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lenten journal: random and radiant

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

It’s far later into the night than I intended to have to stay up to complete my daily practice. The thoughts running through my head are not original; in fact, all I can hear are borrowed words. There’s Barbara Crooker’s poem, “All That Is Glorious Around Us,” featured The Writer’s Almanac last week. Here’s an excerpt where she quotes Mary Oliver:

It is the nature
of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature
of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down
a rocky tor or high escarpment, the panoramic landscape
boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

I went looking to learn a little more about Crooker and found out she’s doing a poetry reading in Durham a week from Friday. I guess I know what I’ll be doing for lunch that day. I kept coming back to the Oliver lines because it struck me that we talk about God as the Rock of our salvation and Jesus talked about himself as the Water of Life.

I’m preaching this Sunday because Ginger is going to be leading our church’s women’s retreat. The two passages are Abraham being called by God to go find home and Nicodemus being told by Jesus he needed to be born again for faith to really take hold of him. I guess it was Abraham’s leaving home to find it that sent me on my next tangent. I remembered Frederick Buechner talking about a homecoming in his novel, Treasure Hunt. The narrator, Anton Parr, is coming back home after being gone for some time and his children have made a banner saying, “Welcome Home,” except one of the legs of the M doesn’t really show up, so the sign reads, “WELCOME HONE.”

“It seemed oddly fitting,” Parr says. “It was good to get home, but it was home with something missing or out of whack about it. It wasn’t much, to be sure, just some minor stroke or serif, but even a minor stroke can make a major difference.”

I don’t know how it happened tonight, but a minor stroke of some sort shut down the computer in the restaurant that allows the servers to charge the meals on the students’ meal cards. Our lead server, Tabitha, got the computer back on, but the numbers had to be entered by hand. Those minor strokes completely took her out of the game. She was seething to the point of hardly being able to converse. She was not even open to expressions of solidarity or compassion.

There was nothing to do on my part except to make sure the food was done well and done on time. The other server on duty made sure it got to the tables hot. Tab kept dealing with the mess and steaming with rage.

I couldn’t do anything to help.

We sold our house in Massachusetts (or we are in the process of selling it), but we didn’t sell it for as much as we owe on the mortgage. We’ve been in a bit of a quandary trying to figure out what to do and we weren’t sure how anyone could help. Today Ginger met with a man at a local bank and he knew exactly what he could do to help, and he did it. She called me at work to tell me the news. His minor stroke made a big difference for us to continue to move toward feeling at hone here.

While my day improved, Tab’s fell apart. We would both do well to read all of Barbara Crooker’s poem:

All That Is Glorious Around Us
(title of an exhibit on The Hudson River School)

is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled
overlooks, towering clouds, but doing errands on a day
of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car,
160,000 miles, still running just fine. Or later,
sitting in a café warmed by the steam
from white chicken chili, two cups of dark coffee,
watching the red and gold leaves race down the street,
confetti from autumn’s bright parade. And I think
of how my mother struggles to breathe, how few good days
she has now, how we never think about the glories
of breath, oxygen cascading down our throats to the lungs,
simple as the journey of water over a rock. It is the nature
of stone / to be satisfied / writes Mary Oliver, It is the nature
of water / to want to be somewhere else, rushing down
a rocky tor or high escarpment, the panoramic landscape
boundless behind it. But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain’s
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

I may read that poem again tomorrow.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: I want to be a christian

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I don’t know where Duke students go on Sunday night, but it’s not to our restaurant. Kyle tells me they realize at some point on Sunday afternoon that they have been partying all weekend and they have class in the morning. Whatever the reason, Ramon and I had a lot of time on our hands. We cleaned and sorted the walk in refrigerator that was left in a bit of a shambles, I’m guessing, because the produce order came in late on Friday. Then we started working on some of our sauces and staples for the week ahead.

I would be more accurate to say I started working on the sauces. When Ramon finished washing the dishes left for him by the brunch crew, he asked what I was doing. I told him I was making marinara sauce, something we go through quickly with our new menu. Somehow I managed to be aware enough to realize he was really asking me to teach him what I was doing. The recipe is one I learned when I worked at the RooBar in Plymouth and I love it for both its simplicity and its taste. I was more than happy to pass along to Ramon what was passed along to me. I’m happy to tell you, too. The problem is, due to the quantities we work with, you will have marinara for the neighborhood.

