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the art of living

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I intended to write more this evening, but instead I got to paint.

My friend Doug is in town and he is an artist. I asked for a painting lesson, so tonight we sat down in the dining room and he constructed a still life centered around a ceramic Winnie the Pooh I have (at Ginger’s suggestion) and we painted. First, he painted a study to show me how to do it and then he instructed me as I did my own version. Here are the finished products. (Mine is the one on the left.)


The experience was full of so many good things for me, not the least of which was getting to hang out and do something creative with my good friend who is really good at painting. I got to learn something new, too, which is always worth the trip. What I loved most was listening to Doug talk about how a painting comes to be. He talked about values and colors and light and shadows. His instruction was about painting and was also parable for me because it led me to think again about how the creative tensions in our lives are what make us grow and thrive.

Painting is full of polarities: light and dark, cool and warm colors, translucent and opaque. When Doug talked about the colors, he even spoke in opposites. When we started painting, it was the collusion of the opposites – the mixing of colors, the grasping of shadows – that brought the image to be on our boards. Our creativity was fed as we worked with the tension between the poles instead of choosing one side or another.

The point of this little painting parable is one I think you can see coming, but I’ll say it anyway. A big part of what stagnates us as a country is we, as Americans, deal with most issues as either/or: we are attracted to the poles in most any discussion. We take our sides on either end of whatever the discussion and then yell back and forth at each other as if that counts as conversation. Rather than moving to a more creative place, we end up hoarse and hostile.

I’m not saying the answer is some sort of middle way that “tolerates” everyone and accomplishes very little. I am saying we have the possibility of being creators when we are willing to listen to both poles and live in the creative tension that grows when we don’t move too quickly to claim our values are absolute. Whatever the issue — global or local, institutional or relational – we all have something to learn, something to teach, and room to grow.

The art of painting means learning how to integrate the opposites in a way that creates something beautiful. The art of living is not so different.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

heart breaking news

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Gaza is one of the Palestinian Territories on the border between Israel and Egypt and a part of the land taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Conditions these days have continued to worsen because of an Israeli blockade on the area that has not allowed even food and fuel to get into Gaza. Reuters has a good article on the situation here. They also give some good background facts:

HISTORY OF THE TERRITORY:

Gaza has been continuously inhabited for more than 3,000 years. It was a crossroads of ancient civilizations and a strategic outpost on the Mediterranean. The Bible says Samson died in Gaza while destroying the Temple of the Philistines.

It is believed to be the burial place of Prophet Mohammad’s great grandfather.

The Ottoman Empire ruled Gaza for hundreds of years until World War One when it came under British rule along with the rest of Palestine. It came under Egyptian control in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war that led to Israel’s creation.

Gaza’s population tripled in 1948-49 when it absorbed about a quarter of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees displaced from areas that are now part of Israel.

Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war and ended its military presence there in September 2005, having removed 8,500 Jewish settlers from 21 enclaves after almost four decades of occupation.

Israel resumed ground operations in June 2006 after militants from Gaza tunneled across the border and captured an Israeli soldier, who is still being held.

Just one year later in June 2007, Hamas Islamists took control of the Gaza Strip in fighting with their secular Fatah rivals, triggering the closure of front-line crossing points. Aid agencies warned of growing hardship for ordinary people.

More recently Israel closed its borders with Gaza, cutting fuel supplies to the territory’s main power plant and petrol stations and stopping aid shipments that include food and other humanitarian supplies. The closure raised international concern over a potential humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel said the blockade is a bid to curb rocket salvoes fired into Israel.

LIVING IN GAZA:

About 1.5 million Palestinians live in Gaza, more than half of them refugees from past wars with Israel and their descendants. Gaza has one of the world’s highest population densities and demographic growth rates.

Most Gazans live on less than $2 a day. Israeli security closures curbing cross-border trade and access to jobs and Western sanctions imposed after Hamas came to power in early 2006 have hit the Palestinian economy hard.

Gaza’s creaking sewage system became the latest casualty of Israeli sanctions aimed at getting Hamas to halt militant rocket fire from the impoverished territory. Officials at the local Palestinian water utility said more than half of Gaza’s population had no running water this week.

Heba of Contemplating From Gaza, one of the blogs I read, wrote an article on her personal experience here.

Last night, someone blew holes in the border wall between Gaza and Egypt, allowing thousands of Palestinians the chance to cross over and get sorely needed food, fuel, and other supplies. Here are two video reports, from Reuters and Al-Jazeera.

