm, and more time for the chicken to brown, and the sauce to reduce, until the dish that goes to the table does so with, well, timefulness.

As much as the latter choice seems the obvious one, I’m well aware of how hard it is for me to live timefully. Espera doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s the dinner rush or some other self-imposed deadline, I can quickly become consumed with The Task at Hand, and push time and everyone else around with the pugnacious impatience of a conductor determined for the train to leave on time at all costs. I know what needs to happen and I want it to happen now.

Time too easily becomes a force, rather than a friend.

As Vanier begins to tell his story, he invokes Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, focusing on Jesus’ words,

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

And then he says,

My life has been privileged enough that I never quite knew where I was going.

I laughed out loud when I read the sentence because it took me back to the parking lot of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas many years ago. Ginger and I drove there after a family gathering in California because neither of us had ever seen the city. I was taking our bags to the car about nine in the morning and followed two people out for whom it was still the night before.

One said, “I tell you one thing: you gotta know who you are and where you’re going.”

“Well, hell,” the other replied, “I’ve always knowed where I was, but I ain’t never knowed where I was going.”

I was still thinking about them when I read this paragraph:

What makes transformation possible? Jesus says that when we’re born of the Spirit, we don’t know where that Spirit is coming from or where it’s going – there is a reason for not knowing. Transformation gives us the audacity to advance along a road of unknowing. At the same time we can’t be totally unknowing. There must be points of reference . . . .” (27)

I wrote in the margins, “I may not know where I’m going, but I know who I’m going with.” Grammar aside, I can see the transformational possibilities when I can remember the who more than the where. To be friends with time is to choose people over tasks, shared moments over schedules, passion over punctuality. When I have the wherewithal to live with patience and intention – to let the pans get hot, if you will – much less of life is left stuck and torn.

Espera. Wait.

Peace,
Milton

how to grow up big and strong

I preached at our church today so Ginger could take her parents back to Birmingham. What follows is the sermon. First, a quick note to say my brother's surgery appears to have gone well; he is flat on his back in the hospital and not allowed to move until Tuesday, just to make sure. Thanks for all the prayers.

_____________________________

"How to Grow Up Big and Strong"
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham
Sunday, December 28, 2008

When you’re the fill-in preacher the Sunday after Christmas, you have to turn in your sermon title early. Marty sent an email message to me a couple of weeks ago with the outline of today’s service and asked me to give him a title. I read through the gospel passage three or four times and was caught by the final sentence of the paragraph:

And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favor of God was upon him.

For all of the times I have read this story, I hadn’t realized Luke’s use of repetition. You see the final verse of the chapter, Luke 2:52, which comes after Jesus, as a twelve year old, has been holding court in the Temple, was one of the first verses I memorized as a young Baptist boy in Sunday School, which meant I learned it from the King James Version:

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.

Once I recognized the emphasis, I realized Luke wanted us to celebrate the baby’s birth alongside of the shepherds and angels, but he didn’t want us to leave him in the manger for long. And so, recalling the title of an old Mark Heard song, I sent the title back to Marty: “How to Grow Up Big and Strong.” As I have continued to study and reflect, my mind went to two scenes, one from a movie and one from a book, that illustrate the point.

The first is from the noted actor and theologian Will Farrell in the far from Oscar nominated movie, Talledega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, which tells the story of a NASCAR driver. He and his family sit down for dinner and he begins to say grace by praying, “Dear Baby Jesus, we thank you for this food.” As he continues, his wife says, “You know he didn’t stay a baby. He grew up to be a man,” to which Ricky Bobby replies, “Well, you can pray to whatever Jesus you want, but I like to think of him as a baby.” And then he continues, “Dear eight pound six ounce baby Jesus . . .”

The second comes in a scene early in Prince Caspian and the Dawn Treader, one of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. I know it’s a movie now, but I’ve only read the story. The four children return to the land of Narnia after a long absence. Lucy, the youngest one, sees Aslan the Lion, who is the Christ figure in the tale. She runs to hug him and then steps back. “You’re bigger,” she says. “It’s because you are,” he answers, and then continues, “When you grow, I get bigger.”

Last week, Ginger called us to allow Christmas to bring out the child – the Christ child in all of us. As the story continues to unfold, we are called to let Christ grow up, even as we do the same. We are called to grow up big and strong, by which I mean to be grownups with childlike hearts and spirits. And Luke gives us two great examples of what that looks like in the persons of Simeon and Anna, who met Mary, Joseph, and Jesus when they came into the Temple, as Allen Culpepper reminds us, to fulfill the "deepest awarenesses and commitments" of their faith:

“They saw God at work in events they had experienced. They lived within a covenant community and they sought to fulfill vows they had made as well as to introduce their son into that covenant community."

Anna and Simeon were also ones who lived in that same sense of deep awareness and commitment. When Anna looked at Mary she must have seen herself as a young, newly married woman. Luke goes on to tell us she was widowed only seven years after her wedding and had lived her life in the sanctuary of the Temple fasting and praying, which probably meant she had no family to take care of her. She was eighty-four by the time Mary and Joseph arrived with Jesus. When Anna saw him, she gave thanks, Luke says, and began speaking to everyone waiting for redemption, telling them, as James Howell says, “"God's blessing was not a continual smorgasbord of titanic experiences and shiny baubles. God's blessing was just one thing, and it was eighty years coming."

Mary and Joseph were diligent in doing all of the things called for by the community of faith. Anna nurtured her faith as she waited in the Temple each day with prayer and fasting, which were rituals of the very redemption she was waiting for. One of the ways we grow up big and strong is by practicing our faith in the sense that we keep the rituals of our community: being together, worshipping together, singing together, praying together, working together, and coming to the Communion Table together.

