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words to live by

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

To kick off the new year, I want to reach back to words from my friend, David Gentiles. This quote was printed on the order of service at his memorial. It captures his spirit and is worth passing along:

Well, I know that when you’ve been betrayed and attacked and hurt, you sometimes just throw in the towel and decide, like Paul Simon, that you are going to be a rock and feel no pain, and to be an island and never cry . . . just feel like you can’t bear another disappointment . . . but love is always worth the risk — always — and sometimes you will be disappointed . . . and sometimes, when you reach out your hand, it will be slapped, but love is always worth the risk.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Peace,
Milton

a prayer for the new year

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Early in the morning I’m getting on a plane for Austin, Texas to go and both say goodbye to and celebrate the life of my friend David Gentiles. I fly back to Durham early Thursday. As I was trying to find words for my final post of the year (since I don’t imagine getting to a computer tomorrow), I received a wonderful email note from my friend, Joy Jordan-Lake (go buy her very excellent novel now) with a prayer from a book I first came to know back in my youth ministry days, Ted Loder’s Guerrillas Of Grace: Prayers For The Battle (buy that one, too). The prayer speaks to and for me tonight and is worth passing along:

Guide Me into an Unclenched Moment

Gentle me,
Holy One,
into an unclenched moment,
a deep breath,
a letting go
of heavy expectancies,
of shriveling anxieties,
of dead certainties,
that, softened by the silence,
surrounded by the light,
and open to the mystery,
I may be found by wholeness,
upheld by the unfathomable,
entranced by the simple,
and filled with the joy
that is you.

Here’s to the year ahead: may it be filled with one unclenched moment after another, whether those moments are filled with grief or joy or pain or hope or even despair; may we open our hearts to God and to one another, asking for help with the same intentionality with which we offer it, convinced that our choice to not forsake our gathering together is what will change our world, beginning with us.

For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.

Peace,
Milton

i’ve got to use my imagination

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I’ve been trying to keep up with the news around the Nigerian man who tried to light some type of explosive on a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. I’ve been trying to keep up mostly because I’m getting on a flight to Austin on Wednesday to go to the memorial service for my friend David, and I want to know how much earlier I’m going to have to go to the airport to get through security. Trust me, when they start “randomly” pulling people out of the line for special attention, this man with the shaved head and the earrings is usually one of them.

The latest I’ve heard is the airlines are telling people they can’t get up or have anything in their laps during the last hour of a flight. What I know about what happened last week had to do with something the guy had strapped to his leg that he was trying to light. I’m not sure how telling people they can’t go to the bathroom, watch a movie on their laptop, or read a book would have stopped him or is going to make my flight any safer, other than it helps, perhaps, because we all feel as though the airlines are doing something at least. We stand on the cusp of a new year and we appear to be fueled by the same old fear. As David Wilcox wrote:

you say you see no hope you say
you see no reason we should dream
that the world will ever change
you say that we are foolish to believe
‘cause there will always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream
put the fear back in your life

Not so many nights ago, we sang together, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” and here, on the fourth day of Christmas, even the four calling birds sound suspect. I heard one Senator talk of perhaps “preemptively striking” Yemen since the man on the plane was suspected of going there for training. Forget the calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, and even the partridge; trade them all in for sitting ducks.

Yes, I know it makes sense to be scared. If we look at things rationally, there are people out there who want to hurt us, who want to do harm. Our situation calls for something more profound, more substantive than rationality. The sensible response would be to say we must hurt them before they hurt us, or at least take our pound of flesh for whatever harm they manage to inflict. We are learning from our responses over the last eight years that neither of those rational responses does more than foment both fear and violence. Trying to make them as scared of us as we are of them doesn’t solve a thing, nor does it make us feel any more secure.