Since it took me awhile to find much focus on the situation among American media, I thought I would pass this along.

Peace,
Milton

birches

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

The Writer’s Almanac put me back in touch with a poem I deeply love yesterday. Since I’m struggling to find words of my own tonight, I’ll let Robert Frost do the talking.

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from the town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Peace,
Milton

underneath the satellite sky

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Ever since I wrote the post on memory the other day, I’ve had the Hubble Telescope on my mind (which may explain the headaches). I don’t know much at all about the giant flying machine except it is discovering all kinds of things about our universe and sending back pictures that are absolutely amazing. When I went to the website today, I found this image of an Einstein Ring


and this explanation:

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull’s-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. This very rare phenomenon can offer insight into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and even the curvature of the universe. The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are exactly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an “Einstein ring,” around the foreground galaxy. If another background galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear. The massive foreground galaxy is almost perfectly aligned in the sky with two background galaxies at different distances. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away. The inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 billion and approximately 11 billion light-years. The odds of seeing such a special alignment are estimated to be 1 in 10,000.

What I understand about those words is what looks like a single image to me is the alignment of light particles just now getting to where we can see them that range from 3 to 11 billion light years away and the chance of them lining up as they did is better than the chance of me winning the state lottery.

Here are two other images I saw (took) today:

Ginger and I participated in Durham’s Annual Martin Luther King Celebration March and Rally with several hundred folks who walked side by side through downtown and ended up worshipping together (more than rallying) at First Presbyterian Church. This is my first experience living in a town so directly affected by King and all of the Civil Rights Movement. The history I had been taught second hand, the experiences I had growing up in Africa, the way Martin’s words and writings have influenced me over the years, and the spirit of those with whom I walked today aligned to give me my own little Einstein Ring, I guess I could say, bending the light and dark of all these experiences into a picture I had not anticipated.

You see, the reason Hubble had been on my mind is I’ve been thinking about all the things it had gone past. The pictures get cooler and more amazing and the gallery gets larger and larger and stuff gets left behind. (My metaphor breaks down a bit here. Hubble is actually orbiting the earth taking pictures deeper and deeper into space; I didn’t know that when I was thinking about this stuff so bear with me.) Hubble was launched in 1990, the same year Ginger and I married. In the same years that it’s lens has been pointing deeper and deeper into the universe, my focus has not been quite as singular. I’ve been a youth minister, a Blockbuster video guy, a substitute teacher, an English teacher, a concert security guy, and a chef – and that’s just the jobs. I’ve made candles and handmade cards, painted with watercolors, learned to write icons, written songs, wrote the draft of a novel, am trying to put together a book of poetry and recipes, and written this blog. I’ve lived in four towns, five houses, and had six schnauzers. I’ve worked on Habitat projects, written letters for Amnesty, cooked who knows how many church dinners and breakfasts, had three foster kids, and probably lost track of more stuff than I’ve hung on to. Whether I’m in orbit or hurtling through space, stuff – even important stuff – has gotten left behind.

Yet, when I read about the Einstein Ring, which I found by accident on the Hubble site as I went to find the link for this post, it gave me a different way to think about it. When we say a star is three billion light years away, it means the light we are seeing is three billion years old: that’s how long it took to get where we can see it. Sometimes the light from things long ago takes a while to get here and, when it does, it shines in such a way to make connections we had not seen before. Sure, some stuff stays behind us (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing) and there are things we will not understand until the light of both the past and the present hits just right.

Ginger came home from another MLK service this evening and, in the course of our conversation, said, “You know, the world is really different than it was forty years ago.”

Yes, it is. We can see that now.

Peace,
Milton

walking with martin

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

When I was in seminary, I took voice lessons because I wanted to learn to sing better. We had a musical school that offered voice to non-majors, so I went and asked and they agreed. One of the songs I learned was “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked,” which was sung from the vantage point of one walking through Palestine and being in all the places where Jesus once was. At the time, the song was something to help me learn to sing. Some years later, Ginger and I got to go to Israel and Palestine. When we walked from the Mount of Olives up to the small stairs that entered the Old City on the way to Caiaphas’ house, our guide said, “I can tell you for a fact Jesus walked up these stairs. Much has changed since those days, but these stairs have always been in use. Ginger and I scooted our feet across every inch of the stones and wept, overcome that we had walked that day where Jesus had also walked.