I started by showing him the four food service-sized cans of whole Roma tomatoes I had brought from dry storage. I opened them into a large container, put on gloves, and began crushing them by hand. “Wait,” he said, and went to get a pen and paper. After the tomatoes were hand pureed, I put two cups of garlic in the food processor and pulsed it just enough to leave the cloves in small pieces. I put the pot on the stove, heated it, and added enough olive oil to cover the bottom. When it was hot, I dumped the garlic in and stirred it for a few minutes – just to give it some color. Then I added the tomatoes. (Ramon was taking notes in Spanish the whole time.) “Now what happens is we put it on low heat, stir it from time to time, and will finish it in about three hours when we add the basil.”

That really is it. The slow simmering of the sauce breaks down the tomatoes and pulls out their natural sweetness so you don’t have to add any sugar. I do add some salt and pepper, but it’s nothing but tomatoes, garlic, basil, and olive oil.

“You got it?” I asked him. He nodded. “Good. Next time you make it and I’ll go drink coffee.” He smiled. We both did.

When I saw him start taking notes, I knew I needed to pay attention to the moment for reasons of my own because the moment meant something different to him than it did to me. I love to teach, particularly in the kitchen, and, because of the way recipes get handed down, I consider most any of them to be public domain: I’m happy to share. Teaching him how to make the sauce also gave me a chance to break down the walls and get to know each other a little better. But what Ramon was after was something more than cooking or camaraderie. He’s learning to change his life, to move up the ladder (or at least the kitchen line) and be something other than a dishwasher.

More encounters than not in life carry such double meanings. The six students who came to eat tonight were looking for dinner in one of the university’s dining rooms. I was in the kitchen doing my life’s work, following my calling. I don’t expect they had any idea anymore than I know where they were headed next. That we miss out on some things is not all bad; perhaps it’s even necessary. I think back to the “Earshot” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she ended up being able to hear what everyone was thinking and the weight of it all was overwhelming. I’m thinking more of the moments when we aren’t two ships passing, or pool balls glancing off one another; I’m thinking about the encounters when we stand facing one another, each from our side of the looking glass. How do I look past my reflection to see what you’re looking for?

When the Tempter came to Jesus, the overarching question was, “Don’t you see this can all be about you?” With that option never out of reach his entire ministry, Jesus spent most of his time noticing the people nobody else seemed to see as they went about their business. That he came out of the wilderness and began to surround himself with a group of disciples – people to teach – none of whom come across as honors level material, even in the best light. The Word became Flesh to teach classes in remedial humanity and talk an awful lot about forgiveness.

This morning we sang, “Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.”

I love the song for its irony. Any time I’ve sung it, I’ve been in a group who already identifies themselves as Christian. And so we sing, Lord, I’ve got the look and the talk and the ‘tude; now, I want to be a Christian in my heart: I want to be more holy, more loving, more like Jesus.

I want to be a Christian at work so I can remember I’m there to help Ramon rather than him being there to help me. I want to be a Christian at home and lift my head from my stuff to notice what Ginger needs. I want to be a Christian in my friendships, working to the friend rather than waiting or expecting to be befriended.

In my heart.
In my heart.
Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the weight

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

We got to see Mavis Staples (whom I wrote about not long ago) and the Blind Boys of Alabama last night. Wait – there’s more. Yesterday morning, I got an email from the Duke ticket office saying we could come early and hear Mavis in conversation with Tim Tyson, who is a visiting professor at the Divinity School and the author of Blood Done Signed My Name, a forthright memoir of growing up in Oxford, North Carolina that begins with the cold-blooded murder of a black man because he said hello to a white woman.

Mavis talked about growing up as a part of the Staples Singers, the family group that started out in gospel music, became a central part of the music of the civil rights movement, and then went on to mainstream success with “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” When she talked about the last song, she even started singing the bass line:

do do do do DO do do dododo DO do.

She talked about what it was like to sing before Dr. King would speak, and about the songs that grew out of the long walk to freedom.

