Dinner On The Grounds

 I can't sleep.

Actually, I can sleep. Feist-dog can't sleep, and he keeps kicking me.

There's a lot going on in life right now.  In American. In Mississippi. In my life. In Jackson. Boy, there really has been a lot going on in Jackson.

A lot of it is very good. Arts and education, and development in Jackson are all very strong. Government in Jackson is an actual quagmire right now. I look to the left and to the right and up and down, and I don't see a clear way out of this. That doesn't mean I'm gonna give up, but it might mean I'm just gonna pick a direction and start digging there in hopes of seeing open sky sooner or later.

We have some brilliant folks on the council and in the House and Senate, but they find themselves butting heads against roadblocks in several directions. I may not have that much faith in the Mayor or the Governor, but I do have faith in the Jackson delegation, so there is hope.

We had dinner on the grounds at Galloway today. "On the grounds" at Galloway means the lawn of the State Capitol, our neighbor. They're gracious in allowing us to do it, and it's incredibly convenient for us. Bathroom facilities and a full kitchen are just a few yards away, across the street.

Music for the dinner on the grounds was provided by the Galloway Bluegrass string group, which is really very good. Their first number was performed without any amplification but still sounded great.

At any event that happens at Galloway, I always count heads of the second and third generation. Young couples and children are the future of our church, and our church is tightly woven into not only the past of Jackson but the future, so I like to keep tabs on them. I'm happy to report that there was a pretty good crop of little ones in attendance today. There were at least three different cultures represented among them as well, which is important because the face of Mississippi is changing, and it's important that Galloway be a part of that.

While Galloway has a healthy and growing Hispanic contingent, I learned today that St Peters has a one o'clock Spanish mass that was really very well attended. Historically, Hispanic immigrants were a transient population in Mississippi, moving across America with the harvests, but now they seem to be taking up residence, and I think that's very good for us.

For our lunch, Brad Chism brought a pretty great smoker/cooker made out of an old propane tank. While he was just cooking burgers and chicken breasts, that's a great setup for a pig roast.  Aficionados of cooking outdoors would recognize this offset cooker as a real work-horse.

Whatever happened in the past, Galloway, in this generation, has taken to the principle that we don't turn any people away. Being a downtown church, that means citizens of the street are regular parts of our congregation, and today, they were a part of our meal.

If you delve into the Jesus story, that's very much something he would do, and like in his day, after the meal, there were several baskets of loaves and fishes left over. Nothing goes to waste, though. We have an active ministry to the homeless, and that food will be distributed there.

From today's service, you couldn't tell there was turmoil in the United Methodist Church. Part of that is because, among us, there is so much love for each other, for our homes, and for our church. We may worry about this turmoil, but I don't worry that it will hurt us. I do worry that it might hurt others, though. I worry about that quite a lot.

Me and Feist-dog, we were born in Jackson. We live in Jackson. We love Jackson. We've seen a lot, a lot that's gone, a lot that's new, and a lot that's eternal. This is not always an easy place to rest. My entire life, and before, there has been inner turmoil of a very great temperature, and that continues. You could say it's more in the open now than it's ever been.

Culturally and physically, we've built our home on top of a volcano. Its peak is just under the city Colosseum, at least the physical volcano. Our challenge now is to find ways to work around the cultural volcano and do it somehow without oppressing anybody as we did in the past.

The church, not just my church but all the churches, might be the key to doing this. When I was little, the churches of Jackson saw that nobody was tending to our citizens of the street. They saw that they were suffering and hungry, and the churches banded together to do something about it.

Acquiring a gas station across the street from Central Presbyterian Church, they called this fledgling effort "Stew Pot," and my mother applied for the job as the first manager there. Mother applying for that job meant that my brothers and sister and I (and even including fiest-dog) were automatically enlisted to convert this gas station that was abandoned decades before into a place clean enough to serve food from.

It wasn't an easy job. There were decades of layers of engine grease on that floor and decades of layers of pigeon poop on top of that, and we had to dig down through it all to find the concrete floor beneath it and then seal that so we could safely serve food there.

