Tag Archives: memory

Jun 12 2016
Leave a comment
learning to live, what they are teaching me

flipping out the lights

ordinary-evening-header

It may be as much the ordinariness that renders an evening memorable as it is the actual memorability of it.

An evening, a cocktail, an honest confession buried in a ridiculous joke.

Ice cream, a kiddie pool, a new hip hop album with Chance the Rapper, Kirk Franklin, and somebody’s cousin named Nicole.

The fierceness of time pushed days into months at some science-fiction speed only noticed when finally cleaning the car out to discover planning notes for things long accomplished or given up on and fancy chocolate turned a new shade of cloudy.

A list of items to accomplish between the alarm and the sun’s disappearance turned into a scribbles on the back of a take-out menu from another city, also now suggesting passage through a time-warp dumping me out several months later looking around, wondering what happened and where I am.

So it seems likely, then, the ordinariness of the friends on time, and the friends on time in their lateness, that seemed to make the evening memorable.

An attempt at a fancy drink resulting in sticky counters and simple syrup on the shirt now soaking in the laundry with crystals of OxiClean I dug out of the rug where I spilled the entire container.

A pregnant friend making ice cream, testing the water out to determine it’s too cold even for you, and deciding who knew of the artist first.

ordinary-evening

The contrast of time slowed down, now with heavy eyelids a new list of scribbles that daylight tomorrow is supposed to bring, compared to a blur of months upon months where the piles in the car and the piles in the inbox stack up is stark and poignant.

No lesson to be learned. No meaning to be gleaned. Just the reality that an ordinary evening put months of blurred hustle into perspective suddenly while closing the dishwasher, turning off the music, and flipping out the lights.

thurman

djordan
Pine Tree Drive

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 18 2016
3 Comments
learning to live, Quotes, Series: Signs of the Kingdom, social work, what they are teaching me

human beings

14c48aec284ac841e08ac8545945491e
I would most definitely be lying if I said it happens every time. It most definitely does not happen every time. But when it’s not a season of dryness, it happens a lot. Today was one of those days. Tuesday was one of those days. Last Wednesday was one of those days.

There comes a split second in the middle of whatever I’m doing where I realize, somehow, that space

and time
and passion
and gut
and possibility
and awareness
and weight
and responsibility
and value
and importance crash in on one another in the middle of what would otherwise be a regular day or a regular moment at work, in work, while working.

Tuesday I stood in front of a group of students who I’ve slowly been getting to know, pointed partly to the screen behind me, projector light across half my face revealing an obvious typo in my otherwise regular presentation. My hands are in the air, my mind is on a person who once sat in my counseling office, and my words are coming out as an imperative I once made fun of a past professor for saying all the time.

“But you will be different. You will be better than everyone else. You will be the one person they come in contact with who looks at them and treats them like the actual human beings they are. These are human beings. You are working with humans. And you will be the best. You will be better than all of your coworkers. You will be excellent. They deserve it.”

Students are half-confused, half still waking up, half-engaged, and some hopefully teeming with the thought they could actually change the course of history in doing excellent work with human beings.

A few hours later, after grading quickly and pouring in caffeine, I’m standing in the same spot with a different group. I find myself reading through a poem about the people who have come before us and challenged everything we think we know about who deserves to be treated like a human being. And I almost lost my composure for a moment.

And then last Wednesday, looking people in the face and listening to them tell me about their perseverance and their hopefulness when everything tells them there’s no reason to keep fighting, I realize I’m in some kind of sacred space where humanity crashes into reality and brings clarity for a split second before exploding back into chaos and confusion once again.

And then today.

Listening to a man the same age and race and history as my grandfathers, were they still speaking wisdom over me in the flesh, saying with tears in his eyes and a knot in his throat,

“Brotherhood & sisterhood
among people of all kinds
is not so wild and crazy a dream
as the people who
profit from postponing it
would have you believe.” – B. Zellner

He was once in the KKK, as was his pastor father. But he joined the freedom riders and was pulled bleeding across the street with his black brothers and sisters, many of whom were killed.

And listening to him tell his story and say these words in front of me as I watch my students sit beside and around me, with lives of social work and beloved-community bringing and rule-breaking completely ahead of them

And then tonight

Driving home from sitting with a friend at another board meeting where numbers and spreadsheets and arguments and committee reports are ultimately about people getting the care and support and dignity they deserve because they are human beings.

It’s then that something clicks and says it’s worth being so tired and so ready for bed if it means that people are treated like the human beings they actually are. It must be. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s so elusive.

And it doesn’t happen every day, every time, every meeting.

But it happens just enough to remind me that there are no other actual options but to wade into these kinds of waters and fight these kinds of fights

And hope that the students and the clients and the colleagues and the men who marched all those years ago will keep doing the same…

on days when it happens

but mostly on days when it doesn’t

djordan
Pine Tree

 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jun 12 2014
2 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, Series: Signs of the Kingdom

the funeral laugh

Screen Shot 2014-06-12 at 9.37.56 AM

You know it.

And please.
Don’t act like you don’t know it.

Don’t act like you don’t know what the funeral laugh is. If you pretend that you don’t know it, I’ll know you’re lying and that’s an entirely different thing to address. We’re together here, you and me.

We all know what the funeral laugh is.
And we’re all guilty.

That inappropriate laugh in the moment where we are faced with the reality that the clock stops ticking one day. The clock stops ticking and the reality rushes in that we are more time-limited than we are prepared to admit. And we don’t know why things happen the way they do, why pain and progress get shaped and honored and forgotten the way they do; why pain lasts and hope lasts; why the possibility of something different for the future can operate with larger and stronger and broader strength than the reality of the way things have been in the past.

That completely inappropriate laugh that surprised us as much as anyone who heard it before we muffled it with a cough or choke or some other lame cover.

We can pretend as though we are wired for money or wired for sex or wired for love or wired for prestige.
But we can’t pretend for long.
Because once we catch anything we chase,
it sheds its skin
and we realize that we are naked and selfish,
insecure,
hopeful,
and powerless in more ways we care to consider.

And that’s when in stings.
It’s gonna be the funeral laugh or the funeral wail. One is coming out and we can’t help it.
We are at the funeral. We know that the person in the casket is highlighted by a story that now has defined lines of what was and wasn’t accomplished.
And we are terrified.
And rightly so, because we are afraid of what the present reality means for us when we shove it up against the reality of the future.

But, it’s that laugh that comes out. And in the same way it’s poorly timed and poorly placed, it’s also unexpected and sends a surge to the abdomen which sends a surge to the brain. And the surges remind us that we are, today, in this moment, alive. And we are alive in a place that is filled with people on the edge of laughter or tears, people ourselves included, who are still making the little choices one after another because our clock is still ticking. Our story still has options.

So we remember our inside jokes and laughs.
So we send cards to the mailbox with stamps and seals that say thanks again for everything.
So we let the other person in front of us in traffic, in line, in thought.
So we pause and raise a glass to make a toast that’s more a prayer than the blessing would have been.
So we make a decision to risk admitting we are powerless and hope that something rises to catch us.
So we wear party hats when making grown-up decisions that aren’t fun because we are alive and here to make them.

So we decide to choose the laugh at that inappropriate time that’s marked by real and gritty silence and seriousness. We know that we will wail again in a moment, and we know that both are actually fine.

But right this second, we choose the laugh. And then it won’t stop. We can’t stop it.

At this funeral, in this thin space where we are asked again that huge question about what it means to move forward in the world we will stop moving in, for a time, one day, we choose the funeral laugh. Because we can. And because we must.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jan 24 2014
2 Comments
learning to live, Series: Signs of the Kingdom

signs of the kingdom: returning to the courtroom

1511805_10152209913237068_795220043_n

There’s poetry of space. And poetry of context. And poetry of memory.

Sitting in the City’s courtroom, where one of my Drug Treatment Court clients reminded me is where the District Attorney’s table is usually placed, I sensed a strong push to remember that holiness shows up in the places we forget to look. And when it shows up, it reminds us that we often look for truth and good gospel news in places that, while religious, are dry and sterile and only shadows of the actual good news. And then there are these other places, where we anticipate the bad news and the emptiness, that we discover the thick and sticky good news that we couldn’t not notice even were that our intention from the beginning.

And in that poetry of space and context and memory, I sit eating a meal and celebrating process and progress with those at all stages of recovery from addiction. Recent drug dealer sitting next to the city mayor. New addition to the Drug Treatment Court program sitting next to the judge that made an offer to seek treatment in lieu of jail.

I find myself sitting next to program participants, grateful for their insight, their courage and the ways they push the truth of the church into my own heart and head through their recovery-minded honesty, acceptance and perseverance.

And the poetry of space and context and memory seems to be ringing louder and louder every time I scan the room. The poetry of people landing themselves in the courtroom after committing a crime in the wake of substance abuse. The poetry of other people, long on the road to recovery linking hands and holding out hope for a future of clarity that seems impossible at that dark time. The poetry of sitting in the very place where you were once sentenced and forced to stare, maybe for the first time, the ugly truth and lies of addiction and powerlessness and unmanageability in the face, now sitting in that very place to celebrate your sobriety and recovery with those ahead of you and those walking in the path left a little more believable in your wake.

And you breath it in deeply because it’s easy to forget when the music isn’t as loud and the poetry isn’t as bold. The day to day and the task to task and the decision to decision doesn’t feel like it’s actually saddling up next to transformation of whole persons with the whole of the good news. For the clients, for the families, for the therapists, for the attorneys, for the judge. The one step at a time mentality feels like it’s actually leading absolutely nowhere.

And then you sit in the room where people were once on trial, convicted of a crime, and watch them now celebrate their newfound strength and resilience, sharing a meal with the ones who made the arrest and the sentence as they cheer for each other.

It’s a sign of the kingdom, no doubt. A sign of the hard work and tested patience of transformation of whole people in communities with the church finding them rather than waiting for them to show up to  building. A reminder that we find Christ all over again when we do life with each other because we find him when we look the truths and the lies in the face.  The sign of the kingdom stands as a reminder that the presence of the church better be in every crack and cranny of every need in every community before we rest, because there are great opportunities and great stories to be told and great poetry to be created. In our own lives and the lives of those in the margins. Even in the courtroom.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 28 2013
Leave a comment
Uncategorized

50 years later: on dreams, justice and imagination

Below is a collection of reposts from mosthopeful.com, posted today in honor of 50 years after MLK’s famous dream.
What is your dream today, fifty years later?

“IT’S DARK IN HERE” | REFLECTIONS ON MLK DAY

mlk-day-2013

It’s no secret that racism is not okay.
Most people know it. A lot of people pretend like they agree with it. Some people fake it. Everyone deals with it.
But we all know that racism is not okay.
And so we think of ourselves as matured. As evolved. As just and honest and good and lovely.
But we are, all of us, racist, of course….

CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THIS POST FROM JANUARY 21, 2013.

 

MLK speech

We were sitting around a table spread with pads, pens and leftovers a few feet off of Beale Street in Memphis. We had a two-day staff retreat for Area Relief Ministries, and we were closing up our time together with some overarching reflections on our different ministry areas, what we were seeing and feeling, and where we wanted to go in the days ahead.

Having been through the National Civil Rights Museum together, a staff of half women and half men, half black and half white, we were reflecting on our own experiences and those of the people we serve every day at ARM.  One of our staffers, Vakendall, started talk-praying in a kind of musical tone that he often speaks in; what came out of his mouth has been lingering in my head since then.

In reference to the photos and pictures throughout the Civil Rights Museum of men and women standing up to oppression, racism and violence with a kind of sharp meekness seldom see, Kendall asked, “Who told them they were somebody?”…CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THIS POST FROM OCTOBER 30, 2011.

LET US TURN OUR THOUGHTS TODAY

“…Let us turn our thoughts today
to Martin Luther King.
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood…”

I’ve been grading papers and cleaning up the house today, enjoying an almost-full day at home which is rare and therefore celebrated. I had headphones on listening to James Taylor because the day felt right for it, and I froze the moment I heard the above lyrics…. CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THIS POST FROM MAY 5, 2012. 

FAILURE TO IMAGINE

I remember the first time I watched Amazing Grace. I felt immediately proud and cowardly, feeling both as I resonated with humanity at its best and worst. Wilberforce looked the status quo in the eyes, evil and injustice and profitable as it was, and challenged it. Of course, he was able to do so because he had the money and the power and the influence to ultimately play hard ball with the good old boys.

But the scene I remember from the film is one where sitting around a table, their inability to imagine how they could continue profitable businesses, orderly communities, and the current status quo made Wilberforce’s audience unable to move forward with the abolition of slavery. They were likely people who sought justice in other ways, but this hit too close to home, and their imaginations could not overshadow their greed and lust for power…. CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF THE POST FROM APRIL 14 2012.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Mar 13 2013
2 Comments
grief and trauma, learning to live, what they are teaching me

in the dark

SONY DSC

If you say you’ve never had to make an emergency bathroom break, I think you’re probably lying.

Tonight, leaving a service at church and on my way to dinner, I called my mom and asked if I could swing by and use the restroom before running right back out the door. She agreed.

I found myself making way to the guest bathroom, late enough in the evening even in our new savings of daylight time for it to be dark outside. Down the steps into the library and around the corner into the guest bedroom, I remembered while walking that there are no lights on the ceiling, so there were no switches to turn on to light the path.

As much as has changed in the last ten years that I have not lived in that home, I found myself walking surely while completely in the dark. The house has changed, my parents have changed, and I no doubt have changed. But in a moment of emergency, I walked and maneuvered out of habit and memory. I made my way down steps and around furniture and corners completely in dark, hands not even out feeling for what I already knew was there.

When turning into the bathroom, I reached my hand around the corner and onto the wall, thoughtlessly, immediately touching the dimmer switch as I have hundreds of times before. The light came on. Emergency over. On my way to dinner.

Driving to dinner it occurred to me that in those moments where we face emergencies and uncertainties, we know exactly what to do. We do it surely even though we often find ourselves completely in the dark. We take the steps we remember taking when we could see what we were doing, and somehow, by the ridiculous grace of God, those same steps work when we can’t see at all what we are doing. We walk and maneuver out of habit and memory, without even stretching out our hands to see if we know where we are going.

And we make it, finally, to the dinner table after all is said and done with. And were it not for the habits from easier times, times when we could see clearly and weren’t in a rush, the habits which have been buried deep inside of us somewhere, we would have been stranded in the dark.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 15 2012
1 Comment
from the archives

approaching one year

 

This time last year, I noticed an acute struggle to remain honest about all the ugliness of all that was going on while fighting to remain, above all, most hopeful; I decided that writing would help hold me accountable.

The lens of passing time has no doubt created opportunities to be most hopeful, and trying to hold myself to processing difficulties through that very lens, almost one year later, has no doubt proven redemptive.

Next Wednesday will mark one year of http://www.mosthopeful.com, so over the next few days, I am going to celebrate a year of writing by posting the most read blog posts, as well as some of my favorite guest posts. It’s humbling experience to see what resonates that most…

Thanks for the accountability that community forces in trying to tell the truth about a world that goes not well, and the promise of a kingdom come. “We cannot walk alone…”

djordan
Pine Tree

Approaching one year: From the Archives

View original post from September 3, 2011

 

if you need anything, just call

 

Circa 1987

Birdie and Donald, circa 1987

Birdie came to our home every single Wednesday for as long as I can remember. She worked for my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandmother, my great aunt and uncle, and my great-great aunts in whose home I live today on Pine Tree.

Two days after finally seeing the movie The Help, I stopped by my grandmother’s house. Pulling a coke zero out of her fridge, I noticed this picture pinned to the side with a magnet. There is another picture of Birdie and my cousin Katie that has been on the front of the fridge for as long as I can remember, but I have never, ever, seen this picture before. I showed it to my grandmother who began to cry, me soon to follow.

My memories of Birdie include her delicious buttermilk biscuits which I was never allowed to request that she make unless I got mom’s permission first. (I assume that these instructions were due to my waiting for mom to be somewhere else in the house, and then my asking Birdie to make things for me that I didn’t need because I knew Birdie would hook me up.) Along the same lines, I also remember the days that I wouldn’t clean my room because I knew Birdie was coming. Mom would ask Birdie not to clean my room on those days, because it was not her job to pick up my mess. Birdie would agree, and then after washing my sheets, she would stack all my clutter from bedroom to closet in neat piles on the bed that had corresponding locations on the shelves or in the drawers. Afterward, she would wink and tell me that she couldn’t clean up my room because it wasn’t her job to pick up my mess. I would put away the stacks quickly, and we both made it below the radar.

She spoiled me for sure despite my parents’ best efforts otherwise.

What I remember the most, however, is the conversation we would have every Wednesday afternoon when dropping Birdie off for the day. I would be riding in the back of our old Toyota van, and as Birdie got out of the passenger seat, I would slide the huge back door open and call out, “Birdie! If you ever need anything just call!”

Every week, the same process. The same line.

I had no idea how much Birdie needed, and how much I had in comparison. I also didn’t know how much she had that I needed like my life depended on it. I remember riding with my parents out to Birdie’s house one night so Dad could fix her water heater, and I was struck with the old, country house. Its dark walls and hanging, exposed lightbulbs. All perfectly kept and cared for. Birdie did not live like I lived, but she never called to say she needed anything from me. Birdie became magical that evening.

I think about how often even still in my own life, I call out strikingly ignorant offers to help others from my buckled up seat in the back of the van. Birdie’s legacy lives on in our family as humble, gentle, strong and faithful. She gave all she had to her church and to her family. Even still, I sit writing this in a home she has worked to make a home more than I have in my seven years here.

Mom told me one day as Birdie was walking off and I pulled the heavy sliding door closed, “Birdie will be your boss in heaven, Donald. Don’t forget that.” That day, I did not understand that comment at all.

As mom and dad and I walked out of the movie this past week, it was that phrase that immediately came to mind.

I’m only beginning to understand.

djordan
Pine Tree

 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
May 05 2012
4 Comments
learning to live

let us turn our thoughts today

“…Let us turn our thoughts today
to Martin Luther King.
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood…”

I’ve been grading papers and cleaning up the house today, enjoying an almost-full day at home which is rare and therefore celebrated.

I had headphones on listening to James Taylor because the day felt right for it, and I froze the moment I heard the above lyrics.

They are from a song of JT’s, someone whose music I was raised on and therefore have ingrained somewhere deeply in my subconscious, called “Shed a Little Light.”

What made me freeze, I think, was the memory that the song immediately brought to the surface in the ways only music can. Frozen, trash bag in hand, I could see it crisply.

We would drive to the beach every year in the summer as a family, grandparents, cousins, everybody. And whenever the four of us, Dad and Mom up front and Jamey and me in the back seat, I remember when this song would come up on the tape player. We immediately split into parts, and sang the whole song through. Maybe it’s just the beauty of remembering, but I think we were pretty good too.

“…We are bound together
By the task that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead
We are bound, and we are bound…”

In my frozen state today, it became clear to me the power of shared values that make themselves at home somewhere deep within us, and as we grow, they influence all we do for better or for worse, and sometimes without our even knowing what is happening.

I stood frozen, headphones on, dogs staring, singing my part at the top of my lungs. Those lyrics came out from somewhere deep within me, and I was amazed at how they continue to reflect what I value most deeply, or at least what I want to value most deeply on the days where I’m more the person I hope to be.

“…There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest..

Shed a little light, oh Lord.”

Here’s to childhood road trips, to family, and to the things we’ve forgotten we will always remember.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

RELATED POSTS | In Remembering and In Hoping | Whoever You Are

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,