When we do any of these things, we are answering God’s grownup call on our lives. We are not a community of habit; we are a community of faith. We don’t have worship on Sunday morning simply because we are a church and that’s what churches are supposed to do; we are about God’s transforming work here. We gather together to wait and sing and pray, to love one another, and to point ourselves to God, allowing the Holy Spirit to cultivate the grownup feelings of expectancy, hope, and trust in our hearts. Mary and Joseph went to the Temple because they thought it mattered to do so. The rituals of faith passed down by the faithful across generations helped them continue to grow in their understanding of what God was doing in their family. Anna went through the motions of meaning because it was how she learned God could make something of what looked like the ashes of her young existence.

As James Howell writes: "Notice the order. In the world, it's rise and fall. The rise and fall of the Third Reich, the rise and fall of the business tycoon, the rise and fall of a movie star. But with Jesus it's fall and rise...We fall, and from that lowest point, we rise."

And then there was Simeon, who had also spent his life waiting in expectation because he had been told he would see the Messiah before he died. Each day for decades he had come to the Temple and each day he had gone to bed without the promise fulfilled until one poor couple walked in with their new little baby. Frederich Buechner describes it this way:

Jesus was still in diapers when his parents brought him to the Temple in Jerusalem as the custom was, and that’s when old Simeon spotted him. Years before, he been told he wouldn’t die till he’d seen the Messiah with his own two eyes, and time was running out. When the moment finally came, one look through his cataract lenses was all it took. He asked if it would be all right to hold the baby in his arms, and they told him to go ahead but be careful not to drop it. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’ he said, the baby playing with the fringes of his beard. The parents were pleased as punch, so he blessed them too for good measure. Then something about the mother stopped him, and his expression changed. What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn’t pretend. ‘A sword will pierce through your soul,’ he said. He would rather have bitten off his own tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice. Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he’d dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.

Part of growing up means learning life hurts. Most any choice we make comes with its own share of pain. There’s a whole side of Christian theology that says Jesus came to free us from pain. I’m not sure what they do with Simeon. He’s pretty clear when he starts talking swords with Mary. Life hurts. Period. There’s enough grief and pain in this room alone to more than prove the point. As we embrace the childlike truth that we can never run outside of God’s love, that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, we must make the grown up move to make meaning out of our suffering, which brings us again to what it means to be together in Christ. We are called to bear one another’s burdens: to voluntarily take on one another’s pain. And it is the regular motions of faith, the daily doings of church life when we do them with awareness and commitment that create the connections that allow love and hope and trust to flow between us.

Even though I’m the substitute this morning, I would like to close by giving us some homework. Next week is Communion Sunday. My assignment for us is to come hungry. Let us come next week ready to partake in a grownup meal. When we line up to come to the front to be served, or when we serve one another as we pass the bread and cup up and down the pews, we are not completing a duty or acting by habit. We are about God’s work, feeding one another and reminding ourselves of Christ’s love that feeds us. We are stepping into the stream of faith that runs all the way back to that first night when Jesus served the meal in the middle of deep suffering and betrayal and said, “Remember me” in as grownup a moment as I know in the gospels.

We are God’s people who have welcomed the Child, who live in suffering, who wait for redemption, and who, together, are the hands and feet of God’s love in our world. With childlike hearts, may we be hopeful and diligent, feeding and loving one another that we may continue to grow up big and strong.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

still waiting

It’s early Saturday morning. Christmas is not even two days gone and already things are changing.

Ginger drove out about an hour ago to take her parents back to Birmingham after their two weeks with us. Since the V. A. is going to provide Rachel with some money to pay for some home healthcare, Lola, our oldest (and least social) Schnauzer is staying here with us so new people can come and go from the house without fear of ankle bites. Gracie went back to Alabama to continue her role as Chief Lover of Reuben, which she does fabulously. Ella will now have to get used to having a sister. Reuben had good days and hard days here, yet all of them reminded us he is slowly slipping away.

My brother, who came home from the hospital last Monday after spinal cord surgery, ended up back in the hospital last night because spinal fluid was leaking from the incision. The last word I had was he will be operated on again this morning; I’m still waiting for further word about what the surgery will involve. His primary surgeon is now on vacation and another doctor is stepping in; what seemed to be going so well a few days ago now feels more complicated.

I’m not sure how long Mary and Joseph stayed in Bethlehem (the stable would not have lent itself to a long term lease, I imagine), from the dawn following the chorus of stars and shepherds, when things had quieted down, the stunning reality of their new little one must have begun to sink in. They were still not married. They were still poor. They were still whatever they were – or weren’t – before the child was born and now they had a little boy. They had been fundamentally changed by the birth. Life could not be as it was, period.

When they got to the Temple with the baby and Anna and Simeon gushed about his being the salvation of the world, I wonder if it crossed the parents’ minds to ask, “Exactly how is that going to come down?” or “Does that mean life will ever be any easier for us?”

When Simeon tells Mary a sword would pierce her heart, Luke leaves her silent.

As the Christmas tide rolls in, I feel the undertow of life as well; both things are real and true. Simeon had waited his whole life to see Jesus. His whole life. And when the child showed up, he responded with unmitigated joy. I can’t find an ounce of “what took you so long” in his words. Anna was no different. Her husband had died young and she had lived, widowed, in the Temple for decades. For both of them, the waiting had nurtured their sense of wonder rather than suffocating it or turning it to bitterness or resentment or despair.

We waited all through Advent for Jesus to be born. He is here and we are still waiting. And we will keep waiting, even as the tide rolls in.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: healing in his wings

Over most of my adult life in faith, I’ve been fortunate to go to churches small enough to still take one of the Sundays in Advent for the Christmas Pageant, though the word pageant always brings a smile to my face. I can’t help but wonder which of the magi will win the gown competition and if any of the shepherds will do something other than shear a sheep for their talent. Vocabulary aside, something about the parade of bath-robed shepherds helps Jesus to be born anew year after year.

The first year Ginger was in Winchester, she had a number of the young people taking part. One of the girls, who had not grown up in church, asked to be King Herod. As the rehearsal continued and came to her scene, she broke character in the middle of her speech and said, “Wait a minute! Herod’s a bad guy.”