What I learned from that was not physical labor for your mom. That I'd learned turning our two-acre wooded lot into a garden club home. What I learned was there was a whole different world outside of the northeast Jackson conclave of doctors and lawyers, and stock brokers I grew up in. I learned that while mental illness had struck my family, there was a whole other layer to it for people who had no family to soften the effect. I learned that there was a whole other face to addiction than David Hicks sending rich kids off to Atlanta for rehab. I learned what Jesus meant about feeding the hungry and tending his sheep.

I'm really proud of what Stewpot has become. They don't use that gas station for much anymore. It's decorated with Murals, and it is mostly locked up, but it still stands across from the church that bore it. Inside are floors that I used kerosene and heavy scrapers with a hammer to clean so hungry people could eat. Not "hungry" as in "I skipped breakfast," but hungry as in "I haven't eaten since Thursday, and I believe the government wants to take my brain, and I slept under a railroad culvert where some bastard stole my shoes, hungry."

As a child, dinner on the grounds meant fried chicken we picked up from KFC on our way from Jackson and served on an ancient picnic table at the Bethel Independant Methodist Church in Hesterville, Mississippi.   A church where my grandfather was baptized and my great-grandfather built.   A church that separated itself from the United Methodist Church so they could remain segregated as long as it was legal, a decision much against the wishes of every Boyd and every Campbell I knew, but none of us lived in Hesterville anymore, so none of our votes counted.   Dinner on the grounds also meant macaroni salad at the Presbyterian church in Learned, where the Brady side of my family is buried, although all the Bradys and Harrises I knew were buried in Greenwood cemetery, not far from my beloved Jackson Zoo.  You can see my grandmother's grave from the top corner of the rainforest exhibit if the grass is cut.

Dinner on the grounds means we'll band together and feed whoever is here.  It doesn't matter if it's in hesterville or the Stewpot or on the keenly manicured lawn of the Mississippi State Capitol; we have food for the hungry.  We will tend our lord's sheep in the most basic and most important way possible, with loaves and fishes, well, hamburgers actually, but you get my meaning.  This isn't just a party.  It's a deeply symbolic act that expresses what we were taught.  "Are you hungry, my friend?  We have food.  Come and eat with us."

Leave me alone, feist-dog.  I wrote what you wanted.  Now, I want to rest.

I Lied

 I lied.  Of course, I lied.  I said it didn't matter.  I said I didn't mind.  I said I knew it was coming, that wasn't a lie, but I said I was prepared, and that was.  I said I recovered quickly.  That was a lie.  I said I was strong enough to take it.  

I never mentioned the nights when the emptiness swept over me.  I never mentioned all the baked things I ate because feeling more than full meant I felt something.  I never mentioned the doubt, the regret, or the loss.

I took a chance because something about her reached inside me.  I took a chance because her needs were greater than my own.  I took a chance because other lives depended on her, and it wasn't her fault.

I lied because I'm supposed to be stronger.  I lied because I'm supposed to leave a positive impact.  I lied because I always had everything handed to me, and if I showed any regret at this loss, then it might mean that I didn't appreciate the things I had when so much of the world didn't have even that.  

I lied because telling the truth wouldn't make any difference.  Telling the truth wouldn't make it hurt any less.  Telling the truth wouldn't fill my arms again.  Telling the truth might make her feel guilty, but it wouldn't make me feel better, and this whole thing was painful enough already.

I'll cut the rope and set you adrift, and where you go from there is under your power, not mine, and if you look back, I'm just a shadow on the water, and your path lies ahead.  I lied because sometimes a gentleman shouldn't tell the truth.

The Stone Moved

It's Easter morning, Feist-dog.  Of course, I can't sleep.  I'm listening for sounds of rain that might slow down my going to everything at church.  It's quiet so far.  

Two thousand years ago, before the sun came up, the followers of this man Jesus rolled away the stone and stole the body of their rabbi so they could tell people he was Immanuel, the Messiah, the Son of God, a lie, a scam, a fraud that lived down through the centuries--or something amazing happened.  

I can't tell you which is true.  No one can.  I can tell you what I believe, but I'm just a man, and you're just a dog.  What I can tell you is this idea, this promise that death cannot hold us, that new life from the ashes of the old is possible, even inevitable, became the foundation of our culture and has inspired millions of hopeless people around the world for two thousand years.

