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advent journal: suppertime

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Who would think a single motion
could carry multiple meanings.
I spend my days stirring the soup,
measuring out the corn meal,
making sure everyone eats well;
it is good and honest work.

Tonight I stood over the soup
in the warm light of our kitchen,
carried by the scent of cornbread
in the oven, the scuttle of schnauzers
at my feet, pouring more of myself
into the recipe than usual.

Jesus spent his days feeding people,
yet, when he broke bread with
friends, his chosen family, gathered
in a small room like our kitchen,
he called them to remember —
to never forget what a meal meant.

It’s easy, you know, to forget,
to let food be only fuel for function.
Supper, tonight, was an end not
the means; now, washing clean
the bowls, I am put back together,
remembered in our simple supper.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a circle of friends

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Time is a living thing.

We talk about it as something that ticks by or slips away, something we make or take or keep or lose, but it is a force, a dimension, an entity on its own terms. Though we often talk about telling time, we do better to listen to what it is saying, or revealing. Chet Raymo talks about looking out into the night sky as a venture back in time, the light in the sky coming from different stars and galaxies, all different light years away. What we see in the present moment, standing underneath Orion, are layers of time all arriving at once; tonight I am found anew by words from a few old friends.

Paging through an old book, particularly one I’ve read several times before, is much the same experience. Madeleine L’Engle published A Circle of Quiet in 1972; she was past fifty and I was closing in on sixteen and preparing to move back to the States for good, leaving Africa behind. I finished high school, college, seminary, chaplaincy, and was working as a youth minister when, Blair, a friend from Baylor Hospital days gave me the book for Christmas. I was thirty-two. Seeing the name written on the inside cover took me back to conversations long since buried under all that collects in life like the dust that buries ancient civilizations. I can tell from my margin notes that I’ve been though the book at least three times, not counting this Advent. Some of the comments I can calendar easier than others. I have names written in the margins next to lines that remind me of someone, or something someone said. Others are distinguishable because of the different colors of ink.

This time around, I’m reading the book at about the same age that Madeleine wrote it and I picture her being my age for the first time in our literary friendship. I am getting to know her when she was my age. And I smiled when I read this paragraph:

Jung disagreed with Freud that the decisive period in our lives is the first years. Instead, Jung felt that the decisive period is that in which my husband and I are now, the period of our middle years, when we have passed through childhood with its dependency on our parents; when we’ve weathered the storms of adolescence and the first probings into the ultimate questions; when we’ve gone through early adulthood with its problems of career and marriage and bringing up our babies; and for the first time in our lives find ourselves alone before the crucial problem of ho, after all these years, we are. All the protective covering of the first three stages is gone, and we are suddenly alone with ourselves and have to look directly at the great and unique problem of the meaning of our own particular existence in this particular universe. (113)

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “hope for growing old.”

In certain moments, the years feel as though they flow by like a river; in others, they stack up like altar stones. Either way, the more of them I live through, the more I find myself thankful to be here, and to be. Madeleine died a little over two years ago. My father-in-law is here, but disappearing in his Alzheimer’s. I went to Texas several weeks back because I thought my mother was not going to recover from surgery (she’s still here and doing fine). I am a couple of days away from turning fifty-three, perhaps the same way a farmer turns the soil in preparation for planting. I suppose I could think of turning, as in turning a car down a different road, or the way a horse turns toward the clubhouse; then there’s turning, as in repentance, and the turning of the leaves, blazing their way to death. Maybe all of those.

Everything in the universe shares the same arc of being, if you will, moving from where we entered the story to where we exit, stage left. We are both essential and temporary. At the bottom of Page 99, Madeleine wrote:

Paradox again: to take ourselves seriously enough to take ourselves lightly. If every hair of my head is counted, then in the very scheme of the cosmos I matter; I am created by a power who cares about the sparrow, and the rabbit in the snare, and the people in the crowded streets; who calls the stars by name. And you. And me.

My twenty-year old margin note reads: “Living with a sense of appropriate significance.”