Once the Blind Boys had finished their amazing set, I moved up in my seat ready to hear that bass line for real. Instead, I heard another guitar progression that lives deep in my memory and she began to sing something I wasn’t expecting:

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feeling ‘bout half past dead
I just need some place where I can rest my head
“Hey, mister can you tell me where a man can find a bed?”
He just shook my hand, “No” was all he said

I dug around a little to see what I could learn about the song, and I found these two quotes:

It sounds pretty New Testament – no room at the inn, but this Nazareth is set in an American landscape. (Peter Viney)

In a typical Robertson lyric, a century or so of chronological time is abruptly made to collapse between us and an event. Suddenly we are involved in it, hearing the contemporary voices, seeing things happen. (Clive James)

I felt it all fall on me as the bass line started for real in the concert and she began to sing:

I know a place
ain’t nobody cryin’
ain’t nobody worried
ain’t no smilin’ faces
lyin’ to the races

Time collapsed on a personal level back to my tenth grade year and me walking out of the house to get in the car to go to school, hardly away from the door before I could hear the radio and start singing along. I hadn’t been in the States since elementary school and had no idea of how to be an American, much less an American teenager.

Time also collapsed in the present tense even as I’m trying to understand what it means to be an American in these days. The move here to Durham has been profound for me, particularly in the sense of moving to a place where diversity gets lived rather than just talked about. Not since my days living in Nairobi or Lusaka have I been a part of such a multiracial society and it’s happening in a place that in my lifetime wouldn’t let people of different races eat in the same places and drink from the same fountains. I feel as though I’m walking on holy ground.

There they sat last night: Tim, a white man whose boyhood memory is of a black man being killed in his hometown and Mavis, who told of her grandmother keeping her from drinking from the wrong fountain down in Mississippi and we listened as they talked and laughed and then we watched as they embraced.

If time can collapse in a lyric, then it can collapse in a moment as well.

Mavis spoke at one point about those in the Civil Rights movement needing to move beyond “We Shall Overcome” to singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The dream King spoke of has not yet been fully realized, but we keep walking forward. Alongside her words come some from Tim Tyson, taken from a Christian Century interview:

Ought we to teach this history differently?

We ought to teach an honest history, and avoid the celebratory and triumphal impulses of the kind that recently led the Japanese government to censor the history of Japan’s bloody imperial conquests during World War II. That does not mean underselling our achievements or wallowing in self-flagellation. We turn to our nation’s history, even its painful racial past, not to wring our hands but to redeem a democratic promise. At our best, we have sought to feed the hungry and free the oppressed. At our worst, we have practiced genocide and slavery. “The struggle of humanity against power,” Milan Kundera tells us, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Many in the mainline churches remember the civil rights movement as a kind of golden age, a time when churches were on the side of the angels. Is that accurate?

The church should never forget that mainline churches failed the African-American freedom struggle and mostly opposed it. The mainstream white churches of the South would not abide ministers who supported the movement. And though we think of the movement as based in the black church, most black churches were not part of the movement. Wyatt T. Walker, Dr. King’s field general in Birmingham, estimated that in the spring of 1963, the movement had the support of 15 percent of the African-American ministers in Birmingham. The notion that the church stood up strong during the civil rights era reveals a dangerous moral amnesia.

The language of journey is the go to metaphor when it comes to Lent. We speak of struggle and singularity of purpose, of setting things aside and turning our hearts toward God. As time collapses to mark the path before me, I keep thinking about those who marched together from Selma to Montgomery, singing

ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around
turn me around turn me around
I’m gonna keep on walking, keep on talking
marking up the freedom trail

Jesus is walking. Martin is walking. Mavis is singing; the Blind Boys, too. The great cloud of witnesses has gathered to see what we do with our leg of the journey.

They’ve put the weight right on us.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: collide-o-scope

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I don’t remember where I got the idea.

What I do remember is it wasn’t original to me. I handed out Post-It® notes to the twenty or so young people gathered in the large room of our retreat cabin and told them to rename the items they saw in the room. I led by example, writing the word “tree” on the small yellow square and pasting it to the lamp on the table.

“This is a tree,” I said.

Before long, the table became an aardvark. For the next ten minutes, we moved around the room renaming everything. The activity spilled into the sleeping quarters and even out onto the front porch. After everything was named, I told them to take another ten minutes to study what they had done and to pay attention to what they could see with the new eyes they had been given because of the new names. We moved from there to talk about how we could “break some stained glass” and open our eyes to new names for God in the world around us.

The experience came back to me last night as I was talking to Kyle, one of the servers at work who is also a student at Duke and involved in the theater department there. He told me about one of the drama professors who begins class each semester by going around and asking each student to say his or her name. Kyle said one of his friends said her name, Elizabeth, and the professor stood for a moment and then responded, “No, that doesn’t work for me. I need to call you Jane,” which he continued to do for the rest of the semester. The point of the renaming, which he did with most all of the students, Kyle said, was to shake them up and make them look at themselves differently.