My people had gods of the trees and gods of stone, and gods of the sea, but the Romans came and gave us one God of the sky.  It wasn't even their God.  They had even more gods than my people did, but the idea, the seed planted by a people they conquered, a people they defeated so completely that they burned their city of Jerusalem and destroyed their palatial temple to the point where no stone lay atop another, they dispersed those people to the wind, they killed their practitioners and anyone who spoke the name of this Christ could die on a cross like his--that idea, that seed of an idea, that tiny bit of faith grew and grew and converted the entire empire that tried to destroy it, and that empire converted the world, and now, people on every continent, call this man Jesus, Adonai, Lord, and Master.

This idea, this Easter, this power of rebirth lives in me, Feist-dog.  I went into a cave and waited for death.  I stayed there for many years, but this man from Galilee, this humble rabbi who spoke a muddled form of Aramaic and barely knew a few words of Greek, wasn't done with me.  I was reborn.  I was as dead as a man can be while his heart still beats, but today I return to the bosom of my church to celebrate Easter.  

I can tell you everything that was said of this man Jesus.  I can tell you everything he said.  I can talk to you for days about the generations upon generations of men, wiser than me, who discussed him.  I can tell you how I feel, Feist-dog, but I cannot tell you what is true.  That's something you have to work out for yourself.  

I'm a terrible proselytizer.  I speak with no authority, no drama, and no force.  I mumble out stories and theories and books I read and men I knew, but I won't grasp you by the hand and look you in the ey and say, "This is the truth!" because I don't know the truth; I only know what I feel.  I cannot make this journey for you.  I'll go with you if you want me, but I cannot carry you.  I can't even clear the way before you.  I'm sorry, Feist-dog; I would do these things for you because I love you, but they're not within my grasp.  They are, however, within yours.  

It was forbidden to do this work on the Sabbath, so the women went to the tomb with oil and herbs to dress the body of the rabbi the next day, but when they got there, the stone was rolled away, and a man greeted them who said: "why do you seek the living among the dead?"

The historian Josephus said the testimony of the women was insufficient because women tend toward hysteria.  I can imagine how that sat with his wife.  The women went to attend the body of Jesus because the men who followed him were in hiding, fearing the same sort of prosecution Jesus suffered.  As he predicted, they denied him.  One betrayed him.  Only the women, Mary, his mother, and Mary, his companion, were left to attend his body with four other women who were followers and the mother of followers.  

The sun's coming up Feist-dog.  Someone rolled away the stone.  I can't tell you who.  I can't tell you what became of the body.  That's a walk you'll have to make, but I can tell you, do not seek the living among the dead.  Do not seek rebirth unless you believe it's possible.

Away from the Party

I snuck away from the party.  I mostly always sneak away from the party.  We've snuck away from some of the best parties in Mississippi's history together.  She showed me pictures of her first grandchild on her phone; she was tiny and pink and beautiful and had her turned-up mouth but twinkling brown eyes like a doe.

Do you remember that time when you called me from your prom to bring you a cigarette, and we smoked it in the parking lot and never went back in?  I always thought your date would be mad at me for stealing you away that night, but then he married that guy from New York, and I figured it was ok.  

You went away for college, but you came home for the summers.  Do you remember that night we got a belly full of good whiskey and climbed to the top of Sullivan Harrell and did unspeakable things in the moonlight?  I drove to Oxford to hold you when that boy cheated on you, then again when she dumped him, and we laughed. 

When my father died, you called, and we talked all night.  When I got divorced, you called, but I didn't answer.  I sent flowers when your child was born, and now that child has a child.

The moonlight reflects the silver in your hair.  You're as beautiful now as you were at sixteen.  We always hid from the spotlight together, but between us, a great garden of life grew and grew.  I've held you. I've loved you.  I've kissed you.  I held your hair when you drank too much.  I wiped away your tears, and you made it ok for me to shed my own.  You found a boy you liked and asked me if you should go away with him, and now you have a grandchild.  

May her heart be as full as yours.  May adventures blaze through her lifetime like a comet.  May she find a friend to sneak away from parties with.  May she continue the garden her grandmother and I planted.