Wine into Water

The First Presbyterian church of Charleston is magnificent. Stained glass, curved, hard wax polished pews, magnificent organ. The wedding coordinator for the church stood before us in a lumpy cotton skirt - but it was 102 degrees out and we all arrived dripping wet. Declaring the church rules she said, "... And NO alcohol AT ALL in the church! I AM NOT jOKING!!! If anyone is caught with any alcohol at all the wedding will be immediately cancelled and every asked to leave the premises. I heard a small stirring and looked over at my young teen granddaughters. They were staring straight ahead, a bit too solomnly. I know that look though. There was mischief afoot! Their dad was doing the same, all the while inching away from a cardboard box sitting on the first pew beside him as if it contained a bomb. The woman leaned forward to make her point, her skirt skimming the box containing 16 bottles of wine that had been delivered and brought in to protect it from the scorching hot car!

Something Worthwhile

My work took me and a student friend to Dallas this week, as part of the requirement of a student award we were granted to help a local school. The event turned out to be valuable, but before I knew that I was just a bit unhappy about taking most of my week to do this task. Steve said to me, after praying for me, "Maybe something worthwhile will happen." My daughter Rachel said the exact same words over the phone.

So, did something worthwhile happen? There was conversation and networking and eating and presenting our school and our work. There was an interesting connection with a mutual friend and some laughing and learning.

As I was leaving the hotel I stopped at the Buss-man's desk to retrieve my luggage and two young guys were there to assist. I had passed them earlier as sentries by the front door and had asked a question and passed a word then. So at the desk I commented on their change of venue and we smiled.

Having received my luggage, the one young man, a tall lovely African American wearing a black with gold trim cowboy outfit said, "May I ask you something?" He was looking at the computer screen and I thought it was a survey of customers.

"Do you consider yourself excellent?" he asked?

Taken aback I paused, and then said, "Yes, I guess I do."

"So," he said, "you don't consider yourself to have flaws."

I laughed! "Oh that isn't what I mean. I have so many flaws. Excellence is about what is inside."

He said, "What's inside? You are excellent but you have flaws. That is how you see it."

 "Yes, of course. I am excellent in that I know who I am and I live out of that, but there are flaws in everything in my life."

Long-ish pause. "So do you have any advice for me?" he asked.

Hmm. I smiled. And thought. And so much wanted to have a brilliant sentence come out of my head. But of course that didn't happen. So I said, (and this won't be exact, but the closest I can remember) "I guess I would tell you that you need to get to know God, and His love for you, and get to know yourself. If you know God and know yourself you will find your way. And you will be excellent."

His turn to pause. "So you believe in grace."

 I laughed. "I definitely do. I need a lot of grace."

"And you believe in forgiveness."

I felt joy to be able to say, "Yes. I need a lot of forgiveness in my life. Always. And for some big things too. But yes, I believe in grace."

 "Keep asking questions," I said. "You are going to find your way." He smiled for the first time.

That was it. I think that was worthwhile.

Signs of God

My son in law told me a story that comes out of the Red Light Project he and his church are developing in Raleigh NC. I asked him to write it out for me. What do you think?

"Two Saturdays ago, I went out to the Durham Art Walk in, well, Durham, to drop off some promotional materials for 5 or 6 artists who are going to be a part of our Project Red Light art exhibit. And the third artist I saw was this wonderful older Italian man named Eduardo Lapetina.

I gave him the promotional pieces and we talked a bit about his display walls that we may be borrowing for the event. And he has this wonderful grandfatherly quality about him. Every word he says smiles.

And then he asked me what I do for a living. I told him that I work as a Pastor at a church. He put his hand to his brow and shook his head and said “Oh. Why? You are far too young to believe in a god.”

And God gave me buoyant joy in that moment - and put words in my mouth that I’m so glad I spoke. Trying to mirror his smile toward me, I said to him, “Eduardo, do you want to know why I believe in a god?” And I pointed to one of his paintings and said “Because of this! Because of beauty and creativity! I see these painting and can’t help but see God. And do you want to know why else I believe in God? Because a bunch of artists like you are giving of your time and talents to help bring justice and hope to people who need it. I can’t help but see all of this as signposts of the divine.”