Fifteen years after that note, my friend Burt called one day and asked me to write a poem about the value of daily work for worship at his church, and I sent him this.

daily work

In the crush of afternoon traffic I sit
in an unending queue of cars, staring
at the stoplight; from my driver’s seat
I can see the beckoning billboard:
“Come visit the New Planetarium
You Tiny Insignificant Speck in the Universe.”

When the signal changes, I cross the bridge
over river and railroad yard, turn left
past the donut shop, and park in front
of my house. Only my schnauzers notice
because they have been home alone.

I have been hard at work in my daily orbit,
but I stopped no wars, saved no lives,
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning;
today would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart:
to have some angel show me I matter.

As I walk the puppies down to the river,
I wonder how many times have I come to the water
hoping to hear, “You are my beloved child.”
Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit,
“I am not the one you were looking for.”

I stand in the stream of my existence,
between the banks of blessing and despair,
convinced that only messiahs matter,
that I have been called to change the world
and I have not done my job.

Yet, if I stack up the details of my life
like stones for an altar, I see I am
one In the line of humanity,
in the river of love: I am a speck,
in God’s eyes, of some significance:
so say, also, the schnauzers
every time I come home.

However the years stack up, I have spent more days than I can count going to the river or the altar or out under the stars to be reminded (convinced?) that I matter, even as I know I am only passing through. I lean into Madeleine one more time:

So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that this will never be simply chronological aging – which is a nuisance and frequently a bore — the old ‘bod’ at over half a century has had hard use; it won’t take what it did a few years ago – but that I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously – to be, in fact, a true adult. (132)

And one more twenty-year old margin note, quoting another friend, Reed: “We stop doing things that prepare us way too early.”

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

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

advent journal: musical interlude

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

James sings Joni.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: towards a fascinated faith

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I first found Chet Raymo in the Science section of the Boston Globe where he wrote a weekly column. I was neither an ornithologist nor an astronomer, but he talked of birds and stars in a way that fed both my curiosity and my faith: he made me think I could understand what he was talking about and share his sense of wonder. The first time I read The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage, I discovered we shared a faith background, though his was more history and mine present tense. He described his journey using a bird as his metaphor:

The upland plover is a shy bird. It is the color of dry grass. In the rare event that one I flushed, it takes to air with a soft, bubbling whistle . . . If the poet wanted an image for the absconded God, he could have found none better than the upland plover.

I can’t say exactly when it was that the God of my youth took to the upland plains. He was not driven from my soul. His flight was no fault of my teachers’. My lapse from faith occurred not long after graduation from college, at the end of a period of intense belief during which His face seemed palpably near . . . And sacred plovers leapt from every page, took to wings in coveys, and made a tumult with their wings that drowned the thin voice of doubt. Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers.” The plover was our hope. The plover was Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Then one day I woke up and the plover was gone . . . I turned to my science books and got on with the business of life. (55-56)

One of the songs that makes the rounds this time of year begins with the little lamb aasking the shepherd, “Do you hear what I hear?” I learned how to look at the night sky with a greater sense of wonder because of Raymo’s Science Musings and yet, he doesn’t see what I see anymore. The bird has flown, he says, and so he moved on. It doesn’t surprise me that he has found his new church, if you will, among scientists because scientists are the explorers of our age. We have circumnavigated the world time and again, but we are learning about particles smaller than we ever imagined, finding stars and quasars and black holes farther away than we ever dreamed we would be able to see, and dimensions to our existence far beyond the three we were taught in school. The legacy of the psalmist (“When I gaze into the night sky and see the wonders of your hands . . .”) has been passed beyond the church walls, and we are the lesser for it.

Shane Claiborne wrote an article for Esquire magazine (HT to Jan for pointing it out, since Esquire is not one of my regular reads) and said something that connects here, I think:

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

In 1972, Madeleine L’Engle was struggling with being told that identifying as a Christian would turn some people off. She responded:

I wouldn’t mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is. I wouldn’t mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities. I wouldn’t mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word “Christian” means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of “how those Christians love one another”? (98)

How did we become the keeps of the status quo, the defenders of truth, the rational ones determined to be relevant? Why are we not primarily consumed by and with the mystery and fascination of the Gospel story? What happened to lost in wonder, love, and praise?