My favorite moment in Marshfield each year came when the angels appeared to the shepherds. The pulpit at the church was a wall of wood across the front, creating a ministerial fortress of solitude behind it. The angels, always some of our youngest and most enthusiastic participants, would jump up from behind the wall holding stars above their heads, their faces beaming, as we all sang, “Joy to the World.”

The pageant here in Durham is an Advent one, which, I’ve learned, means everyone shows up except Jesus. We had shepherds and angels and the star and the wise men who all gathered around Joseph and Mary, but she was still pregnant when we headed out for coffee hour. The days have not yet been accomplished; we still have to wait for Jesus.

I thought about our pageant several times yesterday and today as I have been with my father-in-law who has Alzheimer’s. I thought about it because I feel like one of those little towel-headed kids, all dressed up for the big event and all I’m doing is waiting. Ginger and my mother-in-law spent a couple of days together and I was with Reuben, who is to the core of his being one of the most gentle and hopeful people I know. In other years, we would have spent the drive talking about what he saw on the news, which he watched voraciously, or he would have asked me questions about my job and about Durham. Instead, he wondered if it was going to snow (because he thinks we still live in Boston) and asked about every thirty minutes what time Ginger and Rachel were going to come home. Today, I looked in his face as he sat across from me at lunch and his eyes looked vacant, as though he were fading like a face in an old photograph, except it was happening right in front of me.

As we drove yesterday, I was also waiting for word on my brother’s surgery to remove a tumor from his spinal cord. About ten o’clock last night I got news that was about as good as it could get: they were able to repair the disc, remove the tumor, and all indications were the tumor was benign (we’ll have to wait a couple of days for the official pathology report). More than one person said it was “an answer to prayer. God is good.”

It was and God is. I prayed the tumor would not be cancer, and that it would be as uncomplicated at surgery on one’s spinal cord can be. And I also prayed that Reuben wouldn’t get Alzheimer’s and that he wouldn’t disappear as quickly as he is. My brother is going to get to go on with life relatively unscathed – at least from this and my father-in-law is going to continue to lose his life incrementally. Holding both of them in my heart, I’m hesitant to say God showed up somehow and healed Miller because then I’m left with Reuben not being so fortunate.

When we finally do put a baby in the manger, we will sing

Christ, the highest heaven adored
Christ the everlasting Lord
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings

The last phrase always gets me: with healing in his wings. Both the beauty and mystery stir my heart. I love those words and I’m not sure what they mean; I only know they touch me at a place of deep yearning and hope. Run a Google search for the phrase and you’ll find it means a lot of different things to different people. When I look at the person the baby grew to be, the healing wings he sprouted have as much or more to do with the grace and forgiveness he showed people like Zacchaeus or the adulterous woman as they do with those who were physically healed.

God is good and would still be if Miller had gotten bad news about the tumor or had been left paralyzed by the surgery. God is still good even though Reuben is disappearing before our eyes. It was after Horatio Spafford saw all of his daughters die in a shipwreck that he wrote

When peace like a river attendeth my way
and sorrow like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

George Matheson was rejected by his fiancée when he told her he was going blind because she didn’t want to spend her life taking care of him. And he wrote

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be

What these hymn writers know is healing is something more profound than the absence of disease or the release of pain. I’m not talking metaphorically here. My mother-in-law needs healing for her heart learning to live with the husband she is losing. My brother’s healing will go beyond the surgery to include learning how to live in a way other than his gazillion hour-a-week schedule that was killing him long before they found the tumor. Whatever our circumstances, we all need healing.

And together, we wait.

Peace,
Milton

waiting for the plumber

One could wish for a day that was carbonated,
words rising effervescently, even effortlessly
to the top, bubbles of hope bursting on the
surface. Today is not that day; nor yesterday.
I’m waiting for the plumber to come find the
block on our main drain, somewhere between
here and the street, underneath the growing
grass and the nascent hasta, underground
where the words are trapped in the sludge,
unable to bore their way to the surface, or to
flow through to the drain under the street.

One would think, in these days so full of
friends and family and meaning, the real
struggle would be to keep the words from
coming; how could I keep from writing?
My life goes on, breakless and brakeless,
trading exhaustion for expression, even as
my heart fills up and overflows. My body
stops and my mind races on; my brain
finally tires and I toss and turn. Be still,
I say, but I can’t. Instead, I pace the house
looking for words, waiting for the plumber.


Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nouvelle cuisine

Today was my first day cooking at the new restaurant. I did well and the learning curve was pretty steep. Thinking about my day, particularly in the context of these days of waiting and watching, led me to this poem.

nouvelle cuisine

I’m standing at the stove, staring into the sizzle,
waiting for the right time to turn the salmon.
The exercise is not new, but the kitchen is.
My mind tosses about like fish in the skillet,
wondering how context changes character,
what it means that I’m playing a new room.
I’m being me yet I have to wait to be recognized.

Jesus was cooking fish on the shores of Galilee
the morning Peter recognized the cook
and dove into the water to get to breakfast.
He walked the Emmaus road – Jesus, that is,
but no one recognized him until he broke the bread.
Not exactly cooking, but food let them see who he was.
That’s about as far as I can push the analogy except

to say I want to be known in the broiling and breaking,
to be seen in the motions of memory and making.
A day will come (will it?) when I grab the baby bok choi
out of the walk-in without asking someone where it is,
and in a moment no one else will probably notice,
I will feel recognized and received. For now I’ll cook
and wait for home to burn its way into my heart.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: rice and revolution

Apropos of nothing, I want to point you to an interesting web site I found through Africa Kid and the World: Free Rice. As a former English teacher, a lover of language, and someone who wants to do something about hunger in our world, I love this site. Every time you match the given word with the correct definition, you “earn” twenty grains of rice to be given to hungry people around the world. (The site is for real; the food actually gets to people.) Please make it a part of what you do.

My new Chef is an excellent entrepreneur. She began here in Durham with a catering company, which has continued to grow, has the new restaurant where I have been working, and also runs a restaurant on the Duke campus for faculty during the day and students at night. That’s where she sent me to work this evening and said, “I want to know everything you think about the place when I see you tomorrow.”

