Shamelessly, I just gotta repost this morsel of goodness from a writer I love even more than I admire. Watch his star rise, and Miss Ashley’s along with it. Shine on…son.
Shamelessly, I just gotta repost this morsel of goodness from a writer I love even more than I admire. Watch his star rise, and Miss Ashley’s along with it. Shine on…son.
I am writing from Common Cup, a coffee shop on campus where I had hoped to run into a new friend, a man I met at the Interfaith Roundtable. He is married to a European Jewish woman, making their four well-educated, accomplished sons, bi-racial, which I wish I did not have to notice, but especially right now, I do. He is wise and passionate, my new friend, and whenever we talk he says things worth writing-down. Tuesday, he said,
“We, all of us, have to channel our anger, or else it threatens to tear apart … everything.”
I order the Papa New Guinea free trade, pour-over, with a shot of hazelnut flavoring and cream on the side and decide to wait to see if my friend stops by the shop; he comes here often.
I have just walked here, across the University campus, from an outrageously good Mexican lunch with another new friend, a 20-something community organizer for Habitat for Humanity. She is awaiting the birth of her first child. She lives with her husband in Detroit, and listens to audio books during her :45 commute each day. We talked about the election and she challenged every assumption I had about her before we took the time to share a meal. I walked away, filled by both the depth of our conversation and the combination of flavors in the food.
We had approached our meeting cautiously; and spontaneously embraced when we parted.
During my walk from Tios to Common Cup, I passed a tunnel-like-alley filled with graffiti on every exposed surface. The predominant colors of the angry art were white and black, red and blue. In that tunnel 3 skeletal men were talking as if through megaphones. The words they pretended to offer one another were clearly meant for everyone passing the tunnel; they dripped with hate, unveiled threats and anger, like blood off a vampire’s incisor. I had the sense that they thought their right to speak at this volume on this topic was long overdue. At the entrance of the alley-tunnel, I paused briefly to stare at them; it was likely the evilest eye I’ve ever given away free.
I passed the First Presbyterian Church on my walk. A congregation of 5000 members, I went there Sunday night with friends from church to hear about the 25 Tiny Houses being built on Cass in Detroit for the homeless. Some of the food in our meal was grown in the city garden near these planned houses. The Ambassadors, a formerly homeless group of men and one woman sang us heartfelt hymns and You’ve Got a Friend after dinner.
We were welcomed to the presentation by First Presbyterian’s Senior Pastor / Head of Staff, Rev. Fairfax Fair, who was as gracious and eloquent as one might expect from a leader of such a large church. Her welcome reminded me of a time when some misguided men once told me that I wasn’t Senior Pastor material. I took some pride in listening to her talk to me as an equal.
My mantra since January 1, 2016 has been Listen to Understand. When I chose it, I had no idea how difficult it would be to live it out.
Since the election, I have sought out voices unlike my own and tried to wrap my head around the daily news of hate crimes and questionable appointments to the White House staff. I’ve heard election debriefings that include an account of Facebook’s fake news reporting and how it may have influenced votes and a discussion with no solution about who, if anyone, should be held accountable if the extent of that influence proves to be true. The tension in every dimension of our public dialogue now feels like glue dried on our skin that we need to peel off piece by piece because it has all taken hold.
As I walked, the sheer beauty of the day commanded my attention, like a balm to my brain which has no off-switch, or a soft bandana wrapped around my heart to hold it together.
At every corner, I raised my face to the sun and intentionally inhaled the fresh autumn air. At every turn, I took pictures of the light breaking through –
between buildings
backlighting students
catching the chrome on bikes
making even brown leaves shine.
It is that light, in which we must stand, to warm our weary souls.
“I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; 7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline…Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.” –2 Timothy 6-7; 14
I know that for many of you, last night’s election results were shocking, troubling, and confusing. Perhaps you woke up angry as hell.
I also know, that for others, the results were shocking, but not troubling. Perhaps you woke up with a sense of hope.
The real risk, whether you awoke feeling despair or victory, is in having people continue to divide themselves one against the other. If we learned anything last night, it was the extent to which we are a divided nation. This is not what God intends for the creation God loves.
We must keep focused on the source of life; the author of our faith, who calls us to love.
Therefore, I urge you in these first days of the new normal– to be gentle with each other and with yourselves. Listen to your heart beating and imagine breathing in calm with every breath. Allow God’s first language of silence to wash over you and speak to your heart. Do the simple things that restore your soul.
Systemic change takes decades. In 1989, on this very day, the Berlin Wall came down. That wall remains down today and it’s absence reminds us that change is possible. though it is rarely easy.
Today, we remain free to talk to one another, to pray together, to reflect on where and how we are being called to be part of the solution. This is a time to consider our own complicity in the situation we now find ourselves and to trust that by grace we are able to change. Guard your thoughts against worries of what might happen; such anxieties threaten to compromise our ability to act with justice and mercy by overshadowing our hope with fear.
If you need a safe space to land, I invite you to come to King of Kings Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan. You are so much more than welcome; you are wanted with us here.
9 So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. 10 So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.
I live in a two-calendar world; always aware of the season, the holiday looming, how many days until Sunday; and keenly aware of whether the church is telling the story of loaves and fishes or remembering the saints we’ve loved in this world and those we’ve committed to the next.
It’s a sweet way to move through this life. No matter how much despair the world might generate, or report, inflate or exploit, I’m always considering where the Gospel meets that story and the difference that it makes.
It is Halloween, so I follow my traditions of watching certain YouTube videos: Dance In The Graveyard for example; and at the same time I’m wondering if one of our gifted musicians might lend her trumpet to When The Saints Go Marching In on Sunday.
It is Tuesday, so I begin listening to podcasts to prepare to preach; and I go to Yoga so that my body and mind can get synced up and free the muse that directs my imagination. And I may well land at Frita Baditos for lunch.
Glossy Pumpkin Pie and cookies that look like Turkeys are on the cover of Food; and Soup Suppers will soon begin as we ease into Advent with the lullaby that is Holden Evening Prayer.
I am in a new city I fell in love with long ago, the owner of a new red wool coat and winter white gloves. I am in a new church, singing songs so beloved by now they often make me cry and hearing scripture I know by heart yet long to hear again. And I need to press my white stole with the gold hand-prints and tiny feet for Sunday to prepare to celebrate a holy day of remembering.
I look over the bulletin and on the back page see that hymn you just can’t sing without smiling. And I remember the art print by the same name as the hymn — the one that hung in the restaurant with the delicious tomato soup where Chase and I had lunch. In the print, great jazz musicians who blessed us here are stilled in a parade on a street that surely runs down the middle of eternity.
I remember hearing the brass band playing it to greet us on the mission trip we took to help restore New Orleans after Katrina.
In my mind’s eye I can still see Cooper, age 12, playing it on his Saxophone outside that beautiful fall day in the small farming community we shared before he and his family moved away.
And I hear the voices of my cousins telling me how they played it at Uncle Jac’s funeral.
I will soon read the Frederick Buechner piece that I read this time every year because the truth it contains calls my name like a prelude to a favorite song:
AND I LOVED THEM, these others, those friends and teachers. I would never have used the word love, saving that for what I had felt for the girl with the mouth that turned up at the corners, and for Naya, my mother and brother, but love of a kind it nonetheless was. Even the ones I did not all that much like I think I knew I would miss when the time came. I sensed in them, as in myself, an inner battle against loneliness and the great dark, and to know that they were also battling was to be no longer alone in the same way with in myself. I loved them for that. I wished them well. And then there was Jimmy, my first fast friend; and Huyler, who of all of them heard out most healingly the secret of my father; and Bill, skinny and full of life and the brightest of us all, who would have added God only knows what richness to the great ragbag of things if the war had not ended him before he more than got started. I could not imagine who I would have been without them, nor can I imagine it to this day because they are in so many ways a part of me still.
• • •
On All Saints’ Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own. (Buechner, Not Just The Saints)
I live in a two-calendar world; one on the ground, and the other on a separate plane for which I cannot find the words; even with words being my thing.
And Lord, I want to be in that number.
“Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by its gates.” Revelation 22:14 (NRSV)