Mingo Park

I started running again on Saturday.

I haven't been doing any real taxing activity and I had to move. TO MOVE! The Mingo Park in Nicholasville is a great place: a skateboard area, basketball courts, an extreme frisby course (or whatever they call it), a fishing pond loaded with ducks and geese, and a one mile track. Rows of subsidized housing line the park, giving prime play space to all kinds of kids and families who don't have their own back yard. The park is never empty - it buzzes with colorful life.

 On Saturday I ran three miles(ish). On the first cycle around I passed two Mormon fellows trying to get a conversation going with a small group of young teens who were trying to escape.

The second time around the same five or seven kids were captured by a local 'holy man' - an East Indian fellow who wears exotic clothing and wanders around the town carrying various bags of garbage, talking to himself or yelling bits of wisdom. He was standing in front of the kids who were all sitting on a picnic table, watching, mezmerized. His voice rose and fell dramatically and he railed against evils and called the kids to some kind of higher life. I always wonder if a person like him is really crazy or is he a John the Baptist kind of fellow. I don't know.

This same 'holy man' followed my granddaughters around the library last time they were here. He kept saying, "Peace." Kyra, the most cooperative, would say back, "Peace." They told me about it in the car, laughing til they cried. "Peace!" Megan would make fun of the way her sister had said it. "Peace!"

 After my third time around I sat and watched the same boys ride the ramps and edges of the skateboard area. With elegance they flew through a routine of marvelous acrobatics. Then they would stand with their weight on one foot and act really casual like, "Sheesh. That was nothing. You should see me on a good day!"

I had the thought that God was preaching through them. Not the missionaries or the crazy holy man, but the lives of boys who can fly on a board attached to wheels. Someone's boy. Someone's lover one day, if not now. Life fresh from the womb.

I prayed that they would soar through all of life like they rode their skate boards. God help us all.

Middle Tint

My friend George Ezell posted this ...it is from From “Still” by Lauren Winner

 At the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts, looking at Fitz Lane’s The Western Shore

with Norman’s Woe, an 1862 oil painting of a cove, water, a few clouds, a boat. 

It is distinguished by its palette, by what critics in the nineteenth century would have called middle tint—that is, the grays, the browns and blues and dull brick reds, not bright; the colors that do not sing out for your attention; the colors you might not notice if you are not looking for them. They are the gray curve of Lane’s rocks, the enormous expanse of ochre sky. They are the putty of buildings that dominate a canvas but do not draw the eye. Middle tint makes the shadows in your painting; without it, your canvas would look flat. Standing here in this museum before Lane’s great landscape, you might not linger on the middle tint, but without it, you would not be able to see the bright sharp clouds, the curve of stark black earth that holds your eye. John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century art critic, said that the truly skilled painter devoted most of his canvas to middle tint. In a great landscape, there is “excessively small quantity, both of extreme light and extreme shade, all the mass of the picture being graduated and delicate middle tint. . . . The middle tint is laid before the dark colors, and before the lights.” The painter should follow nature, said Ruskin; nature’s landscapes are mostly all “middle tint, in which she will have as many gradations as you please” and only there in those miles of humble, sleeping green and brown does nature “touch her extreme lights, and extreme darks, isolated and sharp, so that the eye goes to them directly, and feels them to be key-notes of the whole composition.” 

Perhaps middle tint is the palette of faithfulness. Middle tint is going to church each week, opening the prayer book each day. This is rote, unshowy behavior, and you would not notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but it is necessary; it is most of the canvas; it is the palette that makes possible the gashes of white, the outlines of black; it is indeed that by which the painting will succeed or fail. 

“Upon the strength of the middle tint depends, in a great measure, the general look of the picture,” says one nineteenth-century handbook for aspiring artists. “The management of light and shade, as relates to a whole, ought to be always present in the student’s mind, as it is from inattention to this alone that a work is often destroyed in its progress.” 