As I drank my coffee this morning, I read my friend Billy’s introduction to his Blue Rock Review; this issue focuses on seeing. He centered his remarks around Marvin Gaye’s classic protest song, “What’s Going On?”:

But it’s the title line that truly catches my eye: “Talk to me so you can see what’s going on.” The song suggests that talking produces seeing. The claim is audacious – you cannot see but that you talk to me. “Can I get a witness?” says the preacher. We are somehow strategic in the clarity of each other’s vision. I see something possible, or hidden, or lovely, or frightening. Do you? “Do you see what I see?” asks the carol at Christmastime. Talk to me. What’s going on?

Dialogue is a kind of collision of visions. What you are holding now is a “collide–o-scope.”

Heidi is someone with whom I’ve become acquainted since I moved to Durham. She grows pea shoots, among other things. We use them at the restaurant in our salad mix and also as a garnish. Last week, I made a grilled salmon stuffed with spinach, sundried tomatoes, and pine nuts. It sat atop a serving of red beet risotto that was the most beautiful crimson color and was topped with a lemon-thyme beurre blanc and, finally, some pea shoots. The plate looked beautiful to me. About five minutes later, one of the servers came back and said abruptly,

“The girl wants to know what the green stuff is on top of the fish.”

She didn’t see what I saw. I’ll admit my first response was to turn into the stereotypical chef who stormed out of the kitchen, grabbed the plate from before the young woman and said something like, “You don’t deserve my food.” (Of course, I would need to say it in a fake French accent.) But I understood what she saw because I’m married to someone who has wondered out loud on many occasions why chefs feel the need to add unnecessary green stuff to the plate rather than serving simply what she ordered. She talks to me, so I can see what’s going on in the mind of those who order food to eat it as opposed to those of us who make it to be both edible and artful.

To rename such conversation as collision helps me see some new things. We talk about collisions mostly in the context of violence and accident: cars crashing together because someone didn’t see the other coming. But in this context, new vision comes out of crashing together with intention, hoping that the shards of curiosity, creativity, and even confusion reconfigure into patterns of hope and light so we can see what’s going on beyond the limitations of our labels, laments, and longings.

When my friend Doug was giving me a painting lesson a couple of weeks ago, he set up the still life and then began to talk to me about how to create the painting. As I began to draw and then paint, he would comment about how the shadows were falling differently than what I was articulating with my brush. A couple of times I said, “But that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.” He was only two feet to my right and things looked different from there.

None of us has the definitive view. None of us has the answer or the truth left to our own devices and perspective. Yet, when we come crashing into the intersection of faith and life and relationship (can there be a three-way intersection?), we find new eyes, together: a collide-o-scope, for sure.

Rich Mullins — a person, like Marvin, who was as complicated as he was gifted, sang:

And the New Jerusalem won’t be as easy to build
As I hoped it would be
As I hoped it would be easy to build
But the New Jerusalem won’t be so easy to build
There are many bellies to fill and many hearts to free
Got to set them free

But I see a people who’ve learned to walk in faith
With mercy in their hearts
And glory on their faces
And I can see the people
And I pray it won’t be long
Until your kingdom comes

In the collision of our devotion and our despair, in the tension of the now and the not yet, in the crash of what is, what has been, and what is yet to come, and in the glow of the indefatigable light that cannot be put out by the gathering darkness, talk to me so we can see what’s going on.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I’ve posted the aforementioned recipes here and here.

lenten journal: thickest skin

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

When I began working at the restaurant at Duke, my traveling companion was Ramon, a wonderful guy from Mexico who was interested in doing more in the kitchen than just washing dishes. He’s a good guy, he works hard, his English is limited, and he really wants to learn.

In order for the place to get on its feet, we are the only two in the kitchen. I get there early and do most of the prep work. He comes in and helps set up for the dinner service and washes all the stuff I got dirty during preparation. We cook together and then, at the end of the night, he washes dishes while I clean up the line and finishes by mopping while I take out the trash. I created a small menu that had good variety but was something we could do together, and I trained him on two or three of the dishes that became “his.”

Since we have started to find a pretty good rhythm, I upped the ante this week and added more dishes to the menu and gave him a couple more things to add to his repertoire, one of which was Chicken Parmigiana. I had hoped to start the menu on Monday night, which we expected to be slow, but Ramon ended up with the day off. Tuesday, when we did get it off the ground, was really busy, which made the learning curve all the more steep. We went through the steps together several times and even made a couple of practice dishes (also known as supper for the cooks). About an hour into the dinner service, we got hit pretty hard and Ramon ended up with five orders all at once. I had my own board full of requests, and so I didn’t get to check up as much as I would have liked. A few minutes later, three of the Parms came back because the chicken was not cooked all the way through.