I thought about that song in church this morning as we focused our worship around the life, words, and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. One of our older members, a retired minister, gave the children’s message and talked about King coming to Durham and Chapel Hill to meet with thirty-five white ministers who wanted to know how they could help. When he got to town, they realized there was not a restaurant in the area that would allow them to eat together, so Dewitt said, “Come over to my house.” He went on to say when they got to the house they offered Dr. King his choice of the chairs in the room and he chose this rather unassuming one (which was next to Dewitt at the front of the church this morning). I wasn’t fast enough to get the picture of Ginger quickly sitting down in the chair as the children returned to their seats.

Ginger split her sermon time with Bill, who had come to the South as a college student to help with voter registration. As he told about things that happened over forty years ago, his emotion was completely present tense. Then Ginger told her story of being born in Birmingham, Alabama on May 9, 1963, just down the street from the Birmingham Jail and days after King had written his letter from his cell. Ginger had researched and recounted to us all that happened in her hometown the week she was born. After she finished, Ginger, Bill, Carla (our associate pastor), and I read excerpts from King’s letter. Here’s the part that stuck with me:

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Par from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

When we finished, I wanted to scoot across the stairs that lead up to the altar because I felt as though I walked today where Martin walked, and not in days long ago, but in my lifetime. One of the most significant implications of the church being named the Body of Christ is we are the incarnation of God’s love and grace in the world. We are God’s hands and feet and eyes and ears. Martin moves me because he lived like he believed that to be true, all the way to his own death. That doesn’t make him a hero; it makes him faithful.

Patty Griffin has an amazing song called, “Up to the Mountain,” which is her tribute to Dr. King. The second verse says:

sometimes I feel like
I’ve never been nothing but tired
and I’ll be walking
till the day I expire
sometimes I lay down
no more can I do
but then I go on again
because you ask me to

As Jesus called Martin and both call to us, may we call to one another to go on again, choosing to work for others rather than protect ourselves and truly incarnate the God who created every last one of us.

Peace,
Milton

one thing I can hold on to

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

I’ve stared at the screen the last two days and then gone to bed without writing anything. I woke up this morning, intending to chase away whatever was keeping me from putting words down, but didn’t have much luck because I just felt empty. As I sat there, John Prine’s words came to mind:

there’s flies in the kitchen — I can hear them a-buzzin’
and I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today
how the hell can a person go to work every morning
and come home every evening and have nothing to say?

As many times as I’ve sung “Angel from Montgomery” (or listened to it – it’s my favorite song), that last verse penetrates deep into my heart: how can I look at the world, or at my life, and come up wordless? Ginger, who has had the special privilege of living through these days with me, first suggested I get out of the house and to a coffee shop to see if there were any words there and then called about a half an hour later to say, “I know what you can write about.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Write about what you’re thankful for.”

With those words she gave me one thing I can hold on to. When it comes to saying thank you, there’s always something to say.

I’m deeply grateful for the way the folks at Pilgrim UCC have welcomed and embraced us. Moving to a new place (and grieving the one left behind) is lonely business and the folks here have been unabashed in expressing their intent for us to be a part of them.

I’m grateful for hymns. On any given Sunday, my entrée into worship is through the congregational singing. Back in seminary days, they told us the congregation was the true worship choir, all of us singing together, not as the audience but as the primary participants in the act of worship. As much as I like some of the new music, the songs that feed me most profoundly are the ones that have been sung down over generations, words weathered and wise, because they pull me into the stream of singing saints, a sort of melodic Communion.

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord, who rises with healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

I’m grateful for my brother, Miller. A number of years ago, when things between us were distant, at best, my dad said to me, “You need to keep in touch with your brother. He’s the best friend you have.” At that time, my father’s statement was not true. The years since have given grace enough for us to let some stuff go and work through some other stuff such that he is today not only family but a dear and trusted friend.

I’m grateful Ella is bouncing around the house spreading joy and socks wherever she goes.

I’m grateful for this blog and the connections created here. I’m also thankful it has afforded me the chance to develop the discipline of a writer (even when I don’t know what to write).

I’m grateful that pitchers and catchers report in less than a month (Go Sox!).