The kitchen is huge, the staff is small, and they do pretty good stuff. I liked the people I worked with, I had a good evening working there, and something wasn’t quite right. I thought about it driving home, thought about it some more in the shower, talked with Ginger a bit when I got here, and decided before I tell Chef my observations and evaluations, I need to ask a question: “What are we trying to achieve there?”

The things I noticed had to do with making things better: better organization, better kitchen setup, better menu planning – all of which would help increase business. They do a good job; I think it could be a great place. But what I may not know is the university may just be paying for a good place. If so, everyone may be helping to create exactly what they had in mind. If so, talking about how things could change is not necessarily helpful; if not, I’ve got some ideas.

When I taught high school English, I intentionally chose texts I hoped would be incendiary in class. I wanted the students to be changed by the texts, to ask uncomfortable questions, to drive their parents crazy, and to grow up to be wonderfully outlandish adults. What I learned in high school the second time around was mine was the minority opinion. Our schools are designed, for the most part, to raise good workers and good citizens, people who will mow their lawns and pay their taxes. Not too many folks are saying they want a revolution (even though most of the parents have Beatles albums).

Michael Foucault looked at prisons and schools as case studies to analyze the point or goal of society. Smith paraphrases him: “The disciplinary society forms individuals into what it wants them to be: docile, productive consumers who are obedient to the state” (92). Without going on another quoting rampage, Smith’s analysis of Foucault’s theory as it relates to the church led me to the same question I want to ask about the campus restaurant: what are we trying to achieve here?

In most every church I have been a part of, regardless of denomination, I’ve met people with young children who have joined the church – usually come back to the church after some period of absence – because “they want their children to go to be in Sunday School.” I’ve always thought it would be rude on my part to respond by asking, “Why?” so I haven’t, but I do wonder. Do they mean they want them to learn basic values so they will know how to be “good” people? How would they have felt if I had said, “Great!” and handed them this quote from Brian MacLaren:

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative . . . If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo. (Smith 21)

Status quo is Latin for you and me.

When I was a youth minister back in the day, as you kids say, I planned a mission trip to Uptown Baptist Church in Chicago. One of the most active kids in the group came and told me, in tears, that her parents would not let her go. Both of them were deacons and very active in the church. I told her I would talk to them. When I approached the father, he said he wasn’t sure it would be safe. I gave him my stock answer in those situations: every year we took a ski trip and I took forty young people, tied long pieces of fiber glass to their feet and threw them up on the side of a mountain. Never once did I have a parent question if they were safe. How could a mission trip we were going to spend in a church, when his daughter would literally almost never be alone or out of sight of an adult be more dangerous. His shoulders dropped and he said,

“I’m afraid if she goes up there and sees what is going on she won’t want to come back.” She didn’t get to go. She became a missionary.

Her parents were good people, just like the folks in the kitchen tonight are good people, and the school teachers, and the young parents returning to church. Hell, we’re all good people. I’m just not sure God’s point in breathing us into existence was for us to be good. We were created in God’s image to incarnate God’s liberating love and grace to the world around us, which means we are left with a bunch of questions, as I wrote about in a short column for our church newsletter:

The backdrop to Jesus’ birth was an occupied land in turmoil. The world was troubled and uneasy, and yet the angels came and sang about peace on earth. But how do we find peace?

How do we make sense and meaning out of our lives when most of the world is poorer, sicker, hungrier, and more frightened than we are? How do we focus on our families and the relationships that sustain us and find time and love to share with people in Iran and Indonesia? How do we invest ourselves in our local churches to do what it takes for us to become who God is calling us to be and find time and energy to generate hope and change in places like Darfur? How do we fight the good fights that need to be fought on our local levels to make sure our towns and cities are caring for our citizens and find energy and determination to bang our heads against the brick wall that is our national government to hold them accountable for their lack of coherent leadership? How do we save the whales, save the rainforest, stop human trafficking, feed the hungry, house the homeless, wage peace, demand equality, struggle with our own biases, cook dinner, get the kids to soccer practice, pay the bills, love our significant others, meet new people, care for our friends, take care of our bodies, get enough sleep, stay informed, have some fun, do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God?

I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way, I’m just throwing them out there.

We are waiting expectantly for the Birth, the Incarnation, the Sacred Scandal, the God’s release of Unadulterated, Undiluted, Unfiltered Love into the world. God call to us in this season is to be prepared: if we go to Bethlehem open-hearted, we won’t want to come back, or at least we won’t want to come back the same.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- I have a short book review published here.

itunes and interstates

According to Google Maps, my journey from Marshfield to Birmingham is 1201 miles – all of it on interstate highways. The path I chose to drive has taken me through one-fifth of our United States: yesterday I saw Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania; today I added Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. And I’m still not to Birmingham. I got so sleepy I had to stop ninety miles short of Ginger.

I’ll be up early. Trust me.

These kinds of road trips are best suited for college students and not fifty-year olds, I think. Somewhere around Wytheville, Virginia my hips started to petrify so I decided to stop and walk for a bit. I went to the visitors’ bureau to find out what was around and discovered the Appalachian Trail crossed I-81 just south of where I was. I added a few miles to my journey and got off the interstate, winding my way up the side of a hill, only to find the park had closed about fifteen minutes before I got there. I looked around and saw the trail going up the hill on the other side of the road, so I parked the car and headed up the hill. I wasn’t too far away from the road when I realized there was a thin layer of snow on the leaves. I kept walking for about twenty minutes when I realized the sun was falling quickly behind the mountain and I wasn’t in the mood to participate in a casting call for the road company of The Blair Witch Project. I retraced my steps and continued my journey on wheels.

My friend Doug commented this week that the way we travel these days is unnatural. To be able to fly across country (or countries) in a matter of hours, or drive through ten states in a little over a day are actions our bodies and our minds don’t know how to translate. I’ve known a couple of people who have walked the Appalachian Trail from end to end, which is something like a six month venture. They started in the early spring in the south, so they could get ahead of the heat, and finished in early fall up in Maine, hopefully a little ahead of the winter. They made plans for shoes and supplies to be mailed to them along the way. And then they took off walking, taking in each step of the journey, feeling every bump of the trail.