Maybe now in the middle, after the conversion, after ten years, on into twenty years, faithfulness is about recognizing that most of my hours will be devoted to painting the middle tint, the sky, the hillside on which no one will comment, the hillside that no one, really, will see.

 Maybe this is prayer most of the time, for most of my life; I will barely notice it; you will barely notice it; against this landscape of subtle grays, occasionally I will speak in tongues, occasionally I will hear an annunciation."  

George said the ideas in the article reminded him of me. I find that a compliment. 

I have learned that life IS mostly about the middle tint. I am not very impressed by grandeur, heroism, extreme measures anymore. 

I know these have their moment,but when we expect all of life to be grandiose we end up a slave who wonders why life is so meaningless. 

Yes, you barely notice what is most important about my life now. It is not my great job, which I love, or adventures or great moments of service.

 What is important about my life is the color of light that fills my rooms on a spring morning, the fight for life going on in the wreath on my front door, and a smile from Steve. That is enough.

Easter Saturday

We talk a lot about Good Friday and Easter Sunday - but what is today? What is the meaning of the Saturday between the death and the resurrection? In truth, this is where most of us live much of our lives. We live in the waiting time - the time between a death, be it a trauma, a loss, a heartbreak, a disappointment, and what might come of it.

As Christians we believe that God is at work in everything, bringing life. Even the worst situations, put into the hands of God, bring life. God is the great integrator, the maker of what might become new. But the reality is that we must live into the Saturday - the period of time when death hangs over us and life has not yet been resurrected.

In her book called Spirit and Trauma, Shelly Rambo deals extensively with the idea of Saturday - the time between. (I highly recommend it if you are inclined to this kind of question.) One of Shelly's ideas is that after a trauma, life is forever changed, because elements of death remain. This 'remaining' is what we struggle with. Yes life goes on, even blossoms. No, we never get 'over it.'

So, the disciples and friends of Jesus walk around their homes and streets on this (symbolic) day, in a state of shock and pain that makes their hearts literally ache.The waiting. The thinking. Images forced into their brains. No sleep. Tears. Dry mouth. Pounding tension headache.

And then the resurrection, but the Jesus they knew is not the Jesus they can hold onto now. It is a whole new thing. You might argue, a better thing, but it is another death. Hear this little poem imagined from the lips of Mary:




I never suspected
Resurrection
to be so painful
to leave me weeping
With joy
to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty
tomb
With regret
not because I've lost you
but because I've lost you in how I had you -
in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable
flesh
not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest
cling to your body
cling to your, and my, clingable humanity
cling to what we had, our past.

But I know that ... if I cling
you cannot ascend and
I will be left clinging to your former self
... unable to receive your present spirit.

by Ronald Rolheiser

Life in the fair city of Lexington

Here is a little insight into my city, Lexington. An large article in the newspaper today is about how to paint your face for the big basketball game on Saturday. If you are curious, let me help you out. We can all learn.
1. Make sure the paint or makeup you use is safe on skin - non-toxic doesn't equal safe for skin - clown makeup is suggested.
2. Wash your face (or other body parts you plan to paint) to remove oils that will prevent makeup from adhering.
3. Moisturize. Apply a light layer of moisturizer, especially if you have sensitive skin. This will prevent cracking.
4. To get a professional look use a makeup sponge to apply the color. Brushes are your friend.
5. The simplest look is to go all blue. If you want to incorporate white makeup or paint, apply the white first.
6. You may be tempted, but don't put the color on your ears. Otherwise you'll be getting blue stuff out of your ears for weeks.
7. Set your makeup with powder. This keeps it from rubbing off. Make sure you use a neutral color of powder.
8. If all else fails, simply use makeup to draw a blue streak across and between your eyebrows to look like Anthony Davis, famous for the uni-brow.

That is it folks. The news from Lexington, KY. Hope nothing important is happening anywhere else in the world. And now I have to go and buy a blue UK tie for Steve to wear while he preaches tomorrow.