Derek Lamson: News

Good morning, my dear West Hills family, best and most beautiful good mornings to you all. Praise God for spring, and hope, and our health. Praise God for our beautiful children. Praise God this morning that we have enough to eat, and warm places to sleep. Praise God for his hands on our shoulders, and the warm embrace of his spirit. Praise God for this wonderful community! Thank you all for getting up and getting dressed and driving over here this morning. It gives me great joy to see you all today.

Last winter I got serious with God about my leading to travel the country with a concern for the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. You know who they are: the international peace effort sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren, and now twenty years on, a dozen other denominations and faith communities, including our own NWYM. I say I got serious with God about the leading, because I knew I didn’t have the money to do it.

I talked to God about my concern, I said: “I think I know what you want me to do, but I’m broke. If you want me to do this thing, you’re going to have to pull a bunny out of your big shiny black silk top-hat.” And then I waited. Within the month I had an answer: a rediculous long-standing legal mess of several years was suddenly settled out of court – and my share amounted to about $2,000.

“OK”, I said, “We’re on.” Furthermore that spring, you, my friends, came up with an additional $1,000 bucks. But as we all know, money is in fact that green stuff you shovel off the end of the train. I had a few markers to pay off here in town, and I had to spend some money getiting the truck ready and buying used camping gear; and by the time I crossed the California line in mid-may, I was already under a thousand bucks.
I knew that my only hope was to stay was to focus on God’s will and try to keep up. As it turned out, I was officially broke five times on the trip.

There is no way I could tell you all the adventures I had, but here are a few of the high points. From May 7th through September 11th I put 30,000 miles on the little blue truck. I travelled through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticutt, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois again, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho. I’m going to count the day trip into Mexico. Everywhere I went I talked to people about the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

I attended three Quaker yearly meetings; in New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island. I hung out, and worshipped with Osage Indian Quakers, Quakers in bonnets in the Shenandoah Valley, Buddhist Quakers, and fundamentalist Christian Quakers. Friends have a long rich history of intervisitation, and I was sometimes almost literally handed off from Friend to Friend and meeting to meeting.

Everywhere I went in the world of Quakers, I met people who knew other people who knew other people. The Peggy Parsons network – she calls it the Q continuum – apparently extends off planet; but she’s not the only one. In Rhode Island, they know who Julie Peyton is, and Colin Saxton, and Ken Comfort, and Lorraine Watson, and David Niyonzima. Margery Post Abbott has friends and admirers everywhere. And I connected with people we know in unlikely places, to say the least. I played a few songs on the same stage with Eric McEuen in Albuquerque, ran into Peterson Toscano in a parking lot in Rhode Island, made dinner for Joy Ellison in Chicago, weeded Maryellen Marino’s garden in Dalton, Massachusetts. In one of the most startlingly clear examples I’ve ever experienced of God’s direct intervention I ran into Derric Watson in Richmond, Indiana; who greeted me like a long-lost brother, put me up overnight, gave me a hundred bucks and sent me on my way.

I did a lot of music. I sang Sunday morning music with Mennonites and Baptists. I taught In The Mornin’ to a hundred un-programmed Friends around a bonfire in New Mexico. I was heckled by other Friends in Rhode Island, and asked to move along in Chicago. In Taos I earned $18 bucks busking, and in Toronto’s Kensington Market a gay man stopped and listened for about an hour and tipped me $20 Canadian. He said, “Thanks for the guitar lesson.”

I did odd jobs for a lot of Quakers too. I painted a pump house in New Mexico and got pretty sunburned. I painted an outbuilding in Hominy, Oklahoma in the most brutal heat and humidity I’ve ever experienced outside of Africa.

I was befriended in Taos by a Swiss-Canadian shaman, artist, and white witch who supported my mission, and loved my music, and loved me. My dear Annemarie who wanted to see Manhattan and Acadia National Park, so we did.

I had setbacks and challenges too. I got a tick in the Siskiyous, food poisoning in Taos, a bad cold in Ohio, and a heart attack in Brooklyn. I almost died on a muddy county road in New Mexico, and I had my guitar stolen in Albuquerque.

There’s one last miracle I have to share. Headed home in early September, at the Catholic Worker House in Des Moines I met a man named Ed, who said, “Tell me your story.” I said I’ve been on a national peace mission all summer, and I’m just exhausted. I just want to go home, and I do,n’t know how I’m gonna get there. He said what’s the problem, and I said I just don’t have the gas money. I’m out of gas. He said how much do you think you need? I said, I don’t know, maybe a hundred and seventy five bucks.

Well maybe we can help he said, and the next morning he had me drive him down to his credit union and he gave me a hundred and seventy five bucks. “and seventy, there’s seventy five,” he said. I… just came undone. I put my hands up to my face and broke into tears. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You… don’t… know me from Adam,” I said. It’s alright, he said. It’s alright.

Chicago - HQ for the Christian Peacemaker Teams, www.cpt.org .

Living Waters Mennonites had a beautiful Sunday, I thought. The bass player was barefoot - a little chipped blue polish on each toe - the Khmer soup at the potluck steamy and beefy and a little hot - and when they walked the five blocks down to Lake Michigan and baptized Megan I found myself leaking tears, not for the first time today.

A 'parish' model church, compared with the 'network' model church, 70% of Living Waters attenders and members come from about a quarter mile radius around the church. People of color, old and young, gay and straight, seeking Jesus in community. I liked it, and it felt a lot like home.

It's sort of the end of the CPT pilgrimage trail for me. Twenty-four states, two Canadian provinces, and I think I will go ahead and count that day trip into Agua Prieta, Mexico, to see Jose. I've been gifted and sifted, and come to see the Siskiyous tick bite as very very minor.

In some ways it was so foolish... they say don't go looking for trouble... but still somehow we need to figure out how to get Derek's attention... how to get him down into the plasma and come out with his real stuff. His truth. It has been useful to deliberately throw myself in God's path. I may not ever understand how, or how much, but I understand it was true and important this time, for me.

Annie Dillard relates in a book how one specific ancient Israelite temple sacrifice to God Almighty featured throwing the torn breast of a sacrificed lamb at the altar... the idea being to make sure you got His attention...

How many times on this trip has He reached into my life, how many times have I struggled against the desire to TELL Him how I think it should go, and to fight the fight I win when I ASK Him to do it His way.

I think of Louis at Encore Music in Albuquerque, who led me right up to the (excellent, appropriate) replacement guitar. I think of Colin in Toronto's Kensington Market, who should have broken that $20, but gave me the whole thing anyway, "No," he said, "You keep it. Thanks for the guitar lesson." I think of Sharon and her bees and the necklace she gave me, and the affirmation.

I still have such a wide river. I'd like to check in with David and Julie next Saturday morning in Portland, and I have perhaps enough gas money to get to oh, maybe Omaha. My EBT card is suddenly worthless, which was food this whole trip - a CSR says I can talk to another CSR Tuesday, thank you. And the buckle on the travel bag broke, sheeesh...

On the other hand, Mona with the Catholic Worker House in Des Moines says, yes come you are welcome, and there is apparently an open mike in Ames tonight, just north of Des Moines.

BROOKLYN, NY – on national tour for the Christian Peacemaker Teams www.cpt.org . It was only going to be an overnight here with Pete and his family but we stretched it to three, and I’m so grateful. Quality time with my much loved and admired old friend, two whole expeditions into Manhattan, and lots of walk-around here in Park Slope. Worshipped with Brooklyn Friends Meeting yesterday morning. Man, if I had another lifetime to fool around with I would love to invest about ten years here. Livable, walkable, friendly Brooklyn. Brownstones, delis, café’s, schools, shops. It reminds me of the best of Portland’s near east side, only instead of five or six little neighborhood centers; five or six hoppin’ streets, it seems more like square miles.

Constant Reader, this is my opportunity to catch up some of this travel and ministry diary. I do hope – and plan – to revisit some of these topics, but for now… let me offer a little update. I am pleased to report that I have loaded a bunch of photos I think you’ll enjoy. There is enough captioning to at least let you know who where and when.

I should make a report on my experience with the Evangelical Friends Church – Eastern Region annual sessions I attended in late July. This was a multi-state midwest convention of socially conservative evangelical Quakes held in Canton, OH, on the east side of the state. My report, honestly, will be mixed. For me it was a case of being offered very real kindness and hospitality from some of the nicest people I ever disagreed with.

The hospitality to me, the uninvited stranger, was authentic. My introductory emails had been pretty direct: “Do you know of any Friends in the area who might be willing to let me pitch my tent in their backyard, during the yearly meeting sessions?” As it worked out, I got an attic bedroom and house privileges in a really nice big old three story, just across the street from Malone University where the Friends were gathered. Joel Harris was my host, a youth pastor with Canton First Friends Church, and he shared the house with two other twenty-something guys.

I have become so leery of evangelical worship conventions... and that tradition was the starting point for my own church. For instance, in Burundi in ‘07, I attended Kamenge Friends Church – an evangelical Friends community – and as much as I enjoyed the singing, dancing, preaching, repenting, everything, I began to understand much of what happened at Kamenge as a worship convention. Putting your hand in the air palm out is a worship convention. It is learned, modelled behaviour. Congregational singing exhibits a number of worship conventions: do you smile, do you express grief, sing loud, sing soft, clap in time, applaud? Do you repeat the song exactly four times, and do the intruments always drop out on the third go round? Does the pastor whisper or thunder, point his finger, pause for dramatic effect. Does he talk for ten minutes, or an hour? Am I criticizing Kamenge? Am I calling their experience inauthentic? No I am not, but I am calling much of what I experienced there as I saw it: a learned, modelled, practiced set of behaviors. They had their own at Kamenge, and I saw then that we also have our own at West Hills Friends. Thank God for waiting worship! Thank God for our insistence on inviting Christ The Present Teacher to let us know how He wants worship to go; to make time for Him; to expect Him. And even at my home church, where spoken ministry arises out of the silence, we have our conventions. God save us from our intense grasping to control the experience.

Now I criticise my evangelical brothers and sisters in Ohio, and like this: it appeared to me coming in cold from the outside that they controlled everything they could. Their servant leadership are dedicated smart experienced professionals. They are men – all men – who love God and serve His Kingdom and His people as best they know how. And I chafed at their cheerful casual skilled control. I chafed at the worship conventions of singing and prayer. It just felt so completely managed. I never felt like God was being invited in to offer guidance in the worship experience. I struggle to not judge, and to offer this servant leadership the benefit of the doubt. My challenge is to “get it” that the leadership did not design the sessions to frustrate the Spirit of God – but to facilitate the work of that Spirit. They meant the sessions to focus on worship and community, so business issues had been worked out in committee in advance. Business, worship, fellowship – all planned in detail.

Since leaving Portland May 9th, I have attended now three yearly meetings, one quarterly meeting, and a half a dozen Sunday services of Friends meetings or churches. Two of the yearly meetings – Intermountain YM, who held their sessions at Ghost Ranch, northwest of Santa Fe; and New England YM, with sessions at Bryant U., north of Providence, RI – were un-programmed Friends, or mostly. Both gatherings were characterized by transparency in business affairs, and at both sessions there was thorny controversy. At both meetings, those controversies were dealt with in open public meetings. Messy un-resolved painful work was brought before God and people with near total transparency. At both Intermountain and New England, waiting and quiet and invitation to God were prominent in conducting business. Waiting, quiet, invitation to God to lead may well occur with the Ohio evangelicals, but it did not happen in public.

Another difference between my evangelical and conservative Christian brothers and sisters in Canton and the other two YM’s, was that both of the un-programmed more liberal yearly meetings shared the practice of encouraging small groups to gather for worship-sharing, workshops, and committee work. At Canton, the evangelicals’ shared experience was all in large groups – and I don’t know the final count, but at least four or five hundred attended. In Canton, we all met in the auditorium there at Malone to pray, sing, and approve business. We all sat down to eat at long trestle style tables in the Malone dining areas. At Ghost Ranch, and at Bryant, the full daily schedule included four different opportunities for Friends to meet in small groups. Those small group interactions sometimes highlighted fractious differences. People groped humbly through the work of loving the person – even in disagreement. I liked it.

The midwest and east coast have all struck me as beautiful. You will like the pictures of Stillwater Quarterly Meeting. The farm in the Shenandoah Valley of northwest Virginia; the pleasure of being around ‘plain’ people… well, look at the photos, you’ll see what I mean.

Next for me is a visit and overnight tonight with a f/Friend up in the Berkshires in western Massachussetts, then Maine, Quebec, Montreal, Chicago……. home before the 1st of September, I hope, God willing, and the truck holds up, and the creek don’t rise.

Canton, Ohio, on tour nationally for the Christian Peacemaker Teams ,www.cpt.org
THIS IS WHERE IT GETS SO GOOD, right here on I-70 at 1:00 in the morning, eastbound into a rainy Indiana night in July.