My friend Billy and I used to make mix tapes whenever we got together. (We didn’t live in the same town.) When I talked to him yesterday and mentioned a mix CD I had made off iTunes, he asked if it was as fun as making a tape. It’s more efficient, but it’s not as fun. Making a cassette meant we had to record in real time – we had to listen to the songs. He and I would take turns choosing songs to add, making the mix a conversation of sorts, each song responding to the one before it and issuing a challenge to the song to follow. We never knew what we had made until it was completed. iTunes is the interstate of mixing: I compiled some great traveling music and I blew right by all the conversation.

Had I not stopped to unfreeze my hips, if you will, I never would have met the dear white haired woman in the visitors’ center who showed me where the Appalachian Trail was and I never would have walked among the tree skeletons, their fallen leaves crunching under my feet and their barren limbs reached skyward receptively.

I’m grateful for the highways that make it possible for me to have a late breakfast with Ginger tomorrow, which we will have to share with the Schnauzers. I understand there are some journeys that need to be mapped. And – I pray for more days lived in human time, sacred time, full of wander and wonder, listening and waiting for the next song.

Peace,
Milton

free fall

in the moment between
the orchestra tuning and
the curtain going up
lies a space big enough
to hold our expectations

in the last moment before
the wheels touchdown
and grab the runway
as we catch our breath
and let go of our fear

in that one moment before
beginning -- when we know
what’s coming but not here
yet – that one moment
full of waiting room before

we climb up on a time
and the moment is gone
along with our memory of it
until the next time the air stills
and we free fall in possibility

blessed are the cheese makers

I’m now deep into Barbara Kingsolver’s new memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and have been fed so many wonderful things that I’m struggling to know how to write about them. I have three or four things bouncing around in my head, so I’m going to try and blend them into something both interesting and nourishing, like a good recipe.

The first ingredient is this story of hers about “saving” time:

When I was in college, living two states away from my family, I studied the map one weekend and found a different route home from the one I usually traveled. I drove back to Kentucky the new way, which did turn out to be faster. During my visit I made sure all of my relatives heard about the navigational brilliance that saved me thirty-seven minutes.

“Thirty-seven,” my grandfather mused. “And here you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it. What’s your plan for the other twenty-two?”

Good question. I’m still stumped for an answer, whenever the religion of time-saving pushes me to zip through a meal or a chore, rushing everybody out the door to the next point on a schedule. (124)

Why is it that life feels harder to live with now that I have any number of time-saving devices. I used to lose time waiting for phone calls, or talking on the phone unable to multitask because the cord was too short. I typed my term papers without spell check; I went to the library to look up stuff on the card catalog. I reheated and thawed foods without a microwave. I got letters in the mail that were actually something other than credit card applications and notifications of what I might have won. Though I’m also quite grateful for answering machines, cell phones, and wifi, none of them has helped us use our time in a more meaningful way. They’ve trained us to believe that life is 24/7/365, that we are indispensable, and we have to keep moving. Granddad’s question stumps us all: what’s our plan?

Perhaps we could use the extra minutes to sit down for a meal.

If I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, “Get it over with, quick,” something cherished in our family would collapse. And I’m not just talking about waistlines, though we’d miss those. I’m discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family’s mental health. If I had to quantify it, I’d say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I’m sure I’m not the only parent to think so. A survey of National Merit scholars – exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class – turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It’s not just the food making them brilliant. It’s probably the parents – their care, priorities, and culture of support. The words, “I’ll expect you home for dinner.” (125-26)

Meal times matter a great deal to me. (In the early days of the blog, I wrote about them here and here.) I love preparing the meal and sitting around our table as long as folks will stay and I love going out to eat with folks when the point is to be together. One of the not-so-subtle messages of Communion for me is “the congregation that eats together grows together.” Though the message is clear, we mostly miss it. Ginger and I keep imagining congregations who would intentionally decide that committees could only meet one night a month – all of them on the same night – so people could have time to get together for something other than institutional reasons, or not have to miss another family dinner because of another church meeting.

When church is That Place We Go On Sunday and our jobs are The Place We Go Everyday, and meals are What We Do On The Way To The Next Thing, life turns into a train of barely connected compartments in a runaway train. When suppertime connects to scholastics and church to companionship, poetry sneaks in like the aroma of a fresh baked pie, making room for rest, filling our souls, and reminding us living as though we are enough and we are together is a quotidian exercise, rather than a quixotic one.

The connections are crucial.

Modern psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. In the case of modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage of the process. It’s a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little about the product. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can’t feel how or why it hurts. We’re dying for an antidote.

If you ask me, that’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become routines. Our cheese-making for example. (131)

First, of course, I have to get this out of my system: blessed are the cheese makers.



In two working days, my package of cheese-making supplies will arrive and I will begin my attempt at mozzarella, ricotta, and – eventually – cheddar and friends. When Ginger learns I have a recipe for queso blanco, a white Mexican cheese used in chile con queso, I know I’ll be making that regularly. I can already taste the salad of fresh mozzarella, tomatoes from the garden, and basil picked from the window box, even though the tomatoes are weeks away.

And while I wait for the tomatoes to grow and the cheese to cure (is that the right word?), or even for dinner to finish cooking, I’ll be saving time: redeeming time, that is. How did Isaiah put it? “They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.”

Ah, yes: blessed are the cheese makers.

Peace,
Milton

work and wait

Our garden is almost planted. The rain finally stopped some time last night so I got out this morning and put in the rest of the tomatoes and a few other things. Instead of annuals, I’ve filled most all of our containers and with various kinds of herbs. Here is the complete list (I think):

• three kinds of lettuce
• six kinds of tomatoes
• white eggplant
• four kinds of peppers
• rainbow Swiss chard
• Brussels sprouts
• broccoli
• fennel
• green beans
• butternut squash
• zucchini
• summer squash
• garlic
• sweet, purple, Thai, lemon, and cinnamon basil
• chocolate, orange, and lemon mint
• Greek oregano
• sweet marjoram
• arugula
• cilantro
• strawberries

Wow! That’s the first time I’ve written down an inventory of what is growing in our yard. Pretty cool. Now comes the hard part: waiting both to see what makes it to the bearing stage and to eat what we grow – as well as give a bunch of it away.