I’m grateful that just ten days short of nineteen years ago, at a retreat in Texas, I walked over to a beautiful woman and introduced myself. I then proceeded to follow her around the rest of the weekend and, when I got back home, called her and asked her to go see Lyle Lovett (which meant I gave away the ticket that was to have been my friend’s birthday present). I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating in the least when I say spending my life with Ginger has saved my life. I’m still going because of the way she has incarnated indefatigable love and grace and hope on a daily basis. The best news I know is I get to spend my life with her. As I wrote once, imagining us together as old people:

this is the story of two common hearts
that started our young and grew old
they have practiced a lifetime
the art of a well-worn love

Tonight’s list is by no means exhaustive, but I would like to add one more: I’m grateful John Prine wrote this song:

Peace,
Milton

try to remember

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

One day during the last couple of weeks, I heard a story on NPR about a guy who is documenting his entire life – every email, every event, every just about anything – on his computer, and has been doing so for several years. I can’t remember which NPR program aired the segment, so I can’t offer a link. The conversation centered around how or if we are changed as human beings if we don’t forget things, or at least remember selectively.

I remembered the story this morning when I read this poem at The Writer’s Almanac:

Nothing Is Lost
(Noel Coward)

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

One of my favorite novels is Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, in which the author imagines the dreams the budding scientist had when we was still working as a patent clerk in Vienna. Each chapter recalls a dream about the same village and a different concept of time. In one dream, no one has the capacity to remember anything but the day they are living, so people spend the last couple of hours of the day writing down what they want to recall about the day and then the first few hours of the next morning reading their books to remember who they are, who their family is, what they do, and what has happened to them. It doesn’t take long before there isn’t enough time in a day to go back and read everything they have written, so they have to be selective about what pages they peruse and let some go unread.

However diligent the guy is with his computer, however well he has cataloged his every move, what he is doing is not remembering. He will never be able to find a time or place in his life to take in the panoramic view of all he has collected. Leaving if for those who come after him will only prove that he (like the rest of us) is just not that interesting. Remembering is not the same as cataloging every detail. It is re-membering: putting a moment back together again without reading the instructions, letting the pieces rise up from wherever they have been and emerge like a painting on a canvas, so that we can describe what that moment feels like now. Thus, we are shaped by what we let go of, or what slips away, as much as the things we carry with us.

The point of life is not to be permanent, but to be present. None of us is going to be remembered much once we’re gone. But when we are, it will not be because someone came across us in a hard drive file, or put our name on a building, but because of a shared event when we left an indelible mark on someone who mattered to us. The things we do remember stack up like stones in an altar, putting us back together, one step closer to wholeness.

Like the song says, “Try to remember and if you remember, then follow.”

Peace,
Milton

grace and garnishes

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

First, an update.

Our new family member has a name: Ella. We tried several different ones on, but this one seems to be the best fit. She is awesome.

Tonight was my first real night at the new restaurant. Last night the Duke men had a home game and everyone was at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Tonight, Ramon (my prep cook/dishwasher/sidekick) and I cooked meals for seventy-five people, which translates to a culinary butt-kicking. I spent all afternoon getting ready and we used up everything I made. Here’s the menu:

Appetizers

Fried Calamari with Sweet Chili Dipping Sauce
Warm Brie in Puff Pastry
Hummus Platter
Green Salad

Entrees

Pan Roasted Salmon, Crispy Potatoes, and Asparagus
with a lemon-thyme beurre blanc

Tuscan Chicken Sandwich
with portabella mushroom, Fontina cheese,
and basil pesto on sourdough bread

Grilled Barbeque Flatiron Steak
with sweet potato polenta and asparagus

Vegetable Lasagna
layers of pasta filled with assorted vegetables
and ricotta cheese in a mushroom sauce

Teriyaki Stir Fry with Beef or Chicken or
Vegetables only

As I was chopping some parsley to season the mushroom sauce, I was taken back to church on Sunday because the children’s message gave me a new appreciation for the little green plant. More often than not, parsley is the stuff we put on your plate at the end to make it look pretty: a garnish. It does come in handy as a subtle seasoning, but I think it’s mostly for show.

Carla, our associate pastor (who is amazing with our kids) gathered the children around her to talk about baptism on Sunday, focusing on the blessing (as Ginger did also in her sermon). “Baptism reminds us we are loved by God,” she said. And then she pulled out a small plastic bag filled with sprigs of parsley. She poured some water in a cup and then dipped one of the small branches in the water and began to splash water in the faces of the children saying, “God loves you.” Then she gave each of the kids their own piece of parsley and sent them out into the congregation to bless us. Isabella, one of my favorite kids, got a good plant full of water when she swung it my way. I felt loved.

I also feel fortunate because I work with parsley everyday. Thanks to Carla and Bella, I have a built in reminder of grace right in my refrigerator, waiting to remind me my life is seasoned with love and garnished with grace. I may start using it a lot more.

Peace (and parsley),
Milton

two new things

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

Today holds two new things.