We were breathed (laughed) into being, along with quarks and quasars, by our over-the-top-everything-matters-hey-look-what-I-can-do-I-love-you-with-all-my-heart-and-everyone-else-too-let’s-go-make-more-stars-and-stuff-all-ye-all-ye-oxen-free-crazy-go-nuts kind of God. Yet we talk about God as though it’s all business, and serious business at that. We live and worship as though our primary task is to explain God to the world, rather than introduce the One Who is Love to everyone we can and see what happens. Our God may be an awesome God, but our God is not rational. Our God is Love.

The Incarnation doesn’t make sense. Why God would choose to become human, and partake in the entire human experience from birth on, is in itself an outrageous act of redemption. Being fully human is a good thing. It matters; we matter because God loves us from the word go and never, never stops. That Unbridled Love let loose in the world means a peasant girl gives birth to the Messiah in a barn, poor shepherds hear angel choirs, rich foreigners chase stars across the sands, and there are mores stories than we can tell about those who healed and helped, even saved. We, as Christians, are not called to explain any of it, but to become carriers. of redemption, infected with the same irrational exuberance that lives in the heart of God.

A healthy church has less to do with making sure the theology is right than it does with being right with each other. If we chose to redeem our time together rather than make demands, we might see God differently and the story as well. Though I love Raymo’s imagery, I don’t see God as a shy bird hiding in the high places. The story we are telling in these days says just the opposite:

Love divine, all loves excelling
Joy of heaven to earth come down

Why, then, are we not out under the stars with the shepherds and the scientists asking, “Do you see what I see?” Oh, that we might live out a fascinated faith together.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: a sense of humor

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

Some time during the evening on Saturday I first noticed the little wisp that floated into my vision. It looks like a pen and ink drawing of a cloud, or a thin line of black smoke, except it has a certain bounce to it, based on my blinking, that makes it do a little dance and float down and then back up to the top of the frame. I learned today at the eye doctor that my smoky little dancer is called an eye floater, and that it’s probably here to stay. What looks like it is hanging out in front of me is actually something going on inside my eyeball, in the vitreous humor, and is part of growing older – at least for me. The humor in my sight is a bit twisted, it seems.

When we were in Texas for my mother’s surgery a couple of months ago, a friend came by to see her. He is a cellular biologist, which is actually a bit of a misnomer because he is way inside the cell dealing with particles smaller than I even know how to imagine. I asked what he was studying now and he told us they had just gotten a new microscope that allowed them to see exponentially deeper into the cell and its subparticles, and he began to tell us how these submicroscopic parts of us open up related to our emotions. When we feel good, they are open to receive nutrients; when we are angry or sad, they close. Then he said something even more interesting: “They open up the most when we laugh.”

Raymo tells of an Mediterranean creation myth that says God brought everything into being with seven laughs: Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha Hha. (46) As he goes on to speak with his continuing sense of wonder about the universe, he says,

God’s Hha Hha Hha was no snicker, but a roaring belly laugh. (50)

I love the idea of all creation bursting forth in a fit of divine laugher. I picture everything from the giggles that made monkeys, the chortles that produced platypuses, and the guffaws that gave us hippos. By the time God got to humans, I picture the kind of laughter that makes your sides hurt and your nose run. I love the idea, and it’s hard to hear on a day like today. My in-laws are visiting this week, which means we are up close and personal with my father-in-law’s continuing descent into Alzheimer’s. This wonderful, gentle man who turned seventy-nine yesterday and has always carried a sparkle in his eye that gave us a glimpse of God’s creative laughter looks empty now. His eyes are vacant; he is in the room and he is not here. His very existence is being insidiously erased while we watch and our hearts are broken. The comfort we find is in watching our Schnauzers gather around him with a love that finds him when we cannot; he sits and pets them and they love him back, for which we are grateful, even as we are exhausted by the prospect of what is yet to come. As we prepare for Christ to be born again, we are also trying to prepare for the grief that is yet to come. It’s hard to hold wonder and weary together.