After I finished planting, I came in and showered and drove to Plymouth to file for unemployment compensation. The last time I was there was when The Owner laid me off in January. Since the players were still the same in today’s scene, the script, as it were, was still in the computer so my trip didn’t take long. When I was first substitute teaching in Boston I got laid off and had to file as well. They’ve done a lot of work on the “career centers” since then. The office in Plymouth is spacious and clean and the people behind the counter are friendly, at least by New England customer service standards. One side of the office is lined with cubicles where the folks who work there help you get in the system. The other side of the room has a few cubicles with computer terminals where you can go online to look for jobs or take a tutorial. There’s also a long table with newspapers and other employment circulars. There were a couple of folks ahead of me to see a counselor, so I browsed both the print and online versions of the classifieds to see what I could find. The guy who processed my form was nice and efficient and we finished quickly. As I was walking out, I saw the guy who processed me the last time with whom I made a pretty good connection. I stopped at his cubicle to say hello and was surprised at how much of my case he remembered. Then he said, “Hey, I looked at your blog and go back there from time to time.”

I needed that.

I took a back road home so I could stop and see if there were any other interesting vegetables or herbs at some of the small nurseries on Route 53 with a mind to ending up at the gym. I was determined to get there, even though I’m still learning to like it, because it helps with my depression. And it gives Ginger and I a chance to act out one of our favorite scenes from Designing Women when Mary Jo says she likes jogging because it releases endorphins and Suzanne says, “Endorphins – you mean like Flipper?” My body was ready for the exercise today and I got a good workout. Tomorrow is weigh in at Weight Watchers, so I will get to see another benefit from my time on the elliptical machine. (In related news, there’s a new recipe.)

What the three strands of my day have in common is both working and waiting: the now and the not yet, or (perhaps better) the what will be. I planted things that will take anywhere from five to ten weeks to produce what they were created to produce. I set things in motion in Plymouth that will give me some money coming in (starting in a couple of weeks) and create some possibilities for what comes next. I’m going to spend a lot more time watching Sports Center while I work the machine (let the machine work me?) to transform my image of myself both physically and mentally. It’s all good and it all takes time. When it comes to my depression, the same formula applies: work and wait.

Work and wait. The words remind me of William Carey’s words, “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” He is one of my father’s heroes because of his persistence. Carey went to India as a missionary and was there for three years before anyone he met chose to follow Christ. I’m not sure I’m dealing in the Great Things department in my life right now, but I like the combination of verbs: attempt and expect -- work and wait.

What is true for great things, I trust, is true for small things.

Peace,
Milton

no end in sight

When we were in Istanbul a year ago, Ginger and I were both taken by the calls to prayer that went out from the mosques five times a day. Istanbul has more mosques than Dallas has Baptist churches, so the various calls wound together in a haunting sacred harmony that moved us both, even though we could not understand the words being sung. Then we noticed that we were the only ones on the street who stopped to listen or notice it was time to pray, a realization that saddened us both.

Our worship service has a fairly regular form, particularly at the beginning: the prelude is followed by announcements, then a choral introit to mark our move from having gathered to beginning to worship, and a responsive call to worship. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I’m about as attentive as the people we saw on those Istanbul streets until we get to the first hymn, but today the call to worship grabbed me and held on.

Here’s what we said:

Nothing we do is complete: No statement says all that should be said; no prayer fully confesses our faith; no set of goals or objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:

We plant seeds that one day will grow or maybe die; we water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise; we lay foundations that will need further development;

We provide yeast that leavens far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and we can find in that realization a sense of liberation that enables us to do something and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning; a step along the way.

It is an opportunity for divine grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the results.

We are workers, not master builders; we are prophets of a future that is not our own.
(adapted from a prayer by Oscar Romero)

On the day following a weekend where I worked twenty-five hours out of thirty-six, on a day that marks the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the genocide in Darfur and a rally in Boston (among other cities) I was too tired to attend, on a day when more car bombs went off in Iraq, on a day when I awakened thinking of two or three things I had promised to do by today and had not yet completed, I was greeted with an invitation to come to terms – even to embrace – the finitude of my humanity: I’m not everything – perhaps not even enough -- and I’ll have to learn to live with that in Jesus’ name.

Then we sang:

There is a balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul

and

O, love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee
I give thee back the life I owe
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer fuller be

George Matheson, who wrote the hymn, said this about his composition:

My hymn was composed in the manse of Innelan [Argyleshire, Scotland] on the evening of the 6th of June 1882, when I was 40 years of age. I was alone in the manse at that time. It was the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying overnight in Glasgow. Something happened to me, which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering. It was the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life.

What happened was he told his fiancée he was going blind and she walked out on him because she didn’t want to be married to a blind man. The words that came so quickly to him, in the face of his humanity, were “O, love that will not let me go.”

I am not enough and I am loved unfathomably. Talk about your creative tension.

The sermon was about Tabitha, whom Peter resurrected after she died because the widows she cared for implored him to do so. Her vocation in the church was to take care of the widows, among the most disenfranchised of people in that time. Though the church had other people, perhaps, who could have picked up the ministry, the widows convinced Peter that Tabitha’s life was essential to them and so he “woke her up.”

Ginger’s question for us, as she unpacked the story, was, “Is our church like Tabitha: so vital that we too need to wake up because people are counting on us?”

One of the terms we imported from French so we didn’t have to figure out a way to translate it and could sound cool when we say it is raison d’etre: reason for being. If we can’t be enough, then why are we here? There is more to life than quiet desperation or pompous grandiosity. Our reason for being is not to justify our existence or prove we are worthy of our creation. We matter because we’re breathing. We are wonderfully created in the image of God. Our raison d’etre, therefore, is to create and sustain life in what we say and do for and to one another.