Fear may make sense, but it doesn’t make faith, as Wilcox sings:

it is Love that mixed the mortar
and Love that stacked these stones
and it’s Love that sets the stage here
though it looks like we’re alone
in this scene set in shadows
as if night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it’s Love that wrote the play
and in this lifetime Love will show the way

We must move beyond the rationality of fear, or the irrationality of deciding all Muslims are terrorists or the rest of the world is just jealous of us, to the realm of faith and imagination, to a place where we allow ourselves to trust we can expect more from ourselves as human beings than an eye-for-an-eye existence, to a place where choose to respond in love rather than lashing out. Though 2009 appears to be ending on the same note as most of the last decade, the reality that will be 2010 doesn’t have to be pre-determined.

Those of us who choose to call ourselves followers of the One we also call the Prince of Peace would do well to also choose imagination over irony in the days to come. I’m getting on the plane Wednesday morning because I am going to gather with those whose lives were touched by David’s incarnation of God’s love in a way that led us to live imaginatively, believing the truth of our existence lay in something deeper than the reality of the headlines. Davy knew the reality of deep personal pain and yet chose love rather than lashing out. Wednesday night you can find a whole baseball stadium full of those who are both recipients and carriers of that love. Violence, like fear, is a lack of imagination. Peace is not naïve (though I am often told so), it is what love looks like when it is lived out.

I’m going to retell a story. (Hey! That’s new.)

A number of years ago, a missionary to Lebanon spoke at a church where I was serving. At that time, the violence in Lebanon was akin to what is happening in Israel and Palestine. After her talk, one woman in our church said to her, “We will pray for your safety.”

“Please don’t,” the missionary replied. “If you pray for me to be safe, I won’t get to go back because it’s not safe. Pray for me to be faithful.”

Life is not safe; but we knew that. Even on the fourth day of Christmas we know we are already following Jesus to the cross. On more than one occasion, he talked about what our faithfulness would cost us. His love was unflinching, all the way to his death. And his death was not the last word. If we can trust enough to imagine the skies filled with angels singing to the shepherds, or love strong enough to roll away the stone so Jesus could talk to Mary in the garden on that first Easter morning, can we not also imagine we could be faithful enough to wage a peace that would change the world?

Yes, I know out of two thousand years hardly any of those have known peace. Yes, I know those who would hurt us aren’t playing by the same rules. Yes, I know force feels like the only viable option.

That doesn’t change my question.

Peace,
Milton

on the road to find out

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Even though I went back to work on the second day of Christmas, I’ve been thinking more about what Christmastide means. Once we get to the manger, it seems, we find it hard to stay for very long. As far as the culture goes, our economy can’t afford for us to have too long of an attention span: the Valentine’s Day decorations are already out. We can’t spend money and take time to reflect. Those of us in churches that celebrate Advent do a better job waiting and preparing than we do once the baby arrives. Perhaps we are so tied to the culture that we move on, whether we intend to or not. Or, perhaps, we don’t know how to be patient and let Jesus grow up.

The gospel writers skipped from birth to one preadolescent story to Jesus being baptized. None of them intended to write full-fledged biographies, so the gaps are understandable, yet I still keep coming back to the idea that Jesus didn’t come into the world fully formed. Mary laid the babe in the manger that night and three decades later he began his ministry. It took almost eleven thousand days after his birth – eleven thousand breakfasts and dinners and dusty Nazareth afternoons — for Jesus to incrementally become, well, Jesus.

Maybe the idea has stuck with me these past couple of days because I feel some disquietude in my life (and that’s a good thing) that leaves me wondering what is on the horizon. Here I am fifty-three years on (that would be over nineteen thousand days) and I still have a sense of becoming, as though had I continued to make pencil marks on the spiritual door frame of my life I would find I was still growing after all these years. I hope so, anyway. One measure I have had of late is this blog. Today marks the fourth anniversary of don’t eat alone. The nine hundred posts do resembled marks of a sort, indications of where I found myself on the journey on a particular day. I feel safe in saying I am not at the same place I was four years ago. And I am grateful for both the growth and the journey. Like Cat Stevens sings:

so on and on I go
the seconds tick the time out
there’s so much left to know
and I’m on the road to find out

Here’s to becoming, together.