Yet what are the options?

Madeleine L’Engle tells of being asked at a workshop for high school students, “Do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?” She answered, “I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.” (63) She continued to talk to the students about the three choices we had about how we live our lives. We can live as though the whole thing is a cosmic accident: a bad joke. We can live as though Someone started the whole thing but chose to remain aloof. Then she articulated her choice:

Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live. (64)

My mind moves to melody in times like these, to those words put to music that find a way to carry the strains of laughter that endure across the years like starlight from distant galaxies just now bringing light to our darkness. Richard Thompson wrote

this old house is falling down around my ears
I’m drowning in a fountain of my tears
when all my will is gone you hold me sway
I need you at the dimming of the day

And this from Kris Kristofferson:

there’s a song in my soul for the sun going down
when it dies at the end of the day
with a sadness descending as soft as the sound
of the light that was slipping away

the heavens above me seem empty and gray
as dreams that won’t ever come true
then the star spangled glory of love fills the sky
and my heart with the wonder of you

As Christmas draws closer, we will begin to speak more of shepherds and stars, weary and wonder, if you will, walking hand in hand to the manger: the tired tenders of someone else’s sheep lost in wonder at the angel band.

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

Christmas will come this year without bringing answers of what the days hold for our family and they will also come with reminders that God has never stopped laughing or loving. God didn’t inflict Reuben with Alzheimer’s to teach us a lesson or to prove a point. God didn’t set things in motion and then sit back to see how we deal with it. God is with us. In the midst of our pain, Love has taken up residence to show us the Laughter that brought the universe into being runs deep beyond our sorrows, deep into our beings, feeding our cells and our souls.

for the wonders that surround us
for the truth that still confounds us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the specificity of sacredness

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

I’m not sure the first time that it happened; over twenty years, I’ve lost count of how many times we have repeated the scene. Ginger always begins the conversation, and the statement generally comes out of nowhere:

“OK,” she’ll say, “name three reasons you love me.”

And I name three specific things – three the-way-you-wear-your-hat kind of things — that pull me to her as to no other because it is in the details of life that love finds a place to live and grow. I know what love is because of those details, though I’m hard pressed to write a definition that explains it. We talk about love as a feeling, but that idea quickly runs out of steam. Madeleine L’Engle quotes Hugh Bishop of Mirfield (not to be confused with the other Hugh Bishops) who said, “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy” (45). It is, as Billy Joel sang, a matter of trust.

Many years ago before Ginger and I even met, I saw Alan Alda interviewed by Barbara Walters and she asked about his then twenty-five year old marriage, commenting that bonds like that didn’t hold well in the Hollywood. “How did you do it?” she asked.

“We just kept our promises,” he answered. “We said we would love each other through life and we have. Everyone is looking for a custom fit in an off the rack world.”

The simplicity of the metaphor stuck with me as worth remembering. He wasn’t saying just find someone and get on with it. He was saying when you decide to love, then love. Don’t keep looking to find a better fit. Let the veracity of your commitment shape you to fit. Pick three things, and then three more things, and then three more until you have a lifetime of reasons for finding love in the one who has kept the promises with you. L’Engle says a similar thing:

Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can’t be prove, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person . . . I am slowly coming to understand with my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person. It has a lot to do with compassion, and with creation. (43)

I was hardly through the paragraph before I was humming an old song by my friend, Billy Crockett called “Portrait of Love.” The premise of the song saw Paul as an artist painting a picture of Jesus with the words of 1 Corinthians 13. The chorus says:

Love is patient, love is kind
Never jealous, free of pride
Love will never be confine
And love will abide
Love is hopeful, love’s not blind
Love is faithful, every time
Love is Someone, and
If you’ll open your eyes, you’ll find
That love is alive

I met with the other deacons around the Communion Table at the front of the sanctuary to practice before the service. We have been working on our consistency in serving the elements as a means of communicating how essential the Meal is for all of us. Making sure we are lined up as we need to be, or that we are clear about who will pass what, or that we move in some cohesive sense is not about being efficient or perfect as much as it one of intentionality our love for the congregation. We mean to be prepared to serve and share the meal. We mean to keep our promises in our little off the rack church, which means we have to be able to be involved in the moment and detached enough to see what we are creating together. L’Engle says it this way:

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.