You must understand: I had been driving all day, and my eyes were getting grainy. Seventeen hours straight, from Arkansas to the Indiana / Ohio border. It was Thursday – or rather it had been Thursday when I left Arkansas. My prayers had finally gotten right though, finally, about an hour earlier, driving that ragged, construction-messy freeway around Indianapolis. I spoke my truth and my need to God: “Ok then Sir,” I said, “This is what we’ve got here: we’ve got the twenty-three dollars in my wallet, a quarter of a tank of regular, and a half a pack of camel lights. I have no idea how this can possibly work out. I certainly can’t do this; I don’t have any more bunnies to pull out of my top hat. I mean, if it’s going to be a disaster I can probably find someone to help me get home… but… if You want me to go on …if there’s work You want me to do… You’re going to have to pull a bunny out of Your top hat. As usual, love, Derek.” And I said that because my fear kept coming around, rising higher, coming back, howling around my back door… and I would say, “Go away, Fear,” and Fear would show me his teeth. I only know of one Person who is not frightened of those teeth.

But so far no top hat, no bunnies. (Probably all to the good. After seventeen hours at the wheel, any bunnies I saw might be twelve feet tall, carnivorous, and pink.) Then, a couple of signs for Richmond exits, which barely registered; I was trying to at least make Dayton, thirty or forty miles on. I rather doubted at that point I’d last until Columbus. I was just whipped like potatos. My big hope was Barnesville, at the east end of the state, Barnesville and Stillwater Friends Meeting, who didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox, but on whom I pinned my hopes. A little work for them, perhaps a little music. My problem was that I couldn’t make the gas – money – distance equation work out to get there. “Maybe,” I said to myself. “Maybe.”

The Richmond Indiana exit signs were going by and I wasn’t paying any attention, when I saw a sign flash by in the night: Earlham College next right. And I mean out of the corner of my eye. But wait a minute, Earlham College? It’s a Quaker school… didn’t all the cool people I know go there, or graduate from there? I’d had no idea I was anywhere near it. The several acts of Quaker kindness on this trip decided me… I cut across two lanes onto the exit ramp.

I drove down a dark deserted industrial suburb for a mile. I almost turned around. I didn’t know where Earlham was; maybe this was just a mistake; maybe I’d have enough gas to get to Canton after all. A convenience store stood lit and open around the next corner, and I parked in front of the beer signs and went in. The kid was stacking cartons and talking on the phone. He looked up at my question. “Earlham?” he said, “Sure. Go down to Marsh’s, n’ take a right; go up the hill. It’s right there.” “Marsh’s is a… what is Marsh’s?” I asked. “A road?” “It’s a grocery store,” he said. “The road ends there, n’ y’gotta go right or left. Just go right up the hill there. College is on your left.”

I found it; a neat little campus of neo-classic brick, and turned into the oversized parking lot. I rearranged stuff in the back, laid out the sleeping pad and bag, opened the canopy windows and fell asleep to rain on the roof.

Morning was time to sort myself out a little, and think things over. I lay there and dozed. Maybe I’d have enough gas after all, maybe. Finally I pulled on clean clothes and fired up coffee on the propane stove there on the tailgate. It was a nice morning, cool air, blue skies, fluffy clouds. People started showing up to work. The classified crew were getting on riding mowers. A woman drove up and I asked her if there was a cafeteria. “No,” she said, and then pointed into the campus. “I think you can get a muffin and coffee over there.” “Summer break?” I asked, “Do you have a summer session?” “No,” she said, and laughed. “The kids are all gone for the summer.” She laughed again. “We sort of like it that way.” The half-formed picture in my head of me busking for an enthusiastic audience of progressive Quake kids eating lunch started to evaporate. She walked off to her meeting. I poured another cup of coffee, and arranged my Bible, journal, and pen, on the tailgate. “First things first then,” I said, and flipped open the Bible. The 92nd Psalm seemed a little dismal. I read a few lines then looked over at the 91st. The Psalmist sang:

“Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your habitation,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.

For He will give his angels charge over you
to guard you in all of your ways.
On their hands will they bear you up,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Ps 91:11,12
RSV

‘That’s encouraging’ I thought. I drank my coffee, lovely African stuff I bought in a tourist grocery in Arkansas. I said my usual morning prayer. I wrote in my journal. Another man drove up and got out for work. He looked me over with friendly curiousity. I asked him something about the campus, and we were talking a little, when I heard someone else pull up and park. The man I was talking to glanced over my shoulder and nodded a greeting. I turned around. It was Derric Watson. Derric Watson! “Derric!” I said. “Derek!” he said, and gave me a hug. I sang at this man’s wedding! I’d sat in clearness meeting with him. I’d been acquainted with him since he was an undergraduate at Fox. “Are you real? Or are you an angel?” I asked, and he looked at me and smiled.

I am offered dinner and a bed, invited to meet his wife Dana, invited to meet Miles his 1 ½ year old boy, invited to meet the dog. “I can help a little,” said Derric. “I can top off your gas tank.” He did a lot more. He did it all easy with a smile. (Thank you brother.)

“Take it easy, Baby,” says the Lord God. “You worry too much. Who loves you? Who’s your Daddy?”

God’s subtlety about ‘revealing Himself’ is a mystery I love to contemplate. Listening to two creationist activists on Christian talk radio in the middle of Ohio, and they were talking about how the elaborate details of the natural world ‘proved’ intelligent design, and I thought, “No, gentlemen, it doesn’t prove intelligent design, it doesn’t prove anything, it doesn’t, it can’t, and it won’t.” I clicked off the radio. Evidence yes, scientific proof no. And why?

There in the parking lot at Earlham, Derric had said, “Well, call it a miracle if you want, but people will just say, ‘Oh, Earlham… Derric is on staff there, isn’t he?’ Meaning: no miracle at all. Coincidence. I say nonsense. Why wasn’t he out with the flu? On vacation? Or – as he said – because he was giving blood that morning and was checking in early at his office beforehand.

My humble take is that God’s game with us with His self-revelation is all love letters – not evidence. He refuses to compel us. This is what I mean: He wants us to seek Him in love, and with humility, and with a desire to please Him, and because love is a gift freely given, He won’t MAKE US believe. How easy could it be? He’s God. He could rearrange the stars to write in every alphabet on earth: Surrender Dorothy! And we would and our surrender would NOT be a gift of love; it could only be the flattery of slaves.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there is no proof. But this is my testimony: seek to walk in His Way. Ask only to know the next step, and for Him to give you the courage to take it. Find out for yourself: Jesus saves.

Taos, NM, on tour nationally for the Christian Peacemaker Teams… www.cpt.org
So there I was… (sorry, Peg), just newly settled into my guest quarters on the Detweiler’s deck, in Albuquerque, with the chickens and all, and I went down to the supermarket to pick me up some smoked hawg jowls or something to go in my beans, and what do you know? An unknown person or persons STOLE MY GUITAR, right out of my truck. Yep. I knew that because when I got back to the Detweiler’s beautiful relaxed Carlisle neighborhood, and I un-loaded the bag of groceries out of the front seat, I thought, “Hey, even you need to practice, man, I mean, having put up all those flyers and all.”

But Sister Kate was gone, and we have been friends since 1998, and I am slow to get over this.

Yes, yes, sure sure, I went back, I backtracked, I talked to the store manager, I went downtown to the PD. I even made up flyers to email the pawn shops. Who knows?

I was so screwed. The music is the introduction to the stranger, and if I do my job, when the last notes fade, we are not strangers anymore, we are new friends. Eventually I started to breathe normally and I called Ben in Portland.

“You know my sweet Gibson electric and that big box Vox amp you’re babysitting for me?” He said, “Yeah, what about it?” I said, “How quick do you think you could get a reasonable price for them both?

“Oh no,” he said. “Oh yes,” I said, “Right out of the truck, while I was shopping.” So we talked, and he commiserated, and I learned this happens. A lot. Ben was a professional guitarist/vocalist in country bands for 13 years, and he did sympathize. And he also told me, sort of gently over the phone there in passing, that he had four or five guitars stolen over the years.

“One right off the stage while we were on break,” he said. “Look… let’s not do anything hasty,” he said. “Gimme a day or two to think of something.” We hung up.

I was offered a loaner guitar for my Albuquerque stay by friends of my host, Geoff Detweiler. He had a window smashed on his car not ten days before and his laptop stolen right off the front seat. “I want to blame myself,” I said to him. “I sort of wish they had broken in, but I think I just had a guitar-player moment, and left it un-locked.” I said, “If I did anything wrong, it was to tempt a tempt a poor man to steal.” Geoff Detweiler, a big kind Mennonite with a Santa beard, squeezed my shoulder and didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Ken’s boys have nice guitars. I’ll make a phone call. We’ll get you something to play for this Sunday.” And he did.

Josh Gingerich - Ken's son - offered me his little Alvarez. That Sunday morning, at Albuquerque Mennonite Church, all the good things happened: the children’s story was read, the ‘band’ played – including the volunteer from Oregon who didn’t know the songs – and everyone sang those gorgeous four part Mennonite harmonies to the hymns and chorusses. All the good things happened: I took communion with the saints, and was moved. The young couple leaving for Texas were called up front, and applauded, and gifted. One who had passed on was memorialized. Prayers were offered to God Almighty, who was invited to show up, and who did show up. The guy from Oregon taught the church a new song; and coffee was drunk, cookies eaten, smiles and handshakes, and peace passed all around.

That Sunday evening, on the cool outdoor stage of the neighborhood coffeehouse/yoga studio, I offered an hour plus of music, and a few minutes of talk about why I felt so passionate about the Christian Peacemaker Teams. It’s the work they do; hands on, boots on the ground work. In the bad scary places no sensible person wants to go: Hebron, the West Bank, Iraq, Colombia, Bosnia, the US/Mexico border. Putting themselves “In The Way” in Jesus’ name.

And then a little more music from me. Love songs to God, and love songs to women, and silly songs and songs of peace. For me, often the best part of offering music is that place in the song where I look up, and someone else is lost in the song. Someone besides me. Their eyes close, a half-smile comes into their face. Then I know I’m doing my job.

Between their donations and the CD purchases I made $125. The generosity of Albuquerque. Gas and burger money to head on to Taos and beyond.

But the Albuquerque / stolen guitar saga is not quite over. That Sunday morning I sang with the Mennonites, my community, my own people at West Hills Friends church kicked in enough money – Shayla put in $5 of her own money – to allow me to purchase a perfectly adequate travelling guitar.

Josh Gingerich, who had loaned me the Alvarez, sent me to Louie, at Encore music on Menaul street. I told Louie, “My hosts sent me to Josh, and Josh sent me to you. I will trust you. Here’s how much I have and this is what I need. I’d appreciate any help and counsel you could give me.” And Louie knocked $300 off the tag, and threw in a little cardboard case and a new set of strings. Louie is a conservative Christian. We talked quite a bit; played the guitar through my acoustic amp, tuned it, re-tuned it, played some more, talked. We hugged when I put it under the pickup canopy, and I locked it, because it’s a sin to tempt a poor man.

The Burundians taught me a saying, “Imana yaracosi chani,” they say, and it means something like: “For the gifts God has given us we are very grateful.” The way I see it, I also owe the community at West Hills Friends Church, in beautiful southwest Portland, Oregon, about three years of mowing the lawn bare minimum… amen, and amen.

The pilgrimage goes on a little further, thank you Lord for the opportunity to serve.

Monday June 1, 2009

Friends Southwest Center, McNeal AZ –

These are Isaiah’s stars, I think, and I sip my cup of water in the dark, sitting on the bench by the meeting house, and I let that sink in, and look back up. The milky way is a distinct feature again tonight, cloudy but not clouds, a swath, an arc from northeast to southwest. Not smoke, not mist: suns, like our sun. Isaiah’s stars, and I start imagining him on the temple mount looking south, like I am this still early early morning. A car dopplers by on the state hwy from Douglas and Agua Prieta, back up the road to McNeal, Elfrida, Wilcox; it’s headlights and fading sound marking a total stillness in the night, a stillness so acute I’m aware of a slight tinnitus for the first time, something I didn’t know I had. Isaiah would have stood on the temple mount and seen what I see. Behind him there might have been torches, the night shift at the temple of God Almighty, but at 2:30 in the morning in 800 BC I can’t imagine too much light coming from the sleeping City of David. And it is arid, like here, little water vapor in the air to obscure these spangles and sparklers. Who knows what sent him from his bed to walk the parapet, and pull his cloak closer against the night, and look up?

Ahhh… coyotes. First one long sweet howl, and now the whole wild crew join in. They have something to say. It sounds so good humored. There were jackals in Isaiah’s Judah: did they talk at night? Did he cock his head and listen to them?