Peace,
Milton

this day after

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

It was some time after seminary
my best friend, Burt, got married,
and then a few more years before
they had a child. I remember
calling one day; he answered,
saying he was lying on the bed
looking at the baby. I asked,
“Do you ever look down and say,
‘You’re going to stay here?’”

Something about this day after,
this morning beyond the manger,
that reminds me God chose to
come into the world not fully
formed. Jesus looked up from
the straw much like Burt’s baby
from the bedspread, more
enchanted, perhaps, that he
could chew on his toes than

Who he would grow up to be.
I was two weeks old my first
Christmas; a half century of
Decembers have since passed
(twenty more birthdays than
Jesus had) and couldn’t have
imagined that I would take
over fifty years to get from
Corpus Christi to North Carolina

Jesus considered lilies, cleansed
lepers, and chastised leaders who
thought they’d cornered the truth,
but not before he’d been a boy,
a teenager, a young man; not before
he had increased in wisdom and
stature. But that first morning,
Mary might have looked and loved,
and said, smiling, “You’re staying.”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: christmas in the trenches

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

I noticed tonight, as we were singing carols in our Christmas Eve service, that our hymnal has five verses to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” my favorite carol. I find deep comfort in what I have known as the third verse, which I know has been quoted more than once here:

and you beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along life’s climbing way
with painful steps and slow
look now for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing
o rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing

But the intended third verse (making my favorite the fourth) has an amazing message all its own:

yet with the woes of sin and strife
the world hath suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled
two thousand years of wrong;
and man, at war with man, hears not
the love song which they bring:
o hush the noise, ye men of strife,
and hear the angels sing.

My first thought was the Senate might have done well to have that verse sung at the beginning of today’s session – or every day’s session. Then I thought of another song, written about twenty-five years ago by a man named John McCuthcheon, about the last time there was a Christmas truce on a battlefield, which was in 1914, during World War I. Since then, it seems, we’ve learned we don’t need to stop fighting for anything.

McCuthcheon tells the story as one of the characters, an English soldier who is lying in the trenches on Christmas Eve and hears a German voice singing Christmas carols. The English respond with carols of their own and, before long, both sides are standing in no-man’s land under the moonlight, sharing food and even playing soccer, and finding out they are all human. There is painful irony in the fact that the dawn of Christmas Day meant they went back to fighting, yet they were changed.

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

There are many ways in which it feels like Christmas in the trenches here in America, whether we’re talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, health care reform, or which state is red or blue. We are descending into an endless conflict where we choose not to see the faces on the other side, but allow the ideas we are fighting for carry the supreme value. We want to win more than we want to grow and thrive. “Whose family have I fixed within my sights?” might be a good question to carry into the new year. When we pass the Peace each Sunday in our service, we precede it by saying a quote from Mother Theresa together:

Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.

If we, who claim on this night to welcome the Prince of Peace into the world once again, are not those who choose to wage peace in our world, and our nation, bent on mutual destruction, where will we find hope?

The Peace of Christ be with you. Merry Christmas.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: tiny planet

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

If you want to be in power,
you have to have money;
if you want to be invited,
you have to be somebody;
if you want to be in charge,
you had better be rich;
if you want to be noticed,
you’d better know somebody.
That’s the way of this world:
this tiny planet, tucked away
in a fold of the universe,
not the best or brightest,
nor richest or most important,
despite our machinations.

Still, when our Creator
chose to enter creation
dressed as a creature,
God came here: to earth,
not because we were
important, but because
we weren’t, leaving us
to lifetimes filled with
having to come to terms
with love we cannot earn.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the grammar of grace

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. (Luke 2:6 KJV)

I first learned the story the same way
Linus told it: in language so old
that some of the words had been lost
or forgotten, others changed.