Sacredness requires specificity. The grand esoteric themes of theology have their place, but love takes root in those specific moments when we voluntarily and intentionally enter one another’s pain. “God so loved the world” makes sense when love has a name and is lying in the manger. The Incarnation (big theological concept) comes alive in the person of Jesus, God with us in all our off the rackness, all our struggles, in all our, well, lives.

In the specific person of Jesus, God says, “Me, too” in a way that had not been said before. The stories in the gospels are full of specifics, Jesus making particular movements, though not spectacular ones, to offer compassion and healing. He stopped when the woman with the hemorrhage touched his coat. He asked Zacchaeus if he could come over to the house. He wrote in the sand to move the focus off the adulterous woman in John 8 to take the attention off of her for at least a moment. He offered Peter breakfast.

On the way to church this morning, I heard an interview on Weekend Edition Sunday with the authors of Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between. The book is a humorous and thoughtful look at how people regard the afterlife, the authors having chosen to tell jokes to get their points across. Here is the title joke:

Heidegger and a Hippo stroll up to the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter says, “Listen, we’ve only got room for one more today. Whoever gives me the best answer to “What is the meaning of life?” gets in.

Heidegger says, “To think Being itself requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of things and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.”

But before the hippo can grunt one word, Saint Peter says to him, “Today’s your lucky day, Hippy!”

The Incarnation is a mind-blowing theological concept. How do we explain God with skin on? We don’t – we can’t, anymore than we can define love. But when we look at the specific brush strokes of Jesus’ encounters with those around him, we begin to get the picture, to see the portrait of Love. When we gather together at the Table and participate in the simple act of passing bread and wine to one another, we remember Jesus, as in we re-member the Body of Christ and put it back together again. Love lives in the looks, the touch, the simple words of affirmation, the daily acts of recalling the promises we’ve made and keeping them.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the more I hear the story

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

the more I hear the story

the more I think of you
the young girl who took
the weight of grace
and carried it to term
along with the secrets
and accompanying slander

my four weeks of waiting
are a failing facsimile of
pregnancy and preparation
and I know who the boy
became while you were
left to grow up as well

some make you sound perfect
as though Jesus would be
somehow sullied being
born to a peasant girl
who met the angel’s words
with adolescent awe

and childlike openness
to a life of hope and hurt
of devotion and disquietude
and I wonder why it took
so long for me to come
and say simply thank you

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: little lives

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

Each day is a little life, and each life is rounded with a little dark. (Chet Raymo, 41)

little lives

I was born this morning
into a world of possibilities
wrapped, first, in the wonder
of a BLT and egg sandwich
(yes, God is good)
and the kind of conversation
among friends that defines
what friends are to one
another: the ones who stay

I grew into an afternoon
of what could be seasoned
with what I signed up for
and then, as the day died
I worked myself into the
the dimming of the day
and the darkness carried
me out into the night
life to hear music

The day may have died,
but the night had not.
I stood in a room filled with
the road company for Rent
and then found my way
to the restaurant to finish
the day among friends,
which is the way all little
lives should come to a close

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what’s in a name

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I had a couple of errands to run before I went to work this morning, both related to my in-laws coming to visit this coming week. The first was to take our recliner to get the springs on the bottom reattached; for whatever reason, they had chosen to let go over the past couple of months. The second was to drop off my car at the mechanics for an oil change and check up so Ginger could drive it to Birmingham tomorrow (and back on Sunday) with her parents and Gracie, our long-distance Schnauzer, in tow.