This country frightened me at first. Left Tucson and headed south here to explore the offer of hospitality from Bill Schoder-Ehris and folks here at the Friends Southwest Center, I drove first into drier thornier country than I thought I had seen yet even around Tucson. And cousins Bruce and Mary Sue aside, Tucson mostly impressed me with angry feeling aggressive traffic and otherwise unfriendly people. It felt like a giant truckstop in the middle of the desert, and a bleak desert it was driving south: pink and beige gravel, thorny black mesquite, prickly pear and barrel and saguaro cactus, wind, dust, cars cars cars. Rediculous baking hot little half-built subdivisions out in the tumbleweeds with desperate-seeming for sale signs. Driving south into the water mirages on the freeway I wondered what I was getting myself into. Tombstone, for one thing. Another desperate place, faux Old West, and packed with silly people, with the real west old and new scraping out a living off of a spectacularly bloody episode over and done with 100 years ago, where is that at for heaven’s sake.

But then was the miracle of St. David, AZ, suddenly water come to the surface, and heavy irrigation, even standing water, field after field of bright green alfalfa. Little old houses with big green yards, fat ponies snoozing in the shade on small acreages. To a boy from Oregon it was a relief to my eye, and to nerves jittery from desert, sun, weird tourist junk. Finally the Sulphur Springs Valley, and back in desert, but not so spiky as Tucson. Flat valley floor, wiry blond grasses, yucca, dry desert mountains on either side, Hwy 80 straight down to Mexico closing fast. Outside Tombstone I had passed an immigration checkpoint, and it reminded me of the occupied West Bank, and the checkpoints and tensions there. I felt like I was driving into danger into a military zone. I reminded myself where my car docs were, and that I had my valid passport. US passport.

Here is 21 miles from Mexico, and I have been here now a week and a day, and the country does not frighten me now, not so much. I understand better about how mornings and early evenings are the time to be outside and busy, and that it is work to exert yourself much in the heat of the day. The ants like it fine, though. This is great ant country, and when you see their great colonies spread out, cities five feet across you get it that they have roots here too. Ants, and many birds; a yellow breasted one, a rare one with rusty red underneath and a topknot, the magpies, ravens – not crows, ravens – great kite-like vultures, hawks, sparrows, many doves; all talking their own languages.

Every morning when I have sat on the bench outside of the meeting house to drink my coffee I have had the same two visitors: a magpie, who comes to perch in the mesquite and make his little scrap call, and also a jackrabbit who comes to say hello, and shyly nibble the new grass. They are the same two, and they are both curious and like to see what I’m up to. The jackrabbit – she, I think – comes to ten feet or so, looks at me, ambles to another tuft of grass and nibbles, looks at me. She is tan and brown with white points and darker points and lovely big mobile ears and almost black eyes. The magpie is smaller than our Washington state magpies were, with more grey than their stark black and white, but he flies like them and talks like them, and his coloring is the same family. Really; I step outside and they both announce themselves; her quietly, and him with a swoop and a squawk.

I think: this is not a barren place, there are many people here, some on two legs, some on four, (six, eight), some rooted, like the mesquite and yucca. Some are rooted like Eve and Mariah. Eve Rosenberg has lived here at the Friends Southwest Center for fifteen years, and Mariah Irons for seven. They have made gardens for one another in their hearts, but they have made gardens for plants too, outside the neat adobe Eve built herself. Eve has that nice Saxon gap in her teeth, and has a way of looking at you straight and smiling at the same time that makes me trust her. They invite me to dinner and serve me an omelette and kale they grew, and nopalitos, which are prickly pear. They invite me to yoga, and I go, for the first time in my life. They invite me to come tour their community garden, and I go. It is full of plants and trees and hope; set up so anyone – seniors in wheelchairs – can garden, and can sit in the shade by a pond. It’s by the library, and the health clinic. In the middle of nowhere, where we all live.

ON NATIONAL TOUR FOR THE CHRISTIAN PEACEMAKER TEAMS - an international violence reduction ministry sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren (and now also by the Baptist Peace Fellowship, Friends United Meeting, and many others.

I followed the work of the CPT by their web presence for 15 years or so at www.cpt.org , including their incredible first person diary dispatches from vacation spots like the south Hebron hills, and Colombia. In April of 2007, I got a chance to hang out with them in Hebron, and even (gulp) got invited out on an 'action'.

This summer, following a leading seasoned with time and prayer, (and with substantial help from my home of West Hills Friends Church, I am travelling on their behalf. They, the CPT, would like to go more places, they have been invited more places. They could use a few bucks and some more people. It's as simple as that.

So I am playing music, and I am talking to people about their work. Focussing events for this pilgrimage include my plans to attend annual Friends gatherings in New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island; respectively in June, July, and August.

I am deliberately leaving lots of room for God to joyfully monkey-wrench my plans; which is always good because His agenda is always more fun than mine. Often more dangerous, stretching, messy, but that's fun too. It's all about loving joyful obedience and surrender ... and deliberately planning not to have enough money. I expect to be singing for my supper - and gas money - well before June is out...

Speaking of singing for my supper, go to www.CDBaby.com to get your copy of the 'official' bootleg of Monday Nite At Bill's, the very last, no kidding, Derek and Friends recording. I think there are some excellent pieces on the collection, and April never sounded better.

Check the pics of the camping I've been doing on the way also. I am loving these great basin and desert plains and mountains, although I have been long enough in the green suburbs, that I am sometimes overwhelmed by the distances, the quiet, the adaptations to the environment that appear so strange.

Here's a short list of Derek's petty annoyances while travelling for peace:
1. losing keys
2. tick
3. flat tire at 9,000 feet
4. Tucson traffic.

I am this week enjoying respite and fellowship at the Southwest Friends Center, an intentional Quaker community - founded 1975 - just south of McNeal, AZ. They have welcomed me as a f/Friend. I look forward to offering music in their Meeting House, (we're looking at this coming Wednesday eve, 5-27), with some potluck and hanging-out time.

Next more or less scheduled stop will be at Intermountain Yearly Meeting of Friends, held at the Ghost Ranch retreat / resort center, outside Abiquu (sp?) New Mexico, starting, I believe June 10th.

Stay tuned! Drop me a note in the guestbook and I will respond.

Yours in Christ's peace and beautiful music,
dl

(Tucson) The Road To America leads to Los Alamos, New Mexico, a pretty and clean city kept prosperous and comfortable by a stream of US taxpayer dollars. The dollars pay for the research and development of new weapons of mass destruction; new generations of nuclear warheads to make sure the USA stays ahead of… Pakistan, I guess, in our capacity to incinerate armies, and cities, and civilians anywhere in the world. I have no pictures because you do not have the right to take pictures of the sidewalks and entrance drive at Los Alamos labs. It is all DOD property, and the US Constitution is not so much in effect there. I was there this last Monday, May 18th, sort of self-invited, with some Catholic Worker activists from Albuquerque to protest this machinery. It is a state-sponsored machinery of genocide. It is a conspiracy to committ mass murder, and over the years I have paid my fair share to keep it running smooth. If Jesus hates anything, he hates this.

At 7:30 in the morning, I stood on a corner at the main entrance to a campus that might remind you of something Intel, or Nike would build: all neat and low and landscaped and groomed and expensive, with lush bright green lawns, and clean wide sidewalks, and I stood there with ragged young people dressed up in white with angel wings and foil halos, while sober healthy looking academic-like people with name-tags biked or walked or drove into work. It felt like a university campus. It was sunny.

The protest was a well-rehearsed routine, and as a matter of routine, security for Los Alamos labs had called the city police, big guys who came in SUV’s, and talked to us. They asked me, (and I don’t know why, maybe because I was the oldest white guy there), who our leader was and I said, “Jesus Christ,” and the one who asked said, “Does Jesus Christ have any ID this morning?” They ran my Oregon drivers license, just like in a traffic stop, and the one man gave it back. “Thank you, Mr. Lamson,” he said.

They told us where we could stand and exercise our First Amendment right to freedom of speech, and they looked at their watches, and they told us how long we could exercise that right, and then they said they would ask us to leave after that time was up. So the ten of us stood there for an hour or so on the corner in the pretty morning sunshine – in the place they told us we could stand – and we held up the banners, and some of us danced around in the angel wings, and flashed the peace sign at every one who biked or walked or drove in. But Roy shouted. “This place is poisoning New Mexico!” he yelled at the cars that drove by. He yelled this over and over. People looked at us through their car windows and smiled, like people do when someone else is doing something embarassing. Some honked. One or two flashed the peace sign back at us – as they drove in to work.

Our facilitator, a Catholic Worker activist, and a leader of the Trinity Nuclear Alliance, had been arrested the year before, on that very spot, and was still on probation. He had said he was certain that he did not want nor intend to be arrested this day. On the drive up to Los Alamos from Albuquerque I asked him about his earlier arrest. His name is Marcus Page, and he’s a mensch, and has been one of the persons of responsibility at that Catholic Worker house for the last three years; a house of worship, free hospitality and fellowship to the poor, and peace activism.

Driving the biodiesel-powered old mercedes up the freeway, he told how when the judge said to him she was sentencing him to a year in jail for trespassing on DOD property, how he had a bad moment, and then how she’d suspend 363 days of that, and with the two nights he’d spent in jail and a year on probation he was free on his own recognizance. That – and $67 dollars in court fees – were the most likely consequences.

I stood on the sidewalk and I asked Jesus, “Do you want me to do this?” and I thought I heard Him say, “Do it,” but I had no peace with that, and I hesitated and I hesitated. “Do you want me to do this?” I asked again, and I thought I heard Him say, “I’ll be with you,” but I had no peace with myself, and I hesitated and I hesitated and the moment passed. When the time came, we gathered in prayer, and then walked back to the two parked cars. Obeying the walk sign. Staying in the crosswalk. At Los Alamos labs the people settled into another day at work.

After that my day was endless. I moped and hid in my room and finished a perfectly boring Tom Robbin’s novel about beets and perfume and Pan and religion, (like he does), and went out, over and over, like counting bars on a cell window, into the blazing afternoon to smoke. I was dirty from travel, and from the day, and though it was free, and mine for the asking, I didn’t know how to ask to take a shower. I was almost light-headed from hunger, and though it was free and mine for the asking, I didn’t know how to ask for food. I was almost out of miserable cigarets and I was afraid to get in my truck and go buy some. Finally I went out. I know how to buy things.

Trinity House, the Catholic Worker place, is in the South Valley neighborhood of Albuquerque, west of the Rio Grande and a half mile south of downtown. It is a Latino neighborhood, and the stores, schools, street signs, and restaurants are all signed in Spanish. Almost all of the people I saw were brown people. South Valley is an old Albuquerque neighborhood; very old, I think, but not rich. If I am reading the map right, it is partly on the Laguna Pueblo Indian Reservation. Some people had chickens in their sideyards. (Just like Maplewood, in Portland. How ‘bout that?) I drove a half mile and stopped at a taqueria and went in and ordered two tacos and a coke and wrote in my journal. From time to time I glanced up at the TV. The waittress was watching a Latin soap opera. Everyone on the soap opera looked like North American TV hair-products models, only brunette. I felt better after the tacos and the coke, stronger, and drove back to the Catholic Worker house, stopping for smokes on the way. They were eating dinner around a table: something soup and salad. “We eat at six,” said Marcus, apologetically. “But there’s lots,” said Emily-from-Texas, and ladled me soup. “There’s a place…” said Marcus. I ate, a little, mostly quiet. Emma was talking.

She said, “…but if we do what they say, and don’t get arrested, Los Alamos stays open, and if we don’t do what they say, and do get arrested, Los Alamos stays open. I just…” she picked at her salad. “I mean… I get the Christian thing about loving your enemies, but… can I love my friends more? Can I love the whole earth more? Do we always have to be so nice about it… the police there have their guns and everything, and we don’t have anything but we have to be careful that we don’t make them afraid of us, because if they feel like they can’t control us, like they’re losing control, then they get panicky and then they arrest us. Or beat us up. And we can’t do anything.” The talk went around the table. Marcus talked about the big Pax Christi demo of a few years back, when a thousand people were there, and a dozen arrested. I excused myself and washed my bowl, and walked back to the guest room. Marcus’s voice followed me. “We have worship at 7:30,” he said, “And you’re welcome to join us.” The worship space doubled as the guest room, and I tidied up.

Mariah and Marcus came in at 7:30 and sat down on the cushions. Mariah lit a candle in a tall glass with the Virgin of Guadalupe printed on it. The glass had a bad break. I would have thrown it out. She put it on the floor in the middle of the room. We did responsive readings from a little brochure, and took turns praying. There was lots about Mary-the-mother-of-Jesus; exotic and sort of scandalous to the honorary Protestant in me. Mariah leaned back against Marcus’s shoulder and closed her eyes. When we were done with the prayers and the readings, I said, “I would really appreciate it if you guys would let me talk a little about my day. I feel really lousy. I feel like I was disobedient. To God. I’ve been hiding out in this room since we got back.” Marcus swung the door shut to the little room. I talked, and they listened. Then they both talked quietly about experiences at protests, experiences getting arrested. They had both been arrested – more than once – for trespassing on US DOD nuclear facilities. Mariah talked about how scared she had been the first time there were arrests at a nuclear protest. She said she also had backed away the first time, but felt more determined the next time, and went through with it. Mariah had seemed taciturn to me; a tough, punky little chick with short blonde hair, and not very welcoming to the old white peace tourist. (Me.) She seemed different now. Marcus said, “It matters just to be there.” I began to feel better. After awhile I asked how the shower worked, and the laundry.