Since we were in the middle of dinner service, there was not time to do much more than fix what was wrong and give some instructions to make sure it didn’t happen again – all in a rather task oriented manner. (I’m talking about me here.) I don’t mean I was angry or yelling, just that if we stopped too long we would lose track of everything else that was on the board; I had to keep things moving. Ramon responded well and finished the shift in good shape.

Which brings me to the other side of the line.

The two women who serve in the dining room get good feedback from our customers for their friendliness. In my three weeks there, that spirit has not necessarily carried back to the kitchen. I’ve made several changes in a place where change is not necessarily welcomed and I’m the only new guy in a while. They aren’t mean or disrespectful, but curt or terse in their interaction with me. And that’s when things are going well. When the dishes started coming back, my second concern (after fixing the food) was how it was going to play with the front of the house. When the shift was over, the servers cleaned up and left quickly, so we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about it.

I asked Ramon to come in an hour early yesterday because we had so much prep work to do after such a busy night. Tabitha, one of the servers on Tuesday, was working again. I watched as Ramon approached her and worked hard with his broken English to apologize for what had happened the night before. It took her a minute to figure out what he was trying to say and then I saw a side of her I had not seen before.

“You talking about the chicken last night? Shucks, Ramon, don’t you even think about it. Those people were fine. Nobody was angry or nothing.”

“But I sorry,” he said. “I made mistake.”

“Listen, honey, you’ve been working up here how long and that was your first mistake. That’s pretty good. Don’t you worry about it anymore.”

Funny – until that moment I had no idea grace had snuck into the room.

Bill Mallonee is one of the best songwriters around and works in parallel realtive anonymity to our life in the kitchen at Duke. One of the songs that sustains me comes from his Vigilantes of Love days, “Skin.” The chorus sings:

now look if you’re gonna come around here
and say those sort of things
you gotta take a few on the chin
you talking about love and all that stuff
you better bring your thickest skin
sometimes you can’t please everyone
sometimes you can’t please anyone at all
you sew your heart onto your sleeve
and wait for the ax to fall

His words came to mind as I drove home last night because I realized, even in three weeks, I had let my skin thicken to the point that I didn’t expect grace to abide at work. I was allowing myself to become accustomed to the division between the front of the house and the kitchen, to the blank exchange when they placed orders, to just getting through it. Because one short overheard conversation, I saw the whole place differently, and the people in it as well.

Thick skin is no good when I let it grow over my eyes.

At the bottom of the index finger on my right hand are two calluses that have grown because of the way I hold my knife when I cut and chop, the kind of skin that thickens to prevent blisters and ongoing sores. Though I’m grateful for them, they don’t really work as Mallonee’s metaphor. The point is not to grow indifferent or impenetrable. The point is to keep growing, to keep coming, to keep talking about love and all that stuff with unflinching resolve, regardless of what is offered in return: to wear my heart on the sleeve of my chef’s coat and wait . . . .

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: unsummarily speaking

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

One of my least favorite things is to enter a theater after the movie has begun. I don’t just like to be there for the start of the film, I like to be seated and settled for the previews and even some of the ads that flash by while the projectionist is killing time. I want to be in the room for the start of the story, rather than having to lean over and whisper, “What did I miss?”

Truth is I’m always missing something. My life story is a patchwork quilt of unfinished and interrupted stories combined with other continuing tales that I’ve entered long after they began. It’s hard to get the whole picture.

One of the more curious things about being a part of the blogging world is the meme. Part of the curiosity is the word, as it’s spelled, harkens back to my French class days where it is translated as “same.” In blog land, it’s all about answering the same question: sort of a cyber-icebreaker, if you will. I will admit I don’t usually respond when tagged for one (such interesting vocabulary), but Jason at Ogrepraxy invited me to participate in the 1-2-3 meme and it kind of fits with where my mind is this morning. The task is to grab the closest book, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and then share the next three sentences. (A little complicated – do I include the fifth sentence? – but here it goes.