Melton’s Garage is a couple of blocks from our house. When I went inside to give the key, the woman behind the counter asked my name. “It’s a hyphenated name,” I began (as I have learned I need to do), “Brasher-Cunningham.” She began to write as I spelled the name out, except when I said, “Hyphen,” she put an apostrophe. I chose not to correct her. When I said my first name, Mr. Melton, who was sitting next to the counter in a motorized cart, said, “Milton, Melton – it’s almost the same,” and he smiled. Big. I thought about what I had taken with me from my morning reading as I left the house, which was Madeleine L’Engle talking about teaching and getting to know her students by name.

A signature; a name; the very being of the person you talk to, the child you teach, is at stake. (15)

I am the third person in my family to be named Milton, following my grandfather, whom I never met, and my father. I was in college before I met someone other than my relatives named Milton. I never had to share the name in school, so it felt both odd and special to me, which, in turn, made me feel a little odd and special. With a name like Milton, it’s not as though I could turn out to be a normal kid. I needed to be up to something.

When we came to the States on furlough, I learned about Milton Berle and Milton the Monster; in college, one of our star football players was named Milton, but he went by Scooter instead. As someone born into Baptist life and a white family, I have noticed most of the other Miltons I have encountered have either been African-American or Jewish. Because the name was so tied to and limited within my family, it brought with it the weight of succession. As the oldest child and the namesake, part of who it helped me become is someone who is never quite sure he has measured up, and yet feels the freedom to risk rather easily. My name has shaped my self-image.

Milton. That’s me.

And who, exactly, am I? I am a group project, that’s for sure – or at least that’s a place to start. I am a fearless cook because, from the earliest time I showed interest in cooking, my mother would say, “You watched me do this the other day; you do it this time.” I don’t know how many times I have heard her say, “If you can read a recipe, you can cook.” I believed her, so the statement has proven to be true. I have an aversion to math because of Ms. Gibbs, my eleventh grade Algebra II teacher. I remember the day I raised my hand and asked a question. I don’t remember the question, but I do remember her response: “I don’t have time for stupid questions.” From that day on, even though I placed out of math on my ACT, I have been convinced I don’t know how to do it well.

Chet Raymo shared this fascinating bit of information:

The Greeks believed that the eye had a double role in vision. They believed that a pale light went out from the eye to the world and returned again to the eye as a traveler returns bearing gifts.

In similar fashion, we learn to “see” ourselves by bouncing our self-images off of those around us, like a dolphin with sonar waves, to see what kind of response we get. Sometime, we get false readings. Sometimes we see new things. Either way, the circle – faint light sent out to see, and then returning full of images – continues; this is how we grow and learn, how we become more fully ourselves, regardless of age.

Last night in the kitchen at Duke, Abel, my favorite coworker, asked me in his lilting Guatemalan accent, “Do you like to read?” When I said, yes, he asked what kind of books I liked. I have to admit, I flinched a bit with my answer. I answered that I read novels, which is true, but I didn’t say anything about theology or L’Engle and Raymo. I returned the question and he said, “I like books that talk about life. I am reading Rick Warren and he asks a great question: what is my place in this world?”

One of the most amazing things about the Incarnation is that Jesus didn’t show up fully formed. He was born into being, like every other human, and left at the mercy of parents and relatives and teachers and random passers-by to be shown who he was, and who he could become. Sure, Mary and Joseph had some parental prompting, at least in the beginning, but I think about Jesus returning to Nazareth only to learn a prophet does better with folks who didn’t watch him grow up and I imagine his childhood was not easy for any of them. My brother used to talk about “the paradox of grace,” using Mary as an example. “Blessed are you among women,” said the angel (talk about shaping a self-image); “now let me tell you what you’re in for.”

when I find myself in times of trouble
mother Mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom
“let it be”

and in my hour of darkness,
she is standing right in front of me
speaking words of wisdom
“let it be”

Jesus healed fearlessly, the way I learned to cook, and he never went back to Nazareth, much like I never went back to Algebra after eleventh grade. The faint light from his eyes brought back an image of one acquainted with grief and full of love and grace. I have to wonder if, perhaps, it started with him asking Joseph one day, “How did I get my name?”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: nothing new

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

Four days on, my Advent mornings are beginning to find a pattern, a sort of sameness I hope will focus my mind and heart for the day to give me something to say when I come home. After all, as John Prine so beautifully put it, how the hell can a person go to work every morning and have nothing to say? Wednesday nights, as a rule, put that lyric to the test for me because I have lived through four of five ten hour shifts and have little energy beyond what it takes to watch Glee and think about how much my feet hurt. Yet, it seems, taking time to plant small seeds in the morning bear fruit beyond exhaustion in the evening.

