Author / Michael

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Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.
by Michael

Name the Reality

One casualty of that frantic schedule has been the Christian practice of prayer before meals, a practice often referred to, appropriately, as “giving thanks” or “saying grace.”  Christian parents honor the vows they make at their children’s baptisms to nurture their children in Christian faith in a variety of ways.  Some try to teach their children, with at best mixed results, how they should understand themselves and their world.  But whether they recognize it or not, all parents teach their children by how they themselves live.  Surely one of the most important things Christians do is teach their children to name the reality of God’s grace in their daily lives and to express gratitude for that grace and for their life before God by praying before meals.  It is one thing for a child to grow up in a Christian home and church in which the language of Christian faith may occasionally be heard.  It is something else altogether for a child to hear and learn how to speak not just about Christian faith, but the language of faith, the language of God’s grace in reference to the realities and events of their daily lives.

From George Stroup’s Before God (pgs. 160-161), a solid book that’s hardly about parenting and very much about parenting

by Michael

Thinking of My Father

I think of his laugh and it makes me laugh.  I think of all the stories he didn’t tell me, and it makes me want to imagine and pretend and create and write and explore.  I think of those acres that hold his story, his early years, and so much about him, and it makes me want to walk those sacred grounds often.  I think of our last moments together and it makes me remember love, even in crippling, fragile, and beautiful form.  I think of the doctor’s update as I drove back, and I replay his words over and over like they were an unkept promise.  I think of my eulogy and hope he heard me like all those other times I wanted him to feel like I did something well.  I think about the bright day I’ll see him again, rub his head, and hold him longer than he’s comfortable and feel him patting me as the cue to end all that love on display.  And I will hold him longer, press into him tighter, and I’ll kiss his scratchy face and rub his wide nose with my thumb and I will tell him face to face “Pop, happy birthday.”

by Michael

Being in Love

Thurman said in one of books, probably The Inward Journey, that we don’t love in general.  We love in particular.  We love the particular.

We love people and things.  We love God.  We love hobbies, ourselves.  But we love specifically, adding discrimination to an otherwise grand concept.  Love is not a concept and it can’t be done without a grounding in reality.

When we first meet the loves in our lives, we try to shape them by our dreams.  All those things we thought living in love would be like crash into the unsuspecting object of our devotion.  They meet the way our families meet our first girlfriends, with eyes raised, everyone in the room wondering how long this phase will last.

Soon those two parties–the new love and the context of life–get together and ruffle each other until one begins to change.  They effect each other.  Sometimes we change our lives in submission because the object of love is better.  Sometimes we decide that the object of our affections and desires is unworthy, and we move on.  But when loved ones, their particular selves, stay with us, everyone changes.  Because we cannot be in love, live in love, stay in love (and here I don’t mean anything about the fanciful notions of being “in love” as much as I mean the straight and unstraight line that is a life of disciplined, passionate, contemplative, committed love)–we cannot stay in that love without changing.

I am no specialist on love, though I used to say that I fell in love everyone few months when I was growing up.  I started writing poetry in high school because I was in love.  And I did so many other things I’ll kept between me and special people in my life.  I am no specialist, no expert.  But I am trying to become a specialist.

I am trying to train myself in what loving well is.  I want to love well, love strongly, love hard.  And the implicit commitment it takes to want that, to desire that, and to pursue that desire is often unsettling.  I come to see what the desire means, along with what walking toward that desire requires.  It takes detailed effort to love.  Oh, we’d like to believe we love everybody.  I think the Savior said words that make us think we can do that.  But loving everybody is a perplexing impossibility.

Loving the people we know is hard enough and something we fail at so regularly that the Savior would blush at our insistent foolishness to misquote and misunderstand him when it came to behavior.  Thurman turned it correctly: Loving well is loving in particular.

It is loving the cracked skin and blemishes that won’t go away even though they may be covered.  Loving strongly is knowing the sheer vulnerability of your loved one and using that weakness to give them hope and inspiration and faith in humanity because you don’t do with your power what others untrained in such artistry would do.  Loving hard is the consistent exercise of staying with all those promises by the grace and help of every gift God gives.

I think doing this love, being in this love is one of life’s most consistent challenges.  And mostly because nothing really trains us toward it.  We are instructed and taught to dispense with things.  And that won’t help us become lovers.  Recycling and reusing are better words for love because love uses the raw materials of our particular lives, our real special selves, and does not force us to become something else, all while that love motivates (moves and pushes) us to become better.  Living that way is hard and usually so rewarding.

by Michael

Role of an Editor

The role of the editor is an intimate one because she reads your mistakes and judges your intent and suggests an alternative path to your goal.  As much as we think we do, we never like alternative paths.  We like what we know, words we’re married to, what we’ve spent days writing toward.