The book closest to me this morning came in the mail last night. My friend Billy is the owner and creative director of the Blue Rock Artist Ranch (does that make him an artist wrangler?) and Studio in Wimberley, Texas. Once a year, he publishes the Blue Rock Review, an interesting collection of writings and interviews from folks connected to the place. Page 123 is the middle of a short story, “Chlora Plays Poker,” by Ginger Henry Geyer. Here are the three sentences that follow the fifth, plus one:

They chuckled about smoker poker as they puffed on their cigars and pipes. The room swelled with a sweet haze of cherry tobacco. It lingered, blended with the musty smell of old books, and embedded in the mahogany walls and drapes. The room was like a small cathedral coated with centuries of incense that carried the prayers of the people into every nook and cranny that God stuck his nose into.

I’ve never been much of a poker player and my pipe and cigar days are long gone, but I know what it feels like to be in a room with people I care about – most such memories are around the dining table – letting our laughter and love infuse everything around us with meaning and friendship. When we lived in Charlestown, our Thursday Night Dinners were gatherings of anyone who wanted to come eat. We had a group of twelve or sixteen people who would come over in various collections on any given Thursday and we would eat and drink and talk late into the night each week. On its own, each evening could have been described as just a meal together, in the same way as I’ve pulled four sentences out of the middle of the longer piece, yet together they told a story that didn’t require one to come in at the beginning but simply to pull up a chair and join us.

My breakfast reading this morning was the most recent AARP Magazine (damn, I lead an exciting life), which had an article called “Movies for Grownups Awards.” What caught my attention, more than the “winners” themselves, was the one sentence summaries they gave for the runners up:

  • The Kite Runner: A childhood friendship transcends war, time, and even death.
  • Atonement: A love story told on an epic scale.
  • The Bucket List: Dying friends learn to live for the moment.
  • The Savages: Selfish grownup kids learn that a parent’s mistakes are no license to screw up their own lives.
  • Juno: A pregnant teen and an adoptive couple have a lot to learn from each other.

For all I don’t want to miss, hearing only three or four sentences of the story is much more compelling that being told the whole thing in one. In short: summaries suck. The true story is told in the details. Put years and miles between friends, and it gets tough. My friend Burt and I have been playing phone tag for a week. He’s in Texas and I’m here in Durham. We both have new jobs in the last couple of months, we both have lots going on, and, when we finally do get to talk to one another, we will have to work to not settle for summaries and lean back into our history of details to find each other again.

For many years, Billy and I talked everyday. We were writing songs together and inextricably connected in our details. The wonderful thing he has going at Blue Rock is in a different orbit than mine as a chef and a writer. We are both doing interesting and meaningful things that are less connected than we once were. We, too, have to fight the slide to summary when our lives intersect. We are lifelong friends, which means, for me, I’ve got a couple of nights ahead when I need to dive into the details of the Blue Rock Review to find my friend and let him know I found him and I’m with him.

Lent, also, is a descent into the details. For me, “Jesus died for our sins” is summary that leaves me lacking what I need from this part of the journey. I want specifics. I want to read of them gathering in the upper room, much like grandpa and his buddies gathered for smoker poker; I want to listen closely to his words, to follow his steps, even as I listen to the words of those around me this year here in Durham and to the farthest outposts of friendships.

I’ll skip the summaries, thank you, because I don’t want to miss the real story.

Peace,
Milton

holy hollandaise

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

When Ginger started her Transfiguration sermon this morning by talking about those who are attracted to the more mystical elements of our faith and those who steer towards the more practical, I thought about Bob Wiley’s words in the movie What About Bob? when his psychiatrist asked him why he got divorced:

“Well, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t.”

I’m one of the ones who is pulled by the story of Jesus and Moses and Elijah standing on the top of the mountain with the kind of cosmic backlighting that would blow your mind. From a storytelling standpoint the scene is rich, packed full of emotion, metaphor, history, hope, faith, and confusion. There are lots of things to take from the story as we come back down the mountain.

The first reference to the Transfiguration that I remember was at a church youth camp back when I was a camper and not the youth minister. As the week drew to a close, the camp pastor used the story as a way to prepare us for going back to life as we had left it. We were the ones on the mountaintop. We were the ones who had had a special encounter with God. Now we were the ones going back down the hill to where people had been going about their lives without thinking of the mountaintop. How, he asked, would we tell people what had happened to us and invite them to share in it?

That was the first time I noticed Jesus saying, “Don’t tell anyone what happened here until after I’ve come back from the dead.”

At some point along the way, it dawned on me that Jesus was standing with the two prophets who had “seen” God. When Moses asked to see God’s glory in Exodus 33, God makes him wait until God has passed by so Moses can see only God going away:

When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.