I’m still reading Raymo, and I also returned to one of my favorite L’Engle books, A Circle of Quiet. Raymo introduced me to John Burroughs, a writer and naturalist at turn of the century preceding the one we’ve lived through. Chet quoted him in a couple places and both jumped out of their contexts and spoke to me in ways Raymo had not imagined.

One secret of success in observing nature is a capacity to take a hint. (28)

Then I turned the page.

To know is not all, it is only half. To love is the other half. (29)

Needless to say, I spent the day wondering about John Burroughs, the hints he had taken, and what and whom he knew and loved. After Ginger, Cherry, and I watched Glee, I let Google help me find him and found yet another sentence to ponder:

To learn something new, take the path you took yesterday.

I looked back at the notes I scrawled this morning in my notebook to find a resonant word from Madeleine:

Creativity is an act of discovery. (12)

The other part of my burgeoning routine in the evening is picking music. Our house is a bit of a bus station this holiday season, with people coming and going, and what we call our studio/office is actually the guest room, so I’m writing from the dining room table, which means I’m writing in traffic. My answer is to put on my headphones and choose my own soundtrack, and I find myself going to back to songs full of stories and history for me, songs that feel as though they are sung by friends: songs that I know by heart. Tonight, I turned to Shawn Colvin’s Cover Girl, to hear her sing David Byrne’s wonderful song, “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”,

hi yo I’ve got plenty of time
hi yo you’ve got the light in your eyes
and you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
never for money always for love
cover up and say goodnight’
say goodnight

The well-worn paths I find in the music open my heart and mind to discovery, to hints of hope in the middle of exhaustion, to the willingness to walk the Advent road once again to see what I can see. In a world obsessed with new, we are called to tell the old, old story that we might discover we are hungering and thirsting to hear it. It’s the Communion scene at the end of Places in the Heart, Joni Mitchell’s achingly beautiful background vocals on “Long Ago and Far Away,” the black folks standing up in the upstairs gallery when Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom, and Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaiming, “I have a dream,” all rolled into one and, well, more. Life, at it’s best, is about walking the same roads over and over, with eyes and ears wide open as windows to the heart.

Familiarity has its dangers, however. I drive the same way to work every morning and find it far to easy to let my mind run ahead to what has to be done and not see a thing between the house and the parking lot. Familiar hymns show up in worship and we sing them out of muscle memory without taking time to let the poetry pull us toward discovery on the well-beaten path of melody. Last Saturday night, my friend Terry (aka The Best Harmonica Player I Know) and I played and sang our way through an old hymnal with Ginger, Cherry, Eloise, and Jay. All of us, except Terry, grew up Southern Baptist, which means we grew up singing. The familiarity of the hymns, particularly those used for the altar call, had left some scars, and yet, we also found those songs had found new life when they showed up in new places. I remember sitting in the pew in Winchester when we sang “Just As I Am” as the hymn following the time of Confession, not at the end of the service.

just as I am though tossed about
with many a conflict many a doubt
fightings within and fears without
o lamb of God I come

These are the days when we tell the same story again, and again. We talk of Mary and Joseph as though we know them. For many, these will be weeks marked by the return of bath-robed shepherds bringing their herds down the center aisle, of long-standing traditions, of pageants and bazaars and dinners. We know the story. Burroughs reminds us that’s only the half of it. Love is the other half. Love is what pulls us into the details and leads us into discovery. Love is what turns familiarity into ritual, into meaningful and creative repetition.

Tell the good news: this Advent is nothing new; who knows what we’ll discover.

Peace,
Milton

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