I had thought I was going to be a hero, that day, at least in my own eyes, and I was not. Maybe that was the problem. But I was there, and I was there saying, “Peace.” A woman, a housewife and mom, once came up to Father Daniel Berrigan after he gave a speech and she said, “Oh Father Berrigan, I just can’t get arrested,” and he said, “You don’t have to get arrested to work for peace. There are many useful things you can do for peace without getting arrested.”

Today I am in Tucson, at my cousin’s house on the edge of the open desert, and it is raining like it rains at home in Oregon, steady and hard. Raining on the saguaro and mesquite and barrel cactus and yucca, and pink and grey and white stones and gravel they have everywhere here instead of grass. Raining on the doves and quail who have been making a lovely racket all morning. I have been up since 3:30, well before those birds woke up. I will be here a few more days, and do some music, I hope, and promote the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. (And collect a few bucks to continue my journey, I hope.) Next week sometime I’ll head back to northern New Mexico to be there for the Intermountain Yearly Meeting annual Friends gathering at Abiquu outside of Santa Fe.

Enjoy the pictures of the desert. I’ve done a lot of camping on my way here, and took a lot of pictures. I think it is very beautiful: Nevada, which means snowy, and Utah, which is from the Ute native language, New Mexico, and Arizona, and I don’t know what Arizona means. It probably means, “really rainy here” in Spanish. Don’t you think? Drop me an email if you like, and I’ll try and respond.

The Road To America / Christian Peacemaker Teams tour ’09 led to the Sacramento Friends Meeting, twenty minutes south of downtown Sac. (I think it was south, big cities can be confusing.) Down H street a half mile – and two hours before the gig – I found what I was looking for, a big city park by a library branch. I went in and used the bathroom, washed my face and hands, then set up for practice at a picnic table in the shade.

Back at the Meeting House, just off J street, I got there at the same time Dr. Marlene Fitzwater showed up to open up and put out chairs. I set up my stuff, a little light amplification in case the crowd got big, tuned up the guitar, sat down to visit. She was curious about my trip, and I interested in her and her involvement in that meeting. Like me, a Friend by convincement, as we say, and like me, had immediately felt at home with Friends, and stayed – she stayed – for 19 years. Like me.

I asked if she was an MD and she said she was a psychologist, and taught at the college. I see I’m not a very good reporter – yet – I should have asked her about peacework. Why had she jumped on my visit? What is peacework to her? The CPT? I didn’t ask. I do know she’d made considerable effort to schedule me, notify area Friends, facilitate the evening.

“I emailed the Sacramento Community Friends Church to invite them,” she said. In the event, no evangelical Friends showed up, (no more than answered my email).

Two other folks from Sacramento Friends did come, Alexia and Bill. Alexia wanted to talk. She was weary with the world and angry. Gangs in her neighborhood, decades of public school teaching, disillusioned with what she saw as the negligible results of peacework. Also she’d just retired and was uneasy with that. “We’re so defined by our society and ourselves by what we do,” she said. Longing, I think, for peace for herself.

I would play a few tunes, we’d talk, Marlene would talk a little, ask a few questions, Alexia’s husband Bill was mostly quiet, then Alexia would sort of take off and monologue for a few minutes. I doubt she knew she was doing that. Then I would play a few songs and we’d talk about the CPT. Marlene and Alexia and Bill bought CD’s from me – the new authorized ‘bootleg’ edition of Monday Night At Bill’s. We took pictures of each other outside the meeting house. I left CPT brochures. The folks donated a total of $85. Thank you Sacramento Friends – and no thank you, Sacramento Community Friends Church.

Marlene gave me a warm hug and thanked me when I left. I remember we were talking and I said I probably needed to stop “…preaching to the choir,” and take the word of peace I was given and give it to the …unconvinced. What might that look like?

I write these words from a ridge in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, smack in the middle of Nevada. Basin and range, juniper and sage, rimrock and butte. Good weather, clear skies. Snow on the heights to the north. Saw three jackrabbits just while I was writing… or the same jackrabbit three times. I believe they are curious beings.

After breakfast I’ll get back on Hwy 50 and head east. I hope to be camping in southern Utah tonight, and tomorrow night a real bed in Alburquerque, God willing.

It’s Wednesday, and as of tomorrow morning I’ll have been on the road a week. Writing just outside of Reno, headed east on Hwy 50. The Road To America goes through Sacramento. Took off from Portland Thursday morning, and leisurely motored south through Oregon – stayed overnight in Eugene, with family, and Ashland with friends.
Last night sang for Friends at Sacramento Friends Meeting, downtown Sac. Small but warm turnout. Off we go.

This note in haste as I prepare to jump off Hwy 50, straight across the desert towards… more desert. Looking forward to camping tonight. Saturday night in Albuquerque.

Here are a few pics… back soon with more!

Oh and the official bootleg of Monday Nite At Bill’s, the last Derek and Friends album, is now available through CD Baby. I didn’t have time to write all the promotional and descriptive stuff yet, or get it featured on my top page yet. I’ll do that the next time there’s a wi fi signal. Utah.

The Road To America starts up on the roof at West Hills Friends Church here in southwest Portland, Oregon, with a big white wooden cross. The wood itself is fir, Oregon Doug fir, and the cross itself we inherited from Maplewood Friends, put up when they built the church back in ’69 or ’70. Like the church building, the cross was carpentered solid and has held up. The upright is a composite beam; six two by sixes somehow welded or glued together, standing about eight feet above the roof tree, and anchored deep in the framing of the east outside wall. I knew all year it was time to get back up there and get another coat of paint on it because even down on the sidewalk I could see cracking and scaling. Two coats of white marine enamel seem to last about three years. I think it’s closer to four since I did it last. When we did fall cleanup this year I got up on the roof to do gutters, and took a close look. Bare wood peaked out of big cracks in the paint and scale hung loosely in spots. I took Nick Beardsley up that day and pointed it out.

“I’ll be travelling this summer, I think,” I said, “And may not have the time. And I might be gone away for school in the fall. Anyway, I don’t know how many more times I should be getting up here. One of you younger guys should at least see how it’s done.” Nick looked it over – all Beardsley – and said he might not be in Portland this summer either. I said, “Well, listen… the bolt-on ladder is in the shed. If you can’t do it, and I can’t make it back in time, you might talk to Griffin or somebody. It needs to be done this year.” We walked carefully back across the rooftree to the get down place with the stepladder by the front door. “We can’t do anything now,” I said, “It needs to dry out, so we should wait for a good stretch of warm weather.”

It’s only April now, but we’re having four or five really warm days. Yesterday was hot and I was thinking I’d at least get the ladder bolted on and maybe start taking off some scale. The church has a great wi-fi signal, and if I’m not there for music I’m often there to check email. I kept telling myself it would be a good time to get started, but in the library, waiting for my pc to boot, I’d pulled one of the Narnia paperbacks off the shelf. It was The Magician’s Nephew. A week before I’d gotten about halfway through it. There was nothing I wanted on Yahoo, but C.S. Lewis is a great way to procrastinate. I went out on the sidewalk and smoked and read for awhile until Charles drove up in his pickup in a billed cap with some weedkiller, and I was inspired to get to work.

The bolt-on ladder was in the shed back in the corner where I’d left it four years ago; all the pieces, tied up neat in the line I use to haul it up to the roof. I looped two wrenches into the line, and heaved the other end of the line from the sidewalk up to the rooftree. I used the stepladder at the front door get up place, climbed up carefully and walked across the roof to the cross.

It was hot for April. They were calling for low 70’s, but it felt like 80 degrees. Little breaths of breeze. The orangey-rusty colored asphalt roof tiles were baking. I straddled the roof by the edge, yarded up the bolt-on ladder and the wrenches and got to work.

Refinishing the cross on the roof is the best job in the church. Out of everything I’ve done at West Hills I think it’s the most satisfying. I like how the skill-level fits me; sort of painstaking, but nothing too complicated. I mean, the starter on my truck needs to be rebuilt too, but even looking at the Toyota manual, and the blow-up picture of the assembly, I knew it was probably too complicated for me. Too easy to screw up, and I don’t have the experience or tools. The cross is simple. It takes good balance, and you can’t be rattled by the height, but it’s just a few hand tools and a little elbow grease.

The bolt-on ladder went easy; a sandwich affair of two by fours, bolted around the upright and torqued down snug. I was glad Charles stayed to watch, because I dropped a nut – of course – and it bounced down the roof into the clippings pile. He sent it back up on the rope. You also sort of want somebody there in case you make a stupid mistake, you know, to call 911.

Maplewood is so beautiful from the roof of the church. There was something going on at the gradeschool across the street. Not school – it was four thirty – but some activity. A big flock of little kids, second or third graders they looked, were gathered around the young teachers in the shade and the grass by home base and the backstop. They were quiet for such a big group of kids. The teachers were telling them something, and then they all got up and lined out down the sidewalk towards the auditorium. The big old maple in our front yard is blooming, and it’s leaves starting to come pretty good. It’s right beside the roof, and you can see everything that’s going on with it, and the birds in it. Across the street at the school, the Mom’s started showing up in minivans to meet their kids. There were joggers and bicyclers; a pretty woman in shorts walking her dog. Principal Blank – that’s his name – walked over to our side of the street and stood on the corner talking to two moms. Nobody looked at me. I resisted the impulse to say, “Hey look at me! I’m way up here!”

I got the second rung to the bolt-on ladder torqued down tight, and climbed up, and sat on the crosspiece, holding onto the upright. You’re really up there when you do that; fifty or sixty feet off the ground, perched like a little birdy. Up close too, the cross was way overdue; there were some lichens in spots, and the bondo I’d applied last time to the little bit of rot at the very top was all degraded. I casually peeled some strips of heavy white enamel scale off and dropped them on the roof. I’ll need a sander with real coarse grit to do it right. But then I got down. It was a good start. There’ll be lots of good weather before I leave, and just time enough to get paint on before I want to take off in May for the southwest and my pilgrimage. If I don’t get it painted before I go there’ll be weather in September to finish. God willing.

I would have liked more comfortable clothes, and would have gratefully lost the tie and brown wingtips, but I was only on my lunch-hour. There was no place to sit, either, just a long dry banked bar of rock and gravel beside that reach of the Molalla river. I didn’t need to sit. It was enough to be able to get here, five minutes from my office at the cable company, cross the bridge, park, eat a sandwich, and walk a few minutes.
A half a dozen tall poplars up the bank a ways were steadily shedding big yellow leaves into the river. In the gusts they shook into the water by the bushel basket. That breeze lifted the hair from my forehead, and grabbed my cigaret smoke. It was warm, and the wind and the overcast, the falling leaves, the precious minutes of privacy all connected with something inside of me. It made me happy to be there, and I wasn’t a very happy man in those days.
I was working hard and making money for people who didn’t much like me, in those days, wearing business-lite drag and commuting a half hour twice a day on 1-5. Coming home to a woman who wasn’t very happy either, and two little boys doing their best to find a way in between. It all made the river bank an attractive place. I would have stayed there longer if I could, but I meant to be dutiful even if I wasn’t always. As I walked and smoked I looked at the Molalla and the tolerated wildness of it’s banks with hunger, like I could ingest it by looking, like I could keep part of it.
The river was swift there, lightly rippled, and spread out wide for its size on the shallow cobble and gravel bed. Water over stones makes me think deep thoughts. Or think I’m thinking deep thoughts, which may not be the same.
I saw the leaves fall, and it started me thinking about how each of those leaves would make that dramatic little end of life trip exactly once: flutter, flip, flop, into the river and down you go. Like me, of course. But then I really looked into the water, and was surprised, (and then surprised by that). Because first I saw leaves on top of the river, nice big fat yellow poplar leaves boating along, pushed by the breeze and pulled by the current, and some maple from further up, and some alder in there too, but then like a
reflection or something funny in a mirror I finally saw what I had missed: the millions and millions camoflaged brown like the rocks of the river bed, leaves floating just beneath the surface, moving quickly at the rivers speed, the rivers body thick with them. So. The yellow leaves falling. The leaves floating high and fresh on the surface. The brown and wet uncounted below.
It’s a wonder I got any of my job done that afternoon. I did though. I did something. I also never forgot. Christ have mercy; “… no hungry generations tread thee down. The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient day by emperor and clown; the selfsame song that made a path through the sad heart of Ruth as she stood in tears amid the alien corn.” Keats of course, from the Nightingale.
Now some fourteen or fifteen years later, and another Oregon winter, not fall, but late winter, and I sit here writing with another very bad cold. A bad cold I’m watching close for the pneumonia that got me the last two winters. Do I count my blessings? I try to. Do I hear that voice? Often. Do I believe there is that much difference between me and a poplar leaf? I try. I try to have faith that each of us leaves – poplar or vine maple or alder, rushing along brown and silent under the swift river – have our names written on us in clear block capitals that do not fade or rub off, names finally read and spoken aloud with love. Amen.