God also sent Elijah into a cave to wait God’s appearance, which began with storms and winds and earthquakes and ended with an audible silence that was the very appearance of God, who asked one question:

What are you doing here, Elijah?

So Peter, James, and John get up to the top of the mountain and the next thing they know they see Moses and Elijah (who had seen God) and Jesus (who was God with skin on) chatting in the midst of brilliant light and God talking over them. When the spectacle ceases, Peter is ready to build monuments, tabernacles, houses, and souvenir shops; why would they ever want to leave?

What struck me this morning as Ginger was preaching was something I hadn’t seen before in the story. I’ve been thinking about it most of the day (exzcept for the part where I watched the Superbowl – sigh) and I’m still pulled by this thought: we, as humans, are not built to handle anything but small doses of unmitigated joy.

One of the things I’ve learned about in cooking is an emulsion. Here’s the definition from Epicurious:

A mixture of one liquid with another with which it cannot normally combine smoothly — oil and water being the classic example. Emulsifying is done by slowly (sometimes drop-by-drop) adding one ingredient to another while at the same time mixing rapidly. This disperses and suspends minute droplets of one liquid throughout the other. Emulsified mixtures are usually thick and satiny in texture. Mayonnaise (an uncooked combination of oil, egg yolks and vinegar or lemon juice) and HOLLANDAISE SAUCE (a cooked mixture of butter, egg yolks and vinegar or lemon juice) are two of the best-known emulsions.

Might we not see the Transfiguration as an attempt at theological mayonnaise: a spiritual emulsion? Moses only saw God’s hindquarters because his encounter with God’s glory needed to be mixed with what the prophet was missing in the passing by. Jesus — the living, breathing, emulsion that is the Incarnation – spent his life titrating the now and the not yet, calling his disciples to live in the tension, in the swirl, in the paradox that is God’s Emulsion of Eternity, showing them both the unbearable lightness of being on the mountaintop and the unbearable heaviness of the same once they got down among those who were desperate and hurting and looked so much like themselves and who could not all be helped and healed.

When one is cooking and trying to make an emulsion, sometimes the sauce “breaks,” as we say, and the two liquids don’t hold together. I don’t understand the chemistry behind it all, but I know Hollandaise is damn hard to make and takes a lot of patience and sometimes several attempts. Sometimes our attempts to emulsify the highs and lows of living break as well, leaving us to try again to find the how we hold together who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming and how we mix the rest we crave with the tenacity demanded, the light we need with the darkness that surrounds, our essential hope with our inevitable despair, grace freely given with shame so costly carried.

Ginger asked me to lead the congregational prayer of confession this morning and then said, “I didn’t print the words of assurance; say whatever you feel led to say.” The words of Paul I was led to then come back to me now:

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton

mouse hockey

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

I first saw the phrase
in the title of her note;
I’d never thought of it.
I’m sure it’s old news
in Toronto and Alberta
where they’ve moved
beyond poker-playing
dogs to a world where
mice come out checking,
skating, slap-shotting,
even riding the little
Zamboni, while rodent
fans toss back a couple
beers between periods.

Now I’m wide awake,
during dreaming hours,
playing this thing out
in my mind as though
there were somewhere
to go when all I’m doing
is setting myself up for
someone to ask why
I’m tired. “Mouse Hockey,”
I’ll say, straight-faced
and hope they can push
past the poker pups
to the frozen fortunes
of mice on ice.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

white man’s burden

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
11

Say it loud: I’m white and male and not very proud.

And it’s all thanks to two NPR stories. The first came as I was driving to work. WUNC, our local station hosts a program called The State of Things. Frank Stasio’s topic today was “Hillary and Obama.” I came in on the middle of the conversation at the same time as a caller had his say. He talked about being a life long Democrat and then he said, “If Obama is our candidate, I think I’m just going to have to vote for McCain. He’s a Republican I can tolerate.”

Stasio pressed him: “Is one of the reasons you would vote for Obama because he’s black?”

The guy paused and said, “Honestly, yeah. And there are a lot of us that feel this way.”

A couple of hours later, the show was Day to Day and the story centered on John Edwards’ decision to “suspend his candidacy,” as he put it. Rather than spend much time talking about Edwards, the story focused on his absence and in particular who white men are going to vote for now that only a white woman and a black man are left – and they talked about it for a long time with several people as though white guys didn’t know what to do.