No one says, “the days were accomplished”
anymore, unless you’re Linus or
the liturgist on Christmas Eve
saying, “she should be delivered”

In the beginning, God spoke and the
universe exploded into existence;
but the Baby is born in passive
voice: how silently the gift is given.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: fight or forgive

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

I managed to avoid the mall this season until today. I had to go because that’s where the stuff I needed was being kept (Ginger and Jay were going, too), so, as long as we were going, we decided at least part of the afternoon should be spent at the movies; we saw Invictus.

Put it on your Must See List.

As Jay and I were winding our way, I got a phone call from a religion reporter in Austin who is writing a story about David Gentiles for the newspaper this weekend. As I talked about Davy, I told her he is one of the reasons I trust the veracity of the Incarnation because David incarnated God’s love as well as anyone I know. The movie reminded me that Nelson Mandela falls in that category as well, though I don’t personally know him. As Matt Damon’s character, Francois Pienaar, says of Mandela after visiting the cell at Robben Island where he was imprisoned, “I was thinking how he could spend thirty years in a tiny cell and then come out and forgive the ones who put him there.” Mandela told Francois he had been inspired by poetry (hooray!), particularly “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. I found it when I got home.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The question Mandela kept asking was how to inspire people to be more than they imagined they could be. Listening to NPR as we drove home, I couldn’t help but draw a comparison with the imaginative and transformative leadership of Mandela and the partisan bickering and (I don’t even know what to call it) that plagues most every member of Congress, causing them to treat each other with the incivility and immaturity of a grade school playground (my apologies to grade schoolers). I am not inspired. I also didn’t intend to head towards a rant this evening, so I will change my tack.

At the end of the movie, they showed pictures of the people portrayed in the movie. When I came home, I looked for video of the rugby team and found this video of the team singing “Nkosi Sikelele Africa,” the South African national anthem, before the start of a game with England in 2007. The anthem itself is both song and metaphor for South Africa: it has parts in the four languages primarily spoken in the country. The video is amazing to me because the rugby team is primarily Afrikaners and they are singing their hearts out. They are testament to the power of forgiveness and compassion; you can’t beat unity into people, you must lead them.

My friend Gordon Atkinson preached a sermon Sunday calling us to “be the manger.” His wife, Jeanene, is the one who told me about it (she’s my friend, too).

He said that whether we are ready or not, Christ will come. The reality is that we don’t have to be ready, we don’t have to “have it all together,” we just have to receive the Christ child: it’s our job to be the manger.

I love the image. We are called to be a place, a heart, a being, that can receive and hold Christ. Thirty years in a cell that was hardly big enough for him to lay down, and Nelson Mandela was still a manger, still a receptacle of Love, because he refused to be defined by his calling rather than his circumstance. As we gather with shepherds and wise men again this year that Christ might be born again among us, the choice has not changed: will we fight or forgive?

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: I’ve got a hope

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

It’s late, the dinner shift was busy, and I am missing my friend David. I’ve turned to music we shared together, particularly Mark Heard and Pierce Pettis. One of Pierce’s songs, “I’ve Got a Hope,” keeps circling around. I tried to find it on YouTube to no avail, but here is the lyric. It comes from his State of Grace CD, which is worth the investment.

Man is born to trouble
All the days of his life
As the sparks fly upward
From bonfires at night
They fill up the heavens
With pinpoints of light
And I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

Time, it is turning
Like a plow in the field
It roots up the earth
And what’s hidden is revealed
Sewing the future
While the past, it is sealed
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

Half of the battle
Is only with myself
While the other half
Is something I can’t help

Lest I should stumble
I try not to forget
That every hair is numbered
Every footstep, every breath
And this life that I’m living
It will not end in death
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world
I’ve got a hope
That is not in this world

I’m going to let his words be enough for this night.

Peace,
Milton

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