This is from February of '05. It's from that first year of sobriety. Kind of nice. I found it clearing out email and thought you'd like it.

"YESTERDAY evening I wanted to drink, just so bad. After work I was going to a union meeting, their regular second Thursday, and on the way up Barbur Boulevard I kept mentally counting the money in my pocket and figuring how far it would go in a bar. I imagined myself sitting down in O’Connor’s, or was it Renner’s? and how I would say, “Give me a beer and a shot,” and then think to myself, ‘No, that’s not it, you say, “Give me a beer and a blast.”’ Then Mark the bartender at O’Connor’s brings them quickly; the yellow beer with the foam on top, and the clear brown whisky in a little glass. Then you just drink those down, and another set just like it. You read all the paper you want, and watch the cigaret smoke curl off the end of your cig, and order another set, and drink them. And then you’re drunk.

Well, I just earned my six-month coin, and it would be a nine-month coin if I hadn’t fallen off my horse back in July. I mean, time is starting to work for me a little, as they say in the meetings, and I’m getting through my days and most weeks pretty well. So I just prayed really hard, and managed not to turn off anywhere, and I got to the union meeting. I never went to those 2nd Thursdays before. I had told Suzy, “I don’t know what’s got into me. I should probably go and meet the new area rep.” But I was thinking too, ‘Maybe I’ll have a drink.’

At the meeting I was just quiet and listened mostly. They weren’t real organized but they were real supportive. There were three union staffers and twice that many shop stewards, sitting around a table at the local with decafs and cokes. I can’t believe how fragile our people look, sometimes, but this is what is keeping my family in medical benefits. You know, working class people? T-shirts and bad teeth and camo caps, and repeating stuff they heard on television? So anyway, we cheerfully trudged through our agenda, with about a bazillion side trips to tell jokes, and say rude things about management, and gossip, and occasionally ask a question of substance. Some people were under fire at their stores. One woman kept quiet, like me, the whole meeting, then started asking Becky (Durdel, the rep on duty), a whole bunch of questions about her file, and how she’d been trying to get it from her store director, and how she’d been written up twice in the last week. She looked pretty smart, and tough too, but as she talked, her feelings got tangled up. Becky kept murmuring supportively.

When the meeting was breaking up I got a few minutes with the new area rep, Todd.
He looks like a kid, but he’s probably not. They’re all ex-working class themselves, and they all look like they get a lot to eat and take care of their teeth, and wear nice new jeans, and plenty of hair-care products and stuff. They dress nice for these meetings to show respect to us, I’m sure, or they’d be in t-shirts too. So anyway, we talked a little bit. He seemed anxious to have our encounter there in the hall go well, asked me a few questions about the store, what did I think about this, what did I think about that. He pulls me into his office and we look up a couple of grocery checkers off a list. I said, “Look, I like you fine, but we’ve already got issues.” His eyes were wary. “We do?” he said. “Yes,” I said, “My issue is that I’m sure you’re very professional and competent, and I like you, and I want to be sure I see you at my store at least for the next couple of years. I’ve had six area reps in the last three years. We can’t build trust and solidarity if we don’t know our rep. The time is gonna come when that’s gonna be important. You need to go back and tell Gene that this is bad for the union. I want you to stay for the next three years.” He kind of twisted his head around at all this and looked at his shoe. “Well, not three years,” he said, “But at least for the next two.” Alright, so that was fine, and we got out of there. He practically followed me out to my car.

Man, I got in the car and started home, and I immediately started dandling this notion of drinking again. One of the things I used to do, would have been to pick up a pint and go to the church and drink and play guitar. It’s like my imagination was working fine, in color, with theme music. I could see it. I’d turn in, right here at the ol’ state liquor store, at the Capitol Hwy – Barbur intersection. When Kitzhaber was governor I used to call it ‘Dr. John’s medicine stand,’ or whatever. I knew that place. It’s right on the corner of a lot of beaten paths for me. I used to live just up Capitol a couple of blocks. It’s a key intersection to get to my church. I used to shop at Barbur Foods, who share the parking. Anyway, I turned into the parking lot at the liquor store and looked through their windows. There was the red open sign. Cars were parked in front. I drove through, exited onto Capitol, turned left on Taylor’s Ferry, and drove down to the church.

I unlocked, went into the office and turned on the heat. It was 8:30 or so, and I had about an hour to play the electric if I wanted to. I thought about how long it would take for the church to get warmed up, and I thought about lugging all the music gear around and
setting it up, and then I just did it. At least I know how it goes; and I can get the acoustic set up with its amp and the electric set up with its amp, and get the house sound the way I want it for my vocals. I always practice ‘hot’ anymore. One of my problems when I was getting started was having good mic presence. I’d get excited in performance and move around and slide off the mic. Anyway I worked for about, oh, two hours. It turned into the best kind of practice session in that I kind of forgot about being dutiful and just started really enjoying the workout. The electric frustrated me a little, but that’s not unusual. The acoustic felt fine, and my voice felt fine. We’ve got a show in about two weeks and it’s just important that I get a couple of hours in at least every other day, so I have the finger strength and the chops and the voice to do our set.
After practice I didn’t want to drink anymore. I thanked God for bailing me out on that and drove home. Suzy was already asleep. I can’t remember if I read or had a bowl of cereal or anything; I probably went right to bed, it had been a long day. I slept well through the night, like I do these days, and the last thing before waking up that next morning I had a God dream.

In the dream it’s like it was a kind of really big, late afternoon, early evening garden party at some kind of wealthy country estate. I knew too that it was somewhere in the Lewiston country, Idaho where I was a kid, but it was like somebody had poured all this money and water over it, cause that country was dry and kind of poor, and this setting was irrigated and landscaped. There were lots of dressed up glossy looking people wandering around and socializing. It was like there had been some kind of horse event, too, because several people were leading – or slowly riding – nice looking horses, some even in Eastern riding gear, (which I never saw when I was a kid). It was calm and peaceful and pleasant. I don’t recall seeing a big house or any servants, but I know they were there.

Then this little boy and girl sort of detached themselves from a group of people and came over to me. They were all dressed up for the party and looked great: the little girl with this old-fashioned dress-up outfit, starched petticoat, gingham jumper, starched lace cap. She came trotting over to me, holding hands with a little boy, and he was all dressed up in a really nice Western dress up outfit, with a new black Stetson, kind of plaid shirt, new jeans, boots, rodeo belt buckle. Little boy. They were really young, both of them, about six or seven or so. The little boy was carrying a big plastic tumbler filled with ice and some green liquid. He reached it up to me and said, “Your Father wanted you to have this.” So I accepted the glass and took a drink. It was Koolaid or something, and refreshing. It was a little sweeter than I like."

7:00 a.m. Sleeping later. Cloudy, pleasant, cool. No dreams. No fireball in the sky… thank You, Lord. And so the summer days roll by here in ‘Peace and Plenty’. Another good nights sleep, another slow gentle wake up; the blue pyjama bottoms, wool bathrobe. Coffee and smokes on the deck, the journal, Ecclesisates yesterday, the Song today. Some prayer, some quiet, thank You Lord Christ in your cheerful lighthanded acceptance and encouragement.

The roses are coming back so nice since we headed them out in June. Looks like a whole ‘nother crop of blooms on the way. What do they say at the end of Lord of the Rings? Something about things being good always with the promise they’ll get better.

I continue to pray for the discernment to decide for or against U of MO for myself, weighing it against further adventures in ‘Christian Pilgrimage’ – not that I know what CP would look like. Of course not, that’s how it works. I don’t know. One doesn’t. But I know that with radical obedience come the miracles and the transubstantiation, and that I do know.

I think a lot, sitting on the Huber’s roof peak in my raingear, while the wedge of the powerwasher’s stream picks at the moss. Dick runs the weedeater below, putters, works, naps. Bless the man, he does this all for love for his daughter and her family, and I do it for love… and the money I need. And if I think that if it is foolish to be doing this when I’m 55 how much more foolish at 65? Yet I love both the freedom and the prospect of freedom. (And possibly the foolishness.) After so many years of … well, what do you call it?

It was husbandry, and fatherhood, and homeownership, work, and church, and business, birthdays and Christmas, and going to bed with my wife two or three times a month. It was inevitable, and in bad times a clanking handcar on steel rails, with the tasks and years stretching out ahead and the black tunnel in the distance. But never so bad really. A life, and people who loved me, and better than most. What do you want?

Part of the attraction for me of the idea of going to U Mo, (and finally picking up a Bachelors), is just the peace of I get previewing the end of the story… six years of school, a teaching certificate, ten years teaching English in Asotin – and coaching softball – there by the Snake River where it all began for me. A cabin up a creek. A woman and a garden. Visits from children and grandchildren. A book. A collection of poems. Death finally like a gentle falling asleep in the morning sun, amen. I can hope for that. I feel compassion for you Derek, for your journeying, your longing for home.

Against what? What vision? An old man with an old guitar by a campfire? Or handcuffed after a demonstration? Mopping out a big city bar, or cleaning up vomit in a halfway house? Wearing a brown robe and hoeing turnips? With a straw hat and carpetbag and guitar case, sitting at a freeway entrance with a cardboard sign that reads, in bold black letters, “Heaven”. Goddam right it’s attractive. Walking down Thompson St. to be welcomed and fed. Speaking at a conference, a Quaker yearly meeting. Praying. Transfigured. Obedient… and free as a bird.

Yesterday, powerwashing, I made my truck payment, and today maybe my VISA payment. I still have bits of moss in my (now past shoulder length) beautiful brown hair.
8:30 a.m. Time to go back to work. God keep me safe on that roof today…….

The demo was pretty much over and people were drifting away. Many would be thinking about what doorway they would sleep in this night, what shelter might take them, what camping space might be safer. In twos and threes they unlocked their bikes and slid off down the leafy tunnel of the parkblocks. The girl in the dreads and the boy with the black nail polish were necking a little. A hundred people or more sitting in the shade were still listening to people tell their stories. The organizers asked folks to raise their hands, and then people would stand and talk: about getting swept from their camping places and squats, about being houseless in Portland, Oregon. Stories of cops, stories of private security. A woman with no teeth said, “Constantly,” she said, “Just all of the time.” A man in a bent straw cowboy hat said, “They won’t take you if you’re a felon.” A black man stood up and said he’d been homeless for 25 years, some because he wanted to be and some because he didn’t want to be.

I got Patrick to help me take off the signs I’d safety-pinned to my tshirt. They all said the same thing in big block letters: “Jesus says No Violence” and “Christian Peace Witness”. I was glad I’d come. I had been frightened by the possibility of being hurt, or embarassed, but nothing happened that way. I walked with the kids all over downtown and took a ton of pictures. My bike was at the other end of the park blocks and I was hungry and tired. I gave Pat a hug and walked down to the streetcar stop. Two of the men who had been carrying signs in the march were waiting on the streetcar bench and they were talking when I walked up.

“…that one guy got a jaywalking ticket though. That was a bummer.” They were sitting on the bench and rolling cigarets. “Can I sit down?” I asked. “Oh sure,” said the guy who had been talking. He was sort of heavy. The other guy was sort of skinny.
“Are you all expecting a streetcar anytime soon?” I asked.
“About eight minutes,” said the skinnier one. He had a moustache and a billed cap.
“I’m not denyin’ what he said,” went on the heavy guy, “I’m not denyin’ what he said. I’m just sayin’ that CCC got me into this place and they gave me six months free rent, and that’s a pretty good deal.”

I leaned back on the bench and looked up. Blue blue through the leaves of the old trees, mild breath of wind. Lovely July in the PSU end of the parkblocks. Almost eight p.m. now, and we’d been at it since about five thirty.

A couple of younger guys walked onto the platform. One had a bike. “Four minutes,” he said to his friend. “It should be here in four minutes.”

The two older guys from the demo were quiet for a minute, smoking their handrolls. Then the heavier guy goes, “Look! There’s a clock right there!” He had just then noticed the eight foot tall large-faced clock opposite the bench on the other side of the street. He was surprised he hadn’t seen it before, and had to say it again, “It’s been there all the time!”