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, one of my patients taught me the difference between thinking of herself as living with cancer, rather than dying with cancer. The change in vocabulary gave her resurrective possibilities even in her final days on the planet. I’m not called to be essential, important, or famous; I am called to be creative – to give life, to sustain life, to love life every chance I get.

I heard yesterday that, in his new book, Pat Robertson predicted the world was going to end today, April 29, 2007. That’s one way to kill your book sales. Since he’s in Virginia, I’m assuming he was talking about Eastern Daylight Time, which means I’ve got about an hour and a half once I finish writing. My guess is I’ll be here for breakfast and beyond. The unintentional humor in his prediction notwithstanding, I don’t find much that helps me. The One he’s expecting is coming with fangs out and teeth bared to wreak havoc on the world. Telling us all to look busy because Jesus is coming doesn’t call us to live, but to fear. The point of the Rapture is to make sure we know some of us are getting left behind.

It sounds like he’s expecting a bomb in Gilead.

I can’t get it all done. When my life comes to an end, I will leave things unfinished. (Hell, I’m doing that already.) I will never be enough and I can’t allow myself to be satisfied with what I perceive as my limitations. Tabitha woke up because of the creative power of those around her. When I take my place in the creative lineage of the people of God who are committed to incarnating love any and every way they can, I am taking my place in the realm of God that is unending. I am a prophet of a future that is not my own. However my life comes to a close, whatever happens to this planet we inhabit, love never dies.

And it never, never lets go.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: yes, you can

For most of the Marches we have lived here Ginger and I have spent a day together at the New England Flower Show. For the first few years, we would forget it was going on until we saw an advertisement and then we’d scramble to get to the Bayside Expo Center before it closed. Six or seven years ago, we discovered we could join the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and get free tickets with our membership that were mailed to us in February and gave us time to plan when we wanted to go.

Our day at the show has a very particular arc. We enter the main exhibit hall, drop off our coats at the coat check (since Spring doesn’t follow the calendar in these parts), and then walk through the exhibits in the main hall. This year, my favorite was a series of dining tables set in garden settings, each one done by a different group or company. The place settings, centerpieces, and decorations gave a hint of what kind of meal might be served at each table. Some of them gave me the sense that whoever decorated them never thought about sitting down to eat, only having people stand around and talk about how pretty the table looked.


The theme for this year’s show is “Yes, you can!” which I think has more to do with encouragement than with granting permission. I suppose they wanted us to look at the tables and the arrangements and the landscaping exhibits and think, “We could do that in our back yard.” I like the idea – though, for some of the things, a better theme would be “Yes, you can -- if you have a bunch of money,” in the same way Steve Martin used to joke, “OK, I’m going to tell you how to be a millionaire. First, get a million dollars.” One of the reasons I go to the show is to be inspired to think about getting our garden ready for Spring and about what I vegetables I want to plant, even though we are weeks away from any serious planting. From our visits to the Flower Show over the years we have gotten some great ideas and learned we can do a lot of things, even without a huge bankroll.

Once we circle through the main hall, we move to the exhibit hall in the back of the building. Our most important stop is the first: the Iguana Cantina, a Mexican food booth done by the Cactus Club restaurant in Boston. They have a small counter that seats four where we have margaritas and quesadillas and have a conversation with the guy running things who is one of the managers from the restaurant in town. Every year we have a different conversation with him. This year’s focused on two things: his almost one-year old daughter and his love of winemaking.

I loved how animated he became as he talked about making wine in his basement. He has barrels from both France and America. He buys the grapes from the Napa Valley. As he talked, his story meandered from remembering his father and grandfather making what amounted to spiked grape juice when he was a kid to his dream of creating a business where he could help people make their own really good wine. While he talked, the people working with him were handing out beers and burritos as fast as they could and he never lost track of his task at hand. I suppose it could also be said the other way around: as he dished out the food like a short order cook he never lost sight of his dream.

Across from his booth was one of the event banners: “Yes, you can!” I hope he saw it.

We’ve talked to this guy for at least the last three years, which means his dream is aging right along side of the wine he’s making. If his dream is to come true, it will be because he was willing to carry it to term, to live through the discomfort and hope of the gestation period, however long it may be. (That’s probably about as far as a male writer can carry a pregnancy metaphor without losing credibility.)

Dreams don’t come true overnight, anymore than gardens grow quickly. I planted Brussels sprouts last June and ate them in October. The trees we planted six summers ago only now are beginning to shade our front porch from the afternoon sun. All we could do was plant the trees, tend to them, and wait for them to grow. Some dreams take money, but all of them take time.

After lunch, we walk up and down the aisles of the exhibit hall, looking at the various gardening tool demonstrations, fence and stone displays, statuary stores, artists’ booths, and, of course, the fudge vendor. We rarely buy anything other than food and drink, except the occasional Christmas or Mother’s Day present. (We found one of each.) Then we go back to coat check and leave the flowers for the cold wind of the parking lot and the drive back home.

Though the wind did blow today, the cloudless sky meant there was not as much snow in the yard when we got home tonight as there was when we left. Spring officially snuck in tonight, but will also have to wait awhile to come true in these parts. By Easter, perhaps, the daffodils along our front fence line will begin to poke their heads up, followed by the tulips. When the hostas begin to come up, I’m going to have to split them this year because, five years on, they are huge and need to be thinned out. I’ve also got to move several things around one of the hydrangeas because I was shortsighted in my planting a couple of years back and didn’t leave enough room for it to grow. I planted it as it was, not as it could become. Though our garden is mostly perennials, there is much to do to keep it growing and healthy. Though I think I know what’s there, I’m always surprised.

Tomorrow I will head back to the Inn to cook and dream about where my cooking will lead me someday. I have a brochure from the Flower Show. Maybe I’ll put it up on the bulletin board under my to do list.

“Yes, you can!”