An editor sees your gaps, can exploit your errors rather than clarify your efforts, and help you listen to you, to your words, and to the hopes underneath them.  Like a guide, she takes in your hardest-won words and makes them better.

An editor can damage you.  An editor can discourage you.  Or an editor can draw a simple, clear line between your work and your end.  She can look ahead and see the page when you can only see the sentence.  She can show you that there’s more in you without suggesting your earlier presentation as inferior.

Her words return again and again: “There’s more.  There’s more in you.  Go for it.  Go.  See.  Soar.”

by Michael

Reasons To Obey Your Teachers

  1. Your teachers know more than you, despite your persistent belief to the contrary.
  2. We trust them.
  3. They are in your life to teach you, not to deal with your strong affinity to, only, play.
  4. You want to be as nice to them as possible since they report the happenings of your day to us.
  5. They make your toys sound cool even though they may not be.
  6. They are qualified to direct a part of your life just like your mother and me.
  7. You will need to know those numbers well to count off the money I expect you to return for the investment that is your daily existence.
  8. They teach you to share and listen and take your time.
  9. Teachers will take you on fun trips and give you great jobs to do.
  10. They are essentially stand-ins for me and your mother.
  11. Disobeying them gets you put out on the street, and you can’t come to my job during the day.
  12. These teachers actually care about you, and you should enjoy and relish that experience because not all of them will care.
  13. Spontaneous treats.
  14. They are the ones who’ll be most responsible for you becoming something.
  15. We tell you to obey them.
  16. You don’t want me to try to explain slanted lines and how to write an eight.
  17. Nobody else is there to help you when you have an accident.
  18. Your teachers earned your respect before you showed up.
  19. Your whole family expects you to do well in school because you have nothing else to do with your life right now.
  20. They keep careful notes about your progress, communicate to us regularly, avail themselves for conferences, and give you practice sheets to better than writing of yours.
  21. Neither of us wants me to keep my word about what happens if you disobey.  But, as you know, I will.
by Michael

A Prayer For Healing Today

As this surgery starts and throughout the procedure, be the Lord who heals.  You made your servant’s body, know his frame, and remember everything within it.  You know him, love him, and remember him.  So look at and bless him with the sensitivity and care that he needs.

Relieve all manner of sickness.  Remove pain.  Use doctors and nurses and attending angels to do your work.  Grant your servant a strong sense of your company, so that, as he lays and waits and receives both loss and newness, he may always have you.

There are needs beyond your servant’s, and his need today remind me of how long you’ve been healing before now.  You are accustomed to saving and reclaiming and making whole.  Do your work as you often do, even when we don’t notice or watch or praise or acknowledge it.

Be the most competent physician during today’s surgery.  As each nurse and doctor tend to him, be present in each touch, word, and gesture, making healing happen.  Bring recovery when all is done and may strength be in the body of your child and friend and servant.

Grant his family all the courage they need.  May they know your mercy, be enveloped in your lavish grace.  These things are not difficult for you.

In the name of the One who made healing his work.  Amen.

by Michael

When You Recall

When your child lives, he carries with him all his earlier selves, so that you cannot separate your individual memories of him from your view of him now, at this moment.  When you recall a particular event in your and your child’s shared past–a day at the beach, a Christmas morning, a sad, weary night of flight from the child’s shouting father, a sweet, pathetic supper prepared by the child for your birthday–when you recall these events singly, you cannot see the child as a camera would have photographed him then.  You see him simultaneously all the way from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and on, as if he has been moving through your life too rapidly for any camera to catch, and the image is blurred, grayed out, a swatch of your own past pasted across the foreground of a studio photographer’s carefully arranged backdrop.

From Russell Banks’ story, “The Child Screams And Looks Back At You”

by Michael

Treasured Check Ins

Your faces–your eyes and smiles and histories with me brought forward–were another invitation.

Even though we were missing two from our circle, your place settings stayed wrapped, our reunion hinted at all those previous encounters where some wonder was being made before our eyes, unseen by our eyes.

Catching up, being present, keeping company over those delightful tacos at La Cuchara helped me do an easy thing: remember.  And you all helped me see, just as you have before.  What a treasure.