The Chef I work for is quite the entrepreneur. She not only owns the restaurant, but also a long established and well known catering company, and contracts with Duke to run a small restaurant on campus that serves faculty at lunch and students in the evening. The student venture is new this year and still finding its way. Thursday she asked me to take it over to see what we could do. What that means is I become a salaried employee (hooray!), I won’t be at the other restaurant any more (the hard part) and I have a shot at doing a really cool thing. The place is small and, for now, only feeding about forty or fifty people a night. I will start with a dishwasher/prep cook and me. I’m excited. I think this is going to be good.

Now for the second thing. When we moved from Massachusetts, we took our two Schnauzers, Lola and Gracie, to Ginger’s parents to stay until we found a permanent home here. (The Schnauzers are not so good at transition.) They arrived there just before Thanksgiving. As I have written before, my father-in-law has Alzheimer’s and has been declining steadily, particularly over the past six or seven months. Since the pups arrived, he has been so much better. Instead of sleeping most of the day, he is up early and awake petting and playing with them. It has become increasingly clear to Ginger and me that we can’t take them away from him. We’ve had a hard time coming to terms with that, and we are full of gratitude for the gift the little dogs have given the whole family.

Yesterday afternoon when I got home from work, Ginger was standing in the front yard to greet me with this little one.


We have yet to name her, but we are quickly falling in love. I’ve been fighting off a bit of a bug, so I came home from work to sleep. The pup curled up on my chest as I lay on the couch and helped me feel better.

New year. New things. Many stories yet to unfold.

Peace,
Milton

close guantánamo

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3
God has not given us a spirit of fear;
but of power, love, and of a sound mind.
(2 Timothy 1:7)

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoner arrived at Guantánamo Bay. Since then approximately 775 people have been detained there. 405 have been released, leaving about 305 people still in custody. The facility costs over $100 million to run each year (meaning we’ve spent over a half a billion dollars so far) and, in the course of six years, only ten people have been charged with crimes. One person, an Australian, pleaded guilty. Eighty-six percent of those detained in Afghanistan were not captured by US forces in combat, but were turned in by Afghan citizens for the reward money. The youngest known prisoner – excuse me, enemy combatant – is thirteen; the oldest is ninety-eight. (*These facts came from here, here, and here.)

There are several good reasons to close the detention camp at Guantánamo that run the gamut from pragmatic to philosophical, but I just want to talk about one: we are doing something to people from other countries we would not tolerate being done to our own citizens. We’ve put them in prison across an ocean and not on our soil (so they wouldn’t fall under full US jurisdiction), called them “combatants” instead of prisoners of war so we didn’t have to abide by the Geneva Conventions, made it almost impossible for them to get any kind of legal representation, and held most of them without telling them why they are in custody. I don’t care how damn scared we are of Osama bin Laden, or how justified we feel in answering violence with violence, what we are doing to the people at Guantánamo is wrong and we should stop.

Jesus was simple and direct: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He said nothing about doing unto others to keep them from doing unto you. What he knew was treating each other as we wish to be treated is how perfect love casts out fear. Six years in Guantánamo shows us how fear casts out love. One of the pieces I saw supporting the detention camp started by pointing out that no US citizens were being held there. The implication seemed to be it was OK to do whatever we needed to do because they weren’t us. Is that really the choice we want to make?

I’m wearing orange on January 11, as are many Americans (I hope), as a statement of solidarity with those who wish to see Guantánamo closed. I understand there are many levels to the political and militaristic rhetoric around this issue on both sides. I understand we can read statistics in any number of ways. I also understand we live in a dangerous world. Six years of detention later, however, I don’t think we’re significantly safer because those guys have been locked up in Cuba.

Six years ago, my oldest nephew would have been about the same age as the youngest person detained at Guantánamo. In that six years, Ben finished high school, went on to college, even studied a semester at Oxford, and will graduate this summer. He wasn’t born in Afghanistan or in poverty, so he didn’t grow up hearing about al Qaeda. He didn’t grow up in a country that has stood at the crossroads of war and conquest for centuries. My nephew is going to graduate from college and the Afghan guy is still sitting in Gitmo. If he had lived all these years in Afghanistan, I don’t imagine he would have ended up at Oxford, but I feel as though we, as a nation, have robbed him and many others of lives they might have had because of our fear. We had been do unto in the September 11 attacks and we wanted to do unto in like fashion. It has served none of us well.

We are doing damage at Guantánamo. We can stop and we should.

May we live in and treat one another (all the one anothers) with a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind.