Peace,
Milton

through a glass darkly

Reuben went into surgery about eleven, Birmingham time, and the surgery was over around three. The good news was he came through the surgery without any complications, which was one of our concerns beforehand. The hard news is they had to take one lobe from his lung and the mass in that lobe was malignant. Our new word for today is adenocarcinoma. The more detailed pathology report and the tests on his lymph nodes will not be back for a couple of days, so we must wait before we can see what the next steps might be.

I sat in the coffee shop this afternoon trying to write as I waited and could do little more than wait. Tonight, I don't have more words than these. I'm grateful for the prayers and words of solidarity. I'm also aware of some of you who are facing harsh realities of your own in these days. Please know my prayers are with you.

Some day, Paul said, we will see face to face, but not now. Not now.

Peace,
Milton

can't wait

This morning on the TODAY show, they told of an American Airlines flight from hell over New Year’s Weekend. The flight was supposed to go from San Francisco to Dallas: three and a half hours. Because of severe storms in Dallas, the flight was rerouted to Austin, where it was told to land and wait for clearance to go on to D/FW.

The plane sat on the runway for eight hours without letting the passengers get off.

Evidently, American instructed the pilot not to pull up to a gate so they could keep the other flights on time. The toilets overflowed, they ran out of water, and all anyone had to eat were peanuts. Finally, the pilot disregarded instructions and pulled into a gate anyway, letting the passengers off the plane and into the terminal.

The first question that came to my mind was, “Why did anyone on that plane put up with it for eight hours?”

In this age when they will throw someone off a plane for looking askew at the flight attendant (they’ve even turned a couple of flights around to remove passengers), if even one or two people had gone Peter Finch on the crew in the midst of being held hostage by the schedulers, they would have pulled into a gate faster than you can say frequent flyer. I’m sure someone could have started an inflight insurgency and gotten a good bit of support from the other passengers.

I don’t understand why they stayed in their seats for eight hours.

They aren’t the only ones.

I listened to Bush describe how surging against the insurgents is going to make things better. He said it with a straight face. The reporters parroted his words as their alleged commentary. The morning news programs gave passing notice to what he said on their way to the latest idiocies from Donald Trump. Some members of Congress mouthed off, but were treated with the kind of regard one gives an annoying lap dog. As the war grows closer and closer to the end of its fourth year and the death toll rises on all sides (not to mention those left wounded and maimed), we are being given the presidential equivalent of being told we are going to stay sitting on the runway until the weather clears and we are just sitting there.

We are not all silent. There are voices of dissent, but I don’t hear much outrage. That’s not even the right word. Beyond “I’m mad as hell” or “Hell, no, we won’t go” we need a response of faithful indignation. And I think it is going to take intense indignation to get Bush’s attention. He has not listened to much in any of the reports he has commissioned. He acts as if things are true because he believes them to be. When there were no weapons of mass destruction, we complained. When he claimed, “Mission accomplished,” we smirked. When we began to see we have fomented a civil war in Iraq, we let the Democrats have Congress. As the body count has risen, we watched Cindy Sheehan make a creative nuisance of herself and left her out there mostly alone.

It’s not that we have done nothing. Many of us have written letters and blog entries calling for change. Some have written songs, even books. Hardly a day passes that I don’t have a conversation with someone lamenting what is going on. Yet, more people stood in line at Christmas to get an Xbox 360 than have taken to the streets demanding real accountability and real change.

We are allowing ourselves to be kept on the runway, out of touch and unable to move.

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen, wondering whose words I can implore to make my point. When I was first learning to play my guitar, Simon and Garfunkel recorded a song called “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.” I went looking for the lyric.

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with powerful men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again

And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands end bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And guns and swords and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground

Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I also found something else apropos of this discussion: a video clip of John Denver singing the song, prefaced by an interesting poem I’ve not heard before.



As I’ve said before, Denver was one of the folks who helped me learn to play guitar (his records did, anyway). I saw him in concert several times. He was the consummate idealist: he said the words in the poem as though he meant them, he believed them. As I watched the clip, I realized one of the reasons we may not be rising up in indignation is we don’t really believe the world is going to be much different than it is being painted for us by Bush and the other artists in The School of Violence and Cynicism.

The song for our day is more along the lines of John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change”:

now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

When I was Mayer’s age, I thought we could change the world. Now, it seems, I’m waiting right along with him. I think we will keep waiting until we become both faithful and indignant enough to wage peace.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: lives in the balance

While my parents were here they wanted us to open our Christmas presents early so they could see how we liked what they got us. I love mine –- they gave me an iPod Shuffle. The postage stamp-sized gadget holds two hundred and fifty songs. I loaded it up for work this week with some Steve Earle, Jess Klein, and Jackson Browne to keep me moving while I was doing prep work by myself in the afternoons. Browne had been a big part of the soundtrack of my life since I bought his first record in high school. Today, I was caught again by his wonderful lyrics like these from “Fountain of Sorrow”:

Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
There were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more
But they didn't show your spirit quite as true

You were turning 'round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes

Or these from “For a Dancer,” which always makes me think of Ginger:

Keep a fire burning in your eye
Pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down
I don't remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must have thought you'd always be around
Always keeping things real by playing the clown
Now you're nowhere to be found

Twenty years ago, he came out with a record called Lives in the Balance that had a harder political edge than anything he had done because he became passionate about the mistakes our government was making in Central and South America. Now, in 2006, the song sounds as if it were written yesterday. Here are the lyrics and a video of the title track.

I've been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war

And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs

On the radio talk shows and the T.V.
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

There's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can't even say the names

They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

As long as I’m relying on him for most of the words tonight, here is the closing verse of “For a Dancer”:

Keep a fire for the human race
Let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound

In the opening verse of the passage I will read as the prophet Zephaniah in church tomorrow, he sounds as if he is speaking to dancers as well:

Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem!

At that time I will deal with all who oppressed you;
I will rescue the lame and gather those who have been scattered.
I will give them praise and honor in every land where they were put to shame.

At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home.
I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes," says the LORD.

And so we wait.

Peace,
Milton