It looked scary, and I don’t scare that easy, but this was new to me and it looked like a baby, with soft humps and clefts; or a large brown intestine, the way it kinked and coiled away, or just possibly a brain. “I-gor, where in God’s name did you get that?!?” “Oh mahster, I found it in the gahrden, isn’t it perfect?” Behold the mature corm of a Himalayan blackberry. Really yam-ish, or sweet potato-ish, looking, but this one… I swear, it was as thick as a freaking football. It took me a half hour (about) to get to it, and get it out, and as I held this thing up and marvelled at it – baby, intestine, brain, quivering alien predator - I knew there were three or four roots as thick as my thumb left in that hole just waiting for me to turn my back.
“Sic semper tyrannis,” I said, “Just like we’re going to do to the Bush Crime Family,” I said, “We’re going to grub ‘em out by the roots, and drag their ugly thorny bodies into the daylit streets where everybody can take a good close look at them, and then we’re gonna….” But I didn’t finish that sentence, because I am in fact a follower of Jesus, after the manner of Friends, and I’m pretty sure Jesus doesn’t like where that sentence goes. Instead I looked at the corner of the lot I was working on… any more? “Any takers?” I said, “Come out come out…” And then I wanted a cigaret, so I had to stop and do the work until it passed. “Thank you, Lord,” I said, “OK, on we go.”
It was Day 1, and I was getting ‘nudged’ to smoke about every fifteen minutes, or less, or pretty much on schedule. The thing is, I’d managed to quit before, which is confusing to say, because obviously I had in fact started up again. It’s a long story. The good part is that I was deep in the work to get free, and I know, now, this morning, writing, that if I just do the work, I get the grace of God, and I get to be free.

January 21, 2008

This is an old dream from the way back, from that summer in Toledo on the Oregon coast with Karen, makes it about ‘81 or ’82. We were real poor, but the move over from Eugene had gone well, and if we weren’t really in love, we had a lot of genuine affection and were good partners. I’d gotten that gig painting crab buoys like immediately, and we’d found the little cardboard wall apartment there in Toledo. Before the year was out I’d be working on a fishing boat, where I wanted to be, and she’d be cooking at the Whales’ Tale, on the Newport waterfront. We were doing fine.

And I had a prophetic dream. I wrote it down then, carefully, and I’ve never forgotten it. For some reason I began remembering it …yesterday? Perhaps earlier, and then yesterday strongly a couple of times. In church I mentioned it in quiet time before music.

So… twenty-six years ago. I considered the Christian paradigm beneath my dignity. The so-called theology was such a hopeless muddle, and I couldn’t abide the company. True, Karen and I were both interested in spirit. We talked about it all the time. In our own ways we had to be, because neither one of us had too much going on in this dimension. She was deep into readings and meditations on Campbell’s hero. Gnosticism at its finest (and least useful). For both of us real demons lurked in the shadows. Before the 80’s were out, Karen would meet many of those demons in the sunlight: rampant blackout alcoholism, promiscuity, and homelessness. My hell would be more subtle perhaps; though I can say I would rather be waterboarded than put on another blue suit and sell small town cable TV advertising for another twelve years. As an alcoholic. Like I did. I do hope I know better now than to think it was either the blue suit, the small town, or the job that was the problem. Though I digress. Here’s the dream, a gift of God to me then and now.

It was coherently presented to me in four acts: three acts of threat, spite, and accusation, and a fourth act of redemption and hope. The Prosecutor made his case. Thugs threatened the cold poor artist in the mountain shack, starving cats were eating an old woman’s body, an obese whore taunted me with her dance. It was unrelenting and I was being compelled as by a torturer to see what there was to see. And I might have asked for help, in the dream, I might have called out blindly into the darkness, please help me. I don’t know, I wouldn’t swear to that now. But help did come. It came like an animated short, a little cartoon dreamland parable promise, for this was all deep fast asleep dream, in the darkness, in the cheap apartment by the sleeping doomed beautiful girl.

The hero to watch was a little white line stick-figure diagram of a man, I guess me of course, and he was being backed up through the fog. By …what? Compulsion? Fear itself? I never saw what frightened him so badly, but he backed up because he had to, and he backed up and he stood on an edge and there was no place for him to go but backward, and he took that last step backward, out and down into void, and then his little white line stick-figure foot came down firmly on a flat solid security. And then as the camera for our animated short parable drew back, and the lighting came up, I could see the little man standing still and secure on the capital of a …column, a Doric column, of white marble of course, only it’s huge. Whatever the threat was, it had evaporated. The camera, the point of view, dollys back and back, and away from the little man and the top of the column, and then the picture gets all pretty and strong; the length of the column drops down and down against black space and curves out into a white line, and there’s a sensation of stars and great distance, and then the line curves back around and returns, and where it ends it feathers out into a final rainbow over the little man standing still, and the rainbow emits a gentle falling glitter on him. He is being shown that he is blessed and cherished. He is ultimately taken care of. He will not be allowed to fall into darkness. Or for long. Or for good.

I have been pretty near free of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, for, well, four years in April, if I make it. This is not only about that, I think, and I don’t know why I remembered this dream now, or why it’s so strong to me again. Maybe just to nudge me to pray for Karen, who fell into darkness and was lost. Maybe to offer hope to someone else. Thanks be to God from whom all blessings flow.

The Road To The World on ocassion leads to the podium at West Hills Friends Church, in SW Portland, Oregon, USA. I offered the following message this very Sunday morning. Call the topic: "Christian Pilgrimage", and you'll be close.

Matthew 10:7-13

Once upon a time, Prophecy, Prudence, and the Beautiful Serendipity fell madly in love.

To be sure, it was an unusual arrangement and no one expected it to last. It didn’t either. Last, that is, but they did get in a couple of good years, and to tell the truth, everyone enjoyed it so much when they came to town.

It was a travelling revival meeting as much as anything, though Prudence was known to do a brake job from time to time if you had the tools and a place to work. Mostly it was just fun, and raised people’s spirits, when the big, slightly shabby RV showed up and pulled into the parking lot.

In the evenings people came from all over, and the little church was packed, just packed. Prophecy was six foot six and three hundred pounds of classic African – American preacher, and when he would step to the podium in his white suit and apricot tie, and speak the Word of God, and lead the singing in his deep bass voice, oh how the people would surge forward. Beautiful Serendipity lit the candles, and she and Prudence harmonized with Prophecy on the hymns and choruses.

As Prophecy spoke, first one person at the front of the church and then another would kneel down, and then we all got on our knees, and we all raised our hands in witness. Prophecy would lay his big brown hand on somebodys forehead and look up and close his eyes and pray, and we would all sing praises, and call on Almighty God for help, and the tears would come and the healing and the peace, and then deep in the quiet that followed the spirit would rise up and rise up in the room and flow like mighty waters. Umm, mm mm mm mmm it was so sweet!

Afterwards of course, over decaf and cupcakes, people were a little embarassed at all the public emotion, and they would talk about other things. This would be a good time to see if Prudence might be free to take a look at those brakes. Of the three, Prudence often seemed the safest to talk to, you know, over a cupcake and a decaf. He’d stand there in his plaid shirt, jeans, clean work boots, his hair tied back in a sensible ponytail; perfectly willing to compare Swiss Army knives, or fancy new cell phones, or talk taxes. Eventually you might get up the nerve to ask him, ‘What’s it really like to travel around with those two?’ and it was very gratifying to watch him roll his eyes. “It’s OK,” he’d say, “We’re not building any pyramids, you know.” Looking down into his coffee cup. “The fun never stops,” he said, but while you were trying to figure out what any of that meant, he would be stealing a long look at Beautiful Serendipity in the corner with the youth group.

Now Beautiful Serendipity – and that’s what they called her – was just plain exotic; a young woman like an arab horse, like a Masai spear, like a verse out of a poem by John Keats. She was all barefeet and shawls and long red hair like copper and gold mixed together. She was all sequins, and bracelets, and eagle feathers; chiffon, taffeta, silk. She rustled like a field of ripe wheat when she walked, and just standing still in the corner with most of the church youth group… …they look like they’re hypnotised, my gosh, what is she doing there? Are those coin tricks… ? it’s like she came with her own lighting, it’s like she came with her own theme music.

She made some of the men pretty nervous, yet surprisingly, most of the women loved her. She was a skilled midwife, and herbalist. Before getting into the, shall we say, current arrangement, she had been known simply as Betty Jo Bialovsky. She’d been appreciated in her own little rural Idaho church for gifts of discernment, and often for finding a way forward where others only saw blocks. The stories though, the stories they told were just outrageous, and everyone who knew her had one, and they all started out something like this: “We were just going to Fred Meyer to pick up some ice cream… I have no idea what happened… it was totally fun… but I had to borrow quarters to call home before it was all over!”

I remember that summer afternoon they left just like it was yesterday. We’d had ‘em for two Sundays, that time, and workshops all week. I had just come over to the church to… oh, what was it … change a lightbulb? play a little guitar? say hi to Mike?
Anyway when I rolled down to the community building parking lot to lock up my bike, I saw the RV, and the three of them at a picnic table on the playground. It was such a pretty day, you know, summer in Maplewood. I walked over. “Hey,” I said, “I thought you guys were gone. Glad I caught you. What’s next? Or do you even know where you’re going?”

Prudence put a plate of ham sandwiches on the table, and Serendipity picked one up. Prophecy was dinking out a little soft rhythmn and blues thing on his guitar. He put it into the case, and clicked the latches shut, and looked up at me.
“People need the Good News everywhere, Derek,” he said. He stood up. “Like water. Like food. They need to hear the truth that God loves them. That’s where we’re goin’.” “Preach it baby,” said Serendipity into her sandwich. “The Kingdom of God is right here,” said Prophecy, and he held up his open hand, and we all looked into it and for just a moment there, it was like I could see… something… golden and swirling, a little ball of Spirit and life and fire balanced above his palm. “I know,” I said, “Amen.”

Prudence coughed into his fist and picked up the clipboard next to his plate. He munched a barbecue potato chip and said, “Umm… well… if the transmission holds up, that is. I mean, it should. We’ll be fine.” He looked at me and smiled. “Do you guys know you came up with $1,000 bucks for us this week?” He glanced at the clipboard. “$1,003.52 actually. I’m just grateful that you had the resources to help so much. I know you’ve got a lot of career people here; professionals, entrepeneurs. People who work hard, and create wealth, and share it with the people they love. Remember now, the charity of the kingdom always takes at least two. Try and let ‘em know how much we appreciate their help.”

“North… I think,” said Prophecy. “We go North until the Spirit says, ‘Stop’. What do you say friends?”

“Bellingham, maybe,” said Prudence, “We have people there.”

“Hey guys…?” said Beautiful Serendipity. She laid her hand over Prudence’s hand, and then they all looked from one to another, coming to some understanding. Prudence smiled. Prophecy nodded slightly. She turned then and looked me in the eye, and said,

“Come with us.”

This is from February of '05. It's from that first year of sobriety. Kind of nice. I found it clearing out email and thought you'd like it.