I actually dropped my knife on the cutting board and said, “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” (I was alone in the kitchen at the time.)

For the past seven years, I’ve done menial labor as a kitchen worker. It’s good work, it’s honorable work, it’s creative work, it’s what I love to do, and it’s menial labor because every night at the end of the shift I sweep the floor and push three fifty-five gallon trash cans to the dumpster and empty them. But even if I’m pushing those bins through the back hallways at Duke, I still get deferential treatment from a lot of the other workers because I’m a white male: I’m The Man.

It’s a club I wish I could unjoin.

When I was in Baylor, I qualified to join some honor society whose Greek letters I can no longer recall. It’s only value was it went on my transcript to make me look more intelligent, I guess, to future employers or graduate schools. My sophomore year, I went to the meeting where we were to accept new members. All of the applicants were qualified to join by a long shot. The president stood up and began to go through the process of voting on each one. I raised my hand and asked why we didn’t take them all, since it was an honor society and they all met the requirements. His answer was if we let everyone in then it would be as special for those who made it.

I never went to another meeting.

As a high school English teacher, I refused to allow my students to use “man” or “men” as though they referred to everyone. Every semester, someone would say, “But they’ve always been used to mean everyone.”

My response was, “They were used to mean everyone, when everyone meant the white males. When the Declaration of Independence says, ‘All men are created equal,’ it meant the white men; it didn’t mean everyone. Men means men. English is a big language; don’t let your lack of vocabulary limit your inclusivity.”

White men have been in charge for a long time. They still are – just look at who was sitting in the room during Bush’s speech the other night: a sea of dark suits, red or blue ties) and lots of white, wrinkled skin. That Hillary and Obama stand to make history one way or another is one of the signs that life isn’t always going to be so white and white. We’re going to come out on level ground more and more (and probably act like we got cheated out of something). And we need to quit whining about how immigrants and minorities get special treatment. We’ve been treated special the whole time. I don’t get followed around in a store because they think I’m going to shoplift because of the color of my skin. I don’t get stopped by the cops because they think I’m the wrong color to be driving such a nice car. I don’t get dragged off by INS because my last name matches on their list, even though the list is wrong. I’m not expected to stay home with the kids and I don’t get blamed for latch-key children because I choose to have a career and a family.

I don’t do much of anything that elicits the response: “I never saw a white man do that. Good for you. Your people must be so proud.”

Not voting for someone because of the color of his or her skin is not just wrong, it’s ignorant. Expecting to get my way because of the color of my skin is no different. In my lifetime, I’m going to become a minority: there will be more people of color than white people in America. I’m not saying that as a threat; I say it with eager anticipation. White men have had a long time to be in charge and we’ve shown we pretty much suck at everything but reminding people we’re in charge and picking fights (The White Man in Chief being our most recent shining example).

What was it Jesus said? Oh, yes – “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Damn. Every time one of those minorities speaks up, I have to move back.

Peace,
Milton

state of the union

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

After what I saw of the State of the Union address last night, I couldn’t help but think of Steve Earle’s “Christmas in Washington,” which he wrote in the late nineties. Ten years later, the parties’ names are interchangeable. When Steve introduces the song, he often says, “This is a song about heroes.”

It’s Christmastime in Washington
The Democrats rehearsed
Gettin’ into gear for four more years
Things not gettin’ worse

The Republicans drink whiskey neat
And thanked their lucky stars
They said, ‘He cannot seek another term
There’ll be no more FDRs’

I sat home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
With an uneasy feeling in my chest
And I’m wonderin’ what it means

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

I followed in your footsteps once
Back in my travelin’ days
Somewhere I failed to find your trail
Now I’m stumblin’ through the haze

But there’s killers on the highway now
And a man can’t get around
So I sold my soul for wheels that roll
Now I’m stuck here in this town

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now

There’s foxes in the hen house
Cows out in the corn
The unions have been busted
Their proud red banners torn

To listen to the radio
You’d think that all was well
But you and me and Cisco know
It’s going straight to hell

So come back, Emma Goldman
Rise up, old Joe Hill
The barricades are goin’ up
They cannot break our will

Come back to us, Malcolm X
And Martin Luther King
We’re marching into Selma
As the bells of freedom ring

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow
If you run into Jesus
Maybe he can help you out
Come back Woody Guthrie to us now


The best video I could find was Steve singing the song with Joan Baez.

If only our politicians knew what it meant to be leaders.

Peace,
Milton

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