I look forward to the next time, when we get to celebrate the next update, when we get to hear each other and keep this going.Dessert at LaCuchara

by Michael

Prayer For Winston

It’s probably around the time that Winston is standing near the casket of his aunt, saying things about her and saying things about you.  Will you be with him in the midst of a long day of many feelings?

While you know the joy that comes at the entrance of one of yours into bliss, you know the mixed feelings of grief and sorrow and pain as well.  Will you accompany him in the fragile experience of all these emotions and grant him a strong sense of your nearness.

You know the deep feelings of love, the memories, the jokes, the stories.  Enable him to remember with truth and humor and affection.

You know all the things that make us love animals, all the things that make us good and bad at loving.  Redeem every moment that he’s spent, and that his relatives have spent, combining those times into full experiences that help them support each other now.

You see those memories coming back when we see our loved ones, the remains of them, the last pictures of them.  Give Winston and his family and their friends a host of things to see during this day.

May they see you in the midst of their tears and their prayers and their songs and their presence.  May you be in the midst, drawing them all into your embrace.

Give them joy and praise  and kindness.  Let them eat well and restore each other through loving touches and long laughs.

And when the days pass, after others have stopped mentioning their relative, after they themselves have forgotten or begun to forget their loved one, make every spontaneous memory that arrives unbidden an occasion for gratitude and peace and anticipation for that last family gathering.

In the name of the One who conquered death.  Amen.

by Michael

To My Mothers In Particular Re-Post

This is a re-post because it says it the way I need it to still:

I haven’t really celebrated Mother’s Day on the Sunday everybody said I should for a few years.  Even though I’ve purchased things for my son so he could learn the habit of celebrating his mother, of praising her for her sheer wonder and generosity and life.  Sundays, because of my work, usually mean that my attention cannot be spent on my mom and my godmother.  So I appoint time to do that around the holiday.

And, in truth, I have acknowledged the day by trying to reach them and a few of the other mothers in my life, the women who have birthed something like love in me, because they have changed me, and I call or contact or think about them because I cannot forget them.  Plus, I’m one of those people who hate to do things on holidays.  I’m fond of a consistent love ethic.  If my mama doesn’t know I love her every month, there’s nothing unique about May.

Still, I’m thinking about women in general and about my mothers in particular.  Of course, my mama stands in a class that’s lonely for the esteem I give her.  As I read this week, we are all only given one.  But I’ve been blessed with many mothers:  The amazing women who have given me something, who have let me see their lives, who have taught me, and who have given of themselves until I realize what it means to be large and full and generous and kind.

So I want to write in memory of you, women and you, mothers of mine.  You know who you are.

I write to thank you…

For visiting me those six weeks after my birth, saying things to me to make me eat even though the doctors were unconvincing and for your taking me home a day or two before Christmas and making all my childhood Christmases special.

For saving me from drowning that day in the Lake and for always being a fierce protector (and more than a sister) since then.

For making me do my homework, for expecting me to accomplish, and for being gentle while I did it, all because you knew what was ahead and because you saw a splendid future.

For reading to me until I learned to love the sound of a woman’s voice more than I loved the music down in my soul, until I knew how to learn, and so that I could become a reader and lover of learning and giver of truth and knowledge.

For teaching me to get receipts when I purchased things from the corner store because young black men couldn’t assume the privilege of walking out of those doors while drinking a pop in the city of Chicago.

For cooking for me, for washing my clothes, for wiping my head with a cool clothe or picking me up when I fainted those two times before school and that one time on the kitchen floor when I was home from college.  You brought me back to life more times than I can recall; you showed me how to slow down when I moved.

For showing me how to kiss and hug and hold and stare and smile because each of those tender gestures was both an expression and an ingredient of love.

For singing to me, for letting me sing to you, and for the appreciation you created in me for doing something wonderful for God and not only for myself.

For telling me stories, yours, mine, and other peoples until I could begin to scratch at the magic of making lives out of words and images from lines that snapped.

For making it normal in my mind to be kind, normal to take care of people who had no place to live, normal to feed everybody when you had the money, and when you didn’t.

For showing me how to pray and ask God for things that I wanted and for things that other people wanted and for being a consistent, gracious instructor in the ways of Mystery.  I probably can’t give a higher compliment.

For the bad choices you made, the ones you didn’t hide from me, even if we didn’t talk about them because they made me see that as musical and seamless and spotless as you appeared when you made life happen, you were still human too.

For telling me things I really needed to hear about myself, for keeping some things I thought I needed to hear to yourself, and for giving me space—even too much at times—to get it together.

For forgiving me for not writing more in this remembrance.