The Ringer

A gyrating Salvation Army bellringer

fresh off a successful run at Little Caesar’s sidewalk

guards the doorway

to the Stone Mountain Walmart

He deftly dances and offers

his extended hand with an underhand swoop.

His lithe body in perfect unison

with the music in his headphones,

his beautiful brown face beaming with joy,

In the parking lot, sedentary men in cars watch the show

Glad for something interesting while

waiting to ride up and

pick up their mothers as they exit the store.

A few annoyed shoppers avert their gaze

but he pursues them.

General Booth would never have imagined

that the laughter he stirs causes them to smile so,

reach into their pockets and give

into the little kettles

on behalf of the nail-scarred hands

lifted up and outstretched.

Stay Connected

Every Mother’s Day for the last dozen years of my ministry as a pastor, we’d combine Mother’s Day with Graduate Recognition. This is because our college students ended earlier than high school students and if we wanted to see them all before they went to Cancun or their senior trip, we’d better get it done.

So, oddly, we celebrated Mother’s Day (which is lauded above Father’s Day). For all of my childhood, I figured Mother’s Day was in the Bible and we often got a sermon on the woman described in Proverbs 31. This was the only time we heard a sermon on this text unless a woman over 75 died, in which case they had asked that it be read to describe them as a virtuous and industrious woman, whether their family had recognized it or not. By Mary and Martha, those unappreciative kin were going to hear it on her way out.

Graduate Recognition is a time when a church, well, marks the end of one phase of mothering, so to speak. As I told one son-in-law when they announced their marriage, “Son, I’ve done all I can do. She’s all yours.”

Now they move to the next phase, which in this most odd time is less clear. Will the moving be metaphorical (Online college? A virtual backpacking trip to Europe? A job, perchance?)? or will it be literal (huge carloads of stuff to cram into some undersized cubbyhole of a dorm room)?

Whatever comes next, the American Dream of parents is what I called in a sermon the “threefold test of maturity.”  You are:

  1. Out of the house.
  2. Out of school.
  3. Out of our money.

My daughter Erin said, grinning, “Two out of three isn’t so bad, Dad.”

          But this “getting out on your own” has really flown into the Twilight Zone over the past year, and it isn’t over yet. I remember at the end of my freshman year of college packing up a Mustang Grande with my entire dormroom and driving to Denver, Colorado alone at age 18. No cell phone, no credit card, just a “gas card” and cash. That world actually existed.

          Yet I WAS going “home.” My favorite definition of “maturity” isn’t that one above. It is this, given my by a counselor, and I have not been able to trace the author:  “Maturity is to accept oneself and one’s origins as non-negotiable.” You won’t achieve that after high school graduation or even college, and certainly not in your twenties. You are likely to spend decades figuring out what the heck that means.

          Let me just say that what you discover isn’t far from what the poets tell us, that there is something permanent and real right here in us, with us, next to us, in the people we’ve been given, but we cannot know that right away. Wendell Berry said it so beautifully in his short poem:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

                                                          (Wendell Berry, “The Real Work.”)

So out you go, but the prayer of a parent is you will find your way back home. If you have to stay a while until you get it back together or if you have to, as John Denver once sang of the Prodigal Son, make your “way back home again over many a rugged mile,” you will discover the way. And it will be familiar and deep. What you loathed and couldn’t wait to escape or the great treasure you seek isn’t out there anywhere. It is within.

          This past year has had plenty that was terrible and depressing. But it has called forth from us something by necessity—to connect where we can with other humans. Loneliness and distance have caused us to dwell in the Far Country even as we didn’t leave home for months and months. And an ache for the people who mattered most and on whom we counted grew deep until we thought perhaps we might not take them for granted ever again.

          On this Mother’s Day, just after my wife and I returned home from the embraces of grandchildren from whom we’d been separated for over a year, as we survived an invisible virus and the stupidity of our fears toward one another, something eternal has endured. And the stream that is bouncing off the stones is singing. Listen.

          Blessings on you all. Stay connected to the people you love.

Two Poems for the Pan*****

I agree, but am wearying to say, “we’re in it together,” since we didn’t get a vote. I’m sick of “pandemic” (so I turned it into faux profanity–pan*****),”Covid-19,” coronavirus,” and “webinar.” I don’t like where we are, but left that emotion aside in the press of survival. I did a series of “Pandemic Haiku” earlier, but turn today to a bit of escapist verse. Among my Christian friends (most of mine are of the less literalistic and more reflective types), it is helpful to find Biblical imagery–the exile, an apt one, with its sense of jarring losses and displacement. It’s too simplistic to go straight for the apocalyptic–apocalypticism was a minority tool in the ancient box that people take out in times like these. Dystopian imagery, though, is like a long train ride with Obadiah in the Hebrew scriptures (it’s short, give it a read). We yank it out of the box the way my Dad used to call his hammer a “North Carolina screwdriver” and cram every disaster into the Rapture box. It may get the job done, but leaves holes in the wall. Humor, though, is of great use for this moment. Just as it is in grief–without stories that make us smile, or fond memories, the waves of sorrow would drown us. In grief as in life, it not a straight line of morbidity, but the ocean of feelings, good, bad and otherwise. So, two more little poems. I can’t help it. They just pop out. Whether they spread uncontrollably is, well, not up to me.  Maybe a smile amid the little glimmers of loss that intrude on the day. There’s so much to grieve, so maybe a little dark humor helps.

Poor Virus

Imagine!

Everywhere you go, even though you affect everyone around you

and millions of people fear you and know your name,

that the whole world hates you and wants you to die.

It’s not like you had a great start—born of a bat-bite

In a filthy wet market.

You were bound to be wild.

 

You make people sick.

Your existence is one relationship to the next

And everything you touch is diminished or dies.

Continue reading Two Poems for the Pan*****

Pandemic Haiku

When one day disap-

-pears into the next without

signposts hope erodes.

 

Stop each day to cheer

The heroes leaving work to

group of people wearing face mask
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Rest in dreadful fears.

 

Nightmares rise up now

Inflame the stupid hearers

With disinformation.

 

Carrying virus

Sharing death without knowing

The Fall incarnate

 

Fear of each other

Loss of all human embrace

Alone together

 

Glued to devices

Exhaustion without labor

Unable to sleep.

 

Thrown out of routine

The crisis awakens us

To innovations.

 

Separated by

the fear of death we cling to

love we have within.

 

Working now from home

Go to work when I wake up

Don’t know when to stop.

 

It has been so long

Since I cherished trees and birds

IMG_20190427_073604

And moved so slowly.

 

Dying all alone

Amid caring strangers here

Wearing masks and gloves.

 

 

The earth rests from us

Our noise has ceased from the land

Creation is glad

 

Daily briefings last

On and on the numbers rise

And the people talk.

 

Televangelists

Sit in empty rooms just like

Those with little faith.

 

Planners meet daily

To anticipate and plan

What cannot be known.

 

People do research

On facebook and internet

To determine facts.

 

Scientists were nerds

We made fun of during school

Now we have regrets.

Good Friday

Morning coffee comes to our cells,

We are not in jail, we are monks of the pandemic

“Go to your cell. It will teach you everything.”

This time can teach us, too.

We can go to Good Friday here.Jerusalem

 

 

By three o’clock, the world shaken,

The darkness a shadow across our souls,

the failures and oblivion of us all fully revealed and judged.

By three o’clock, the thieves will have died, too.

The crowd dispersed, the disciples disheartened,

His mother and the Beloved Disciple,

Having to keep their distance, wait to receive His body.

All will descend into silence.

 

Even Easter will begin with a graveyard disruption

A woman alone

And disciples hiding behind locked doors.

We can do this.