"YESTERDAY evening I wanted to drink, just so bad. After work I was going to a union meeting, their regular second Thursday, and on the way up Barbur Boulevard I kept mentally counting the money in my pocket and figuring how far it would go in a bar. I imagined myself sitting down in O’Connor’s, or was it Renner’s? and how I would say, “Give me a beer and a shot.” and then think to myself, ‘No, that’s not it, you say, “Give me a beer and a blast.”’ Then Mark the bartender at O’Connor’s brings them quickly; the yellow beer with the foam on top, and the clear brown whisky in a little glass. Then you just drink those down, and another set just like it. You read the paper and watch the cigaret smoke curl off the end of your cig, and order another set, and drink them. And then you’re drunk.
Well, I just earned my six-month coin, and it would be a nine-month coin if I hadn’t fallen off my horse back in July. I mean, time is starting to work for me a little, as they say in the meetings, and I’m getting through my days and most weeks pretty well. So I just prayed really hard, and managed not to turn off anywhere, and I got to the union meeting. I never went to those 2nd Thursdays before. I had told Suzy, “I don’t know what’s got into me. I should probably go and meet the new area rep.” But I was thinking too, “Maybe I’ll have a drink.’
At the meeting I was just quiet and listened mostly. They weren’t real organized but they were real supportive. There were three union staffers and twice that many shop stewards, sitting around a table at the local drinking decafs and waters. I can’t believe how fragile our people look, sometimes, but this is what is keeping my family in medical benefits. You know, working class people? T-shirts and bad teeth and camo caps, and repeating stuff they heard on television? So anyway, we cheerfully trudged through our agenda, with about a bazillion side trips to tell jokes, and say rude things about management, and gossip, and occasionally ask a question of substance. Some people were under fire at their stores. One woman kept quiet, like me, the whole meeting, then started asking Becky (Durdel, the daytime rep on duty – desk job), a whole bunch of questions about her file, and how she’d been trying to get it from her store director, and how she’d been written up twice in the last week. She looked pretty smart, and tough too, but as she talked, her feelings got tangled up. Becky kept murmuring supportively.
When the meeting was breaking up I got a few minutes with the new area rep, Todd. He looks like a kid, but he’s probably not. They’re all ex-working class themselves, and they all look like they get a lot to eat and take care of their teeth, and wear nice new jeans, and plenty of hair-care products and stuff. They dress nice for these meetings to show respect to us, I’m sure, or they’d be in t-shirts too. So anyway, we talked a little bit. He seemed anxious to have our encounter there in the hall go well, asked me a few questions about the store, what did I think about this, what did I think about that. He pulls me into his office and we look up a couple of grocery checkers off a list. I said, “Look, I like you fine, but we’ve already got issues.” His eyes were wary. “We do?” he said. “Yes,” I said, “My issue is that I’m sure you’re very professional and competent, and I like you; and I want to be sure I see you at my store at least for the next couple of years. I’ve had six area reps in the last three years. We can’t build trust and solidarity if we don’t know our rep. The time is gonna come when that’s gonna be important. You need to go back and tell Gene that this is bad for the union. I want you to stay for the next three years.” He kind of twisted his head around at all this and looked at his shoe. “Well, not three years,” he said, “But at least for the next two.” Alright, so that was fine, and we got out of there. He practically followed me out to my car.
Man, I got in the car and started home, and I immediately started dandling this notion of drinking again. One of the things I used to do, would have been to pick up a pint and go to the church and drink and play guitar. It’s like my imagination was working fine, in color, with theme music. I could see it. I’d turn in, right here at the ol’ state liquor store, at the Capitol Hwy – Barbur intersection. When Kitzhaber was governor I used to call it ‘Dr. John’s medicine stand,’ or whatever. I knew that place. It’s right on the corner of a lot of beaten paths for me. I used to live just up Capitol a couple of blocks. It’s a key intersection to get to my church. I used to shop at Barbur Foods, who share the parking. Anyway, I turned into the parking lot at the liquor store and looked through their windows. There was the red open sign. Cars were parked in front. I drove through, exited onto Capitol, turned left on Taylor’s Ferry, and drove down to the church.
I unlocked, went into the office and turned on the heat. It was 8:37 or so, and I had about an hour to play the electric if I wanted to. I thought about how long it would take for the church to get warmed up, and I thought about lugging all the music gear around and setting it up, and then I just did it. At least I know how it goes; and I can get the acoustic set up with its amp and the electric set up with its amp, and get the house sound the way I want it for my vocals. I always practice ‘hot’ anymore. One of my problems when I was getting started was having good mic presence. I’d get excited in performance and move around and slide off the mic. Anyway I worked for about, oh, two hours. It turned into the best kind of practice session in that I kind of forgot about being dutiful and just started really enjoying the workout. The electric frustrated me a little, but that’s not unusual. The acoustic felt fine, and my voice felt fine. We’ve got a show in about two weeks and it’s just important that I get a couple of hours in at least every other day, so I have the finger strength and the chops and the voice to do our set.
After practice I didn’t want to drink anymore. I thanked God for bailing me out on that and drove home. I can’t remember if I read or had a bowl of cereal or anything; I probably went right to bed, it had been a long day. I slept well through the night, like I do these days, and the last thing before waking up that next morning I had a God dream.
In the dream it’s like it was a kind of really big, late afternoon, early evening garden party at some kind of wealthy country estate. I knew too that it was somewhere in the Lewiston country, where I was a kid, but it was like somebody had poured all this money and water over it, cause that country was dry and kind of poor, and this setting was irrigated and landscaped. There were lots of dressed up glossy looking people wandering around and socializing. It was like there had been some kind of horse event, too, because several people were leading – or slowly riding – nice looking horses, some even in Eastern riding gear, (which I never saw when I was a kid). It was calm and peaceful and pleasant. I don’t recall seeing a big house or any servants, but I know they were there.
Then this little boy and girl sort of detached themselves from a group of people and came over to me. They were all dressed up for the party and looked great: the little girl with this old-fashioned dress-up outfit, starched petticoat, gingham jumper, starched lace cap. She came trotting over to me, holding hands with a little boy, and he was all dressed up in this really nice Western dress up outfit, with a new black Stetson, kind of plaid shirt, new jeans, boots, rodeo belt buckle. Little boy. They were really young, both of them, about six or seven or so. The little boy was carrying a big plastic tumbler filled with ice and some green liquid. He reached it up to me and said, “Your Father wanted you to have this.”
I accepted the glass and took a drink. It was Koolaid or something, and refreshing. It was a little sweeter than I like."

Rich Mullin’s much loved ’93 hit: “Our God Is An Awesome God” is also loved in Burundi central Africa. I found this out in March of 2007, when the team of church musicians I was working with there, suggested the song for the recording sessions we were planning.

When I heard their version, which is Rich’s great chorus, no verses, and their own rap bridge, I knew we had a hit. Our big hope and plan and scheme is that other folks – you! – will agree. Every dime of every download will go to buy and maintain musical instruments for Kamenge Friends Church. In a country where a skilled workman can make $1.50 a day, getting a church band an $800 electric piano is quite simply and literally a miracle.

At Kamenge Friends Church in Burundi their faith is very strong. It has to be strong because in 1993-94 200,000 Burundians – Hutu and Tutsi – died in the genocide violence that swept their country as well as Rwanda to the north. This is a little part of their story.

Kamenge neighborhood is an inner city slum in Bujumbura, Burundi. During that 1993-4 crisis, and the civil war that festered in the following decade, Kamenge neighborhood was repeatedly overrun by both rebel and government battles and activity.

At big busy successful Kamenge Friends Church, you can still see the bullet holes on the walls and in that place in the roof that when it rains really hard everybody moves their chairs. You can see the bullet holes, but you cannot see the scars on the people’s souls.

Peggy can see the scars on the souls because Peggy not only has big bushido for Christ, but also because she is a psychologist and trained trauma healer. Peggy brought me to Burundi. So I said to her, “What percent of this population have been through this kind of horror?” and she said, “Nine out of ten of the people you meet over the age of thirteen have a story – or multiple stories – of trauma, terror, war, torture, rape that happened to them or to someone they knew and loved… mother, father, siblings. Nine out of ten.”

When people get traumatized part of their brain wants to forget what happened, and the other part of the brain keeps saying ‘listen to me: something terrible happened’, so when your brain won’t talk to itself, people drink and do drugs and go numb and crazy and then they become victims again. Or perpetrators.

But making music is a whole-brain activity and heals trauma. Now listen to the song again. Our God is an awesome god.

The Road To The World starts somewhere below my eyebrows, wanders around my weary and gentle and saggy eyes, down my thickening nose and around my still quite poetic lips, fights through the beard, then over hill and dale, across my shoulders and chest and stomach, through the paths and thickets of my loins, the central highlands of my upper thighs and butt, and fades out like a buffalo trail at high altitude in Wyoming, only down where my feets final expressions are nail and callus.

Or you could say it the other way.

The other way would be all about the lovely organic yellow beets I picked up at the Red Barn at 3rd and Blair, in the heart of Elvendom on earth… just a natural foods store. Just right livelihood. Just right. While the last of the late October sun warmed all of our hearts and hopes, and the dogs smiled, the walnut and locust leaves fluttered finally to earth, and the bike women in clogs and long skirts swept in and swept away, parked their bikes, and locked and shopped. Anyway, I peeled them all, the yellow beets, and cubed them and put them in with their other friends the red beets and the parsnips, the new potatoes, and of course the big piece of dead cow; salt and pepper and cumin and garlic, on high 500º for 15 or so then down to 350º for a couple of hours, covered. A half cup of red wine and a bay leaf, maybe a half cup of stock would have been nice, but do you know what? It was really good and we ate a lot of it.

The road to the world: so the beet, and all of his friends, my share anyway, went down the hatch and were broken down by powerful mechanical and chemical processes into many intricate and jewel-like components, and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-wah and… voyla! as we say in Amarillo, here I am today with all the ooomph I need to bike around to this coffee place and write out all my important thoughts. What a wanker.

It is all the road to the world.

I have talked a little about doing Christian pilgrimage. That is me, now. I’m ‘Christian’ from Bunyan; gonna lay that packsack full of rocks right on down at Jesus’ bare feet. One of these damn days. So cool, I liked that book. We had a copy when I was little, with line drawings. I wonder if it was perhaps ‘adapted’ for young people, because I do remember I could read it easily and it made sense but I haven’t read it since then, and it was written in the 17th century for Heaven’s sake, wasn’t it? Now I need a copy to check against my memories.

I do not know of much emphasis on poverty-as-spiritual-discipline in the history of protestantism. Anabaptists, and my own Quakes, speak to the value of simplicity, which may appear from outside to be poverty, but I do not believe it is the same thing. George Fox was a little that way. Poor on purpose. My sense is that the Catholics have more experience with this than does the protestant tradition. I have a coloring book understanding of Catholic poverty as discipline from the popular lit I’ve looked at… the barefoot Franciscan counselor to the King, walking the last few miles to his appointment; the ivory relief of Julian of Norwich walled up in her bell-tower closet in the filth of a medieval city; the Monophysite Fathers (and Mothers) in their caves and huts. Severe fasting. The mortification of the flesh. Brrrrr….! Why would anybody be interested in that?

I do not see value in discomfort as such, in and of itself. But I have become quite interested in the things Jesus said, as reported by Matthew, in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of his report. The beatitudes, or blessings, or happiness sayings. Sermon on the mount. I have had much opportunity this year to put my life and my welfare and my happiness and my purpose into God’s hands. I am tempted over and over again to just leave it there, safe and sound, and free from my meddling. Only, it’s just that when I get real close to, or closer… what do the Indigo Girls say? ‘Closer to fine…’

When I run out of money I get scared. This then becomes opportunity to talk to God about this. Perfect love drives out fear. God is certainly perfect love. When the fear lifted for a moment this morning on my bike I looked up and there was a line of boxcars being shaped up into a train by middle aged men in fluorescent green vests and walky-talkies walking the track, and 4 out of 5 box cars were carefully and beautifully decorated with graffitti. Some of the cars were self-propelled. I did not think about having one dollar bill, four quarters, and ninety-four cents to my name. I did not think about ‘will that check clear tomorrow’ or ‘should I sell that thing I’m not using, and will I get anything for it?’ I thought about taking pictures. Photos. For the website. You know, for the kids…………..
Perfect love drives out fear.

It scares me because Eugene is full of guys who look like me. Kind of ‘mature’ types with hobo boxes on their bikes full of books. Perhaps I should re-think this. Perhaps, on the other hand, Eugene is more enlightened. I rather suspect they’d agree…….

Melanie said that a lesson of the car wreck and the totalled car and the lingering health problems was that if she lived and was alright she was being taken care of by God who loves her, and if she died in that wreck she was being taken care of by God who loves her, loves her, loves her. Melanie’s tougher than she lo

The Road To The World led through Dorothy Lee Spencer’s kitchen, for which simple fact I am most grateful. You see Mrs. Spencer, my grandmother, my Honey, was a gourmet farmhouse cook. I got to live in her house, or very close, for several of my most formative years. When I had lived in the wide world on my own for a few years I really understood just how cushy I’d had it growing up. She was the cook, and the cook’s food was good three times a day in that house. Sunday was worth waiting for just for Sunday afternoon supper. It was a little comical to see the shirt-tail relatives show up just around noon, for a “…short visit, really can’t stay long…” and get ‘armtwisted’ into staying for supper at about 3:00.

Of course it was the high protestant holy days of Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings and anniversaries, graduation, and your birthday, that were all celebrated by the greatest festal gatherings and the most glorious feasts.

One Easter, I think it was, really sticks in my mind, but it was one of many… the lace tablecloth at the big table with the candles, Papa at his end, Honey at hers, the two daughters, the sons in law, possibly a cousin or family friend or two, children and more children, and a mountain of lovely food. A very large baked ham, (but I was a small child), glazed, and studded with cloves, whipped potatoes, and gravy in a china boat, fresh asparagas – in April? - I don’t know, but I remember the asparagas from her own garden, so … maybe later than Easter – maybe storebought from California for the holiday. Baked candied yams, which I didn’t love. Creamed peas, which I didn’t love. (I love both of those now.) And heavenly fresh hot dinner rolls by the pan she made herself, with butter and scalded milk, dinner rolls in two or three different shapes, that everybody raved about, to her face.

She did menus, and that menu included a sourcream horseradish sauce for the ham – very good but blow your head off, be careful – then the pickle and olive tray, ok, not bad, and then her own out of this world mustard pickles with cauliflower flowerets and tiny gherkin cukes and pearl onions in this excellent mustard pickle sauce. So that was dinner. And there were seconds of course and more hot bread, and big glasses of cold milk for the kids. Baby!

Then you were reminded about the third time you reached for the ham to leave room for dessert. Dorothy Lee Spencer just completely rocked on dessert. She liked dessert. She put a lot of thought into it, and time, and skill and love, and you knew it with every forkful. So let’s talk about pie crust, shall we? She did the lard flour salt water deal like burning down the barn, and used it for most of her, oh, dozen fruit and nut and custardy combinations she liked really well and did a lot.

Apple of course, sour pie cherry, banana cream, washington nut (a pecan variation), mince, and pumpkin. Rhubarb, and gooseberry, and real Idaho Rocky Mountain huckleberry, bursting with flavor. Sour cream raisen, which was this outstanding custard thing where she soaked the raisins and plumpled them first.

And that was Easter dinner at Dot’s house. Holy Smoke.

So I’m fifty four now, and remembering a dinner from maybe 48, 49 years ago. A dinner in the middle of the Great & Prosperous Calm, the Highest of the American High Noons, (to date, who knows what the next decade will bring). The 40’s and 50’s were good to the Spencers, canny hardworking wheat and cattle farmers that they were. But I suspect those days are long past.

I am now about at the age my grandmother was then. I am now making her pie crust, and filling it with berries and pears and custard and I am serving it to people I love. Here in western Oregon, where the farmer’s markets, and people’s backyards, and the feral apples and pears by the roadside are all lolling in plump and juicy sweetness. The fearsome and delicious blackberries are almost over – go to the shady northside of the thickets and still find good ones. The blessing and the mercy of the fruitful season. The blessing and the mercy of the people who teach you early and often that love is a good verb.

Here are some sweet shots of F/friends at Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Churches, held as always in Newberg, Oregon, during the third week of July, on the campus of George Fox University. There are a few nice shots of keynote speaker David Niyonzima, Senior Pastor at Kamenge Friends Church, and of course my host for 1st quarter ’07, at his home in Bujumbura, Burundi.

Lots of F/friends pix on here, including a hilarious sequence with a couple of young ‘uns and a rather stiff fountain. There are some nice shots of Peg making a presentation on behalf of at risk Rwandan Quaker secondary students. Rwanda is just north of Burundi, same culture, same language, same evangelical Friends churches. These young Rwandans – see flannelgraph shot – are remarkable as survivors of genocide and poverty, and remarkable also in their tenacity and hard work to achieve an education. What is at risk for this group now is that despite their hard work, and the good will of their school, they would have to quit school for lack of money to pay tuition and fees. I had the opportunity to speak on their behalf during the Global Outreach presentation at Yearly Meeting, and thanks to Friends generosity, over $3,000 dollars in cash and pledges came in specifically right then to help these inspiring young people continue their education.

Find out more about these special needs secondary students – Christians, Quakers, survivors, orphans, and very hardworking students all – by emailing Carrie Hutchinson with Northwest Yearly Meeting’s Global Outreach team. She can direct any contributions, and respond to any questions.

----------------------------- ------------------------------ ----------------------------

I’ve been thinking a lot this year, these days, this week, about what it might mean to be surrendered to God’s will? To be lost to the world, or in the world but not of it? Asking also: what does it mean to be happy?

These questions are all laid out in a neat bold stack of double-spaced italic captions, just to the right of a portrait of me, looking intrepid or meaningful or something, (same pic as upper left on my webpage); and just above the fold of my new promo mailer, an advance piece I’ve been getting out to help me get gigs with colleges and organizations that book music.

I could have easily added, or substituted: “What does it mean to be a Pilgrim?” More and more that is how I am seeing myself, a pilgrim free’er of things and the distractions of things, a pilgrim with no place of my own, a pilgrim on a trip to the holy places of the heart. God’s heart, my heart, our hearts. I will keep this up as long as I can. For now my pilgrimage is easy and sweet: house-sitting for another set of generous (vacationing) F/friends.

I am enjoying their things well enough; their washer and dryer, their blueberries and bookshelves, their master bedroom and bath. I am feeding cats and watering flowers; I am locking up carefully every night, and taking phone messages, and cleaning up after myself. I am enjoying quiet and privacy in SW Portland, one of the garden spots of the world. But these are not my things and I will let them go gladly when it’s time to move on.

What does it mean to be surrendered?
I tell myself that all I want to do is whatever God wants me to do, (and hope to God I mean it). So far, He’s been saying (as much as), He’s been saying, “You’ve been busy, you’re due for a little rest …take it easy. Go where you are invited. Do music. Celebrate God with God’s Family. Preach the Good News, preach peace, preach justice and compassion for the poor. Preach good stewardship of Creation. Stop worrying! Nothing bad is happening to you, is it? Your teeth are good. Your digestion is good. You sleep through the night with no bad dreams. You work enough to eat, to buy guitar strings, to service your bicycle, to buy a latte, to make a phonecall, to pay down your Visa. Take it easy. Enjoy the bounty.” And I do, I do.
But what’s the catch? asks the mean little scared voice inside, when do I pay for happiness, and heartsease, serenity?

I tell that voice, “Come what may, at least I feel like I know what my job is now. My job is to ask God everyday for direction, and try and do as I’m told. Everyday. And when I fail, in ways large or small, I can ask for forgiveness, and strength and encouragement to try again.”

This is the way of peace. This is the way of sobriety, amen.
If my job is to call an old friend to pick blackberrries, and bake my grandmother’s pie crust, and eat warm blackberry pie with a glass of milk… well, I can do that. I can do it and say THANK YOU.

Will He ask me for more? Here’s the hardest thing he can ask me to do – and it ain’t housesit in Garden Home – love the unlovable. Love the unlovable. I must be a real baby; everyone he’s asked me to love recently has been lovable. Easy.

This morning I’m writing you from a very American, very Oregon, glassed-in sitting nook, in a comfortable middle-class home high in the hills of the Vermont neighborhood of SW Portland. I’ve been back in the states since May 9th, and Constant Reader, please accept my apologies for not writing sooner.

South and west beautiful wooded suburban Portland stretches out in the June sunshine. I look out the picture windows across the Tualatin Valley and the Coast Range into the blue west, and search for a little perspective I could share with you about my journey, and how to talk about what’s next.

It’s a nice view here, a great perch. I won’t try and be too glib or quick about what I learned in Burundi, or Kenya, Palestine or Istanbul. It’s so rich; I’ll keep finding out that I learned more. I know in Burundi, David and Peggy, Yoyo and Fiston, Edith, Fabrice, all modelled faith in God, and courage to follow Him, not to school me, but because that’s who they are.

I know I got to experience the joy and hope of the 4th Grade girls English class in Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Now… that crew very likely judged my visit to their classroom to be all about comparing international hopscotch technique. Or, possibly, finding out what happened to the farmer in the song about the Blue Tailed Fly.

But when I went out and looked at the obscenity of the wall that surrounds their lives, and witnessed the spirit power of their smiles, I knew my visit to them was also about me learning faith and courage.

Faith and courage. When I was up on Mt. Kilimanjaro, and went out and looked at the African stars in the African night, I wrote you a little bit about talking to God that night about what next. Asking Him the question: here’s my life… what gifts can I bring to Your service? Or, what am I made of that You can put to use, and what is that best use?
I made a little joke about it: God said, “Do the band. Get on it. Stop asking the same question.”

NEXT: THE CALL FOR OPEN AUDITIONS

I’m going to leave this up as it is for a week – today’s Monday – then post the following seperately (it’s copy for the flyer I’m putting up here in town):

Hi! I am on a mission from God to build a new small performance / recording band. Don’t laugh. If you’re looking to cut loose and shine, I’ll help make a space for you to give your gifts of passionate spirit, hot chops, talent to burn, stage presence, smoke-free sobriety, and integrity first last and always. Do please have at least one and preferably two pop instruments under your belt, plus solid vocals, plus a desire to write / arrange excellent American music. Need percussion, bass, keys, 2nd guitar; and open to the idea of horns, strings, harmonica, woodwinds. Everybody sings.

I’m old as dirt (54), yes it’s true, in great shape, and my first musical loves are: sharing a vibe with a band and an audience, lyrics, simple rootsy folk, rock, and blues… but I am teachable. I’ve got three-and-a-half collections of my own originals recorded, so let’s start there, and with your originals too, and with our favorite covers, and let’s try writing together, too. I love to sing, play my git(s), perform, and I do a better job by my audiences every year. I’m up to my greying temples in the Jesus romance, peace and social justice, rocking the boat (and rocking the house). I don’t care what your spiritual path is, but if you want to hang with me, you’ll have one.

Let’s go play all the colleges in the northwest; let’s light a big fire in everybody’s heart. If this sounds like the chance for you, let’s meet, talk, listen, jam, see what happens…
Start with a note to: derek@dereklamson.com

Did I achieve what I came to do? Did what I achieve have anything to do with what God wanted of me? The Road To The World leads through Burundi, Africa, and I will get on that road and leave here in about two weeks. I will be Fed Ex’ing my laptop home soon and internet updates might get a little sparse. It’s a good time to review:

Five NWYM Friends churches helped get me here, and directly helped fund my mission and they are:

Lynnwood Friends – thanks Pastor Bill, thanks Ramona, thanks Joe!
Scotts Mills Friends – thanks Jeannie and Ted and Eric and Merrilee!
Newberg Friends – thanks Greg K., thanks Mauri! Thanks Ralph and everybody for showing up in that incredible heat that day for our fundraising concert!
Reedwood Friends – thanks Johan, and Brenda B., and Julie Downs!
West Hills Friends – oh, thanks everybody: you’re home and family, but especially and always Mike and Erica, and the ‘And Friends’ crew, April, Bill, and Rich, and Deja and Baby Fiona, and Julie Peyton and David, and Claire and Jim, and Baby Chloe and Charles and Cynthia and Lorie and Wilbur… I have to stop here. (And everybody I didn’t name. And Sally. And Leslie. And Tim. And Nick Beardsley. And Cedar and Reed.)

Also, the NWYM Board of Peace and Social Concerns made a signifigant grant. Thanks to Peggy Hanson, and Rachel Hampton, and board members.

Lots and lots of folks at different meetings (and some who don’t go to church at all) contributed lightly used guitar strings. The effort in the Newberg area was co-ordinated by Nate Macy. (Thank you, bro!) Eugene Friends collected strings for Burundi. My sister collected strings for Burundi from her open mic people in Eugene. Artichoke Music on SE Hawthorne in Portland contributed a bunch of new strings. Jim Nardi’s Uptown Music in Keizer also contributed new strings.

Invaluable inspiration, encouragement, counselling, contacts, and logistics for my trip were provided by Peggy Parsons and Alivia Biko, buddies with lots of folks at NWYM, and co-pastors of Freedom Friends in Salem, a new independent un-affiliated evangelical Friends meeting. Here in Bujumbura, Burundi, Pastor David Niyonzima has practiced simply Biblical hospitality, putting me up in his own home for the duration of my 2 ½ month visit.

But here’s the coolest beans: through people’s generosity really nice big things are happening to the Kamenge Friends Church music program. You really have to get it that Kamenge Friends is just this huge, hugely successful inner-city church. Ghetto church. It’s right in the middle of the poorest, dirtiest, and frankly most frightening neighborhood in Bujumbura, where Bujumbura proper is around 1,000,000 people in one of the poorest countries on the planet. These would be the people Jesus was talking about, when he said, “…the least of these…”

Well now for one thing, thanks to you all, the church guitars have decent strings. They have tone, and can actually be tuned.

Two, I came with funds to invest in their music program. We talked over what the church’s music needs really were, then we spent your money as wisely as we could. At Kamenge Friends Church, 800 – 1,000 people show up every Sunday morning expecting to sing loud. So what we got was a powerful new 8 channel PA with cool new speakers, and it kicks. Also there is now monitoring capability so the musicians can hear themselves. What a concept! Plus four new mics, mic stands, and cabling, etc.. Then we went downtown and shopped a new electric keyboard for the church, a nice one that will practically make coffee for you and sounds fantastic. And two guitars, an electric and an acoustic.

Finally, I’ve been able to come, and spend two and a half months doing weekly music workshops with the Kamenge Friends Church music worship team. We’ve been learning classic African-American spirituals, Jesus blues, and freedom songs. We’ve learned stuff from The Dixie Hummingbirds, Blind Boys of Alabama, Edwin Hawkins great “Oh Happy Day”, some Sweet Honey In The Rock, and we’ve even learned a few old Quaker folk songs. This week we’ve been recording some of the stuff we’ve been playing together, and I should be able to post it to this website pretty soon.

So that’s what we did with your money guys.

I’ll be going on as a pilgrim to Israel / Palestine, via Kenya and Ethiopia, expecting to be back in beautiful Oregon around the second week in May, maybe…? I keep cutting my travel plans back! I spent a lot of my own money here too. Everything’s expensive everywhere!

Directly after I’m gone, Paul and Marian Bock will be visiting Burundi; then in April, Lorraine Watson and other Friends from North Seattle will be coming to work for three weeks on peace and reconciliation projects. I see God at work here, keeping Burundi in our hearts and prayers!

Last note: David Niyonzima will be speaking at Yearly Meeting in Newberg this coming July. If you have not had the opportunity yet to meet this outstanding young African leader in our Christ-centered Quaker family, you should do so. His work both with Kamenge Friends Church, and with his non-profit reconciliation agency T.H.A.R.S. are truly effective work for the Lord, inspiring, and deserving of our support.

I will try and get a lot more pictures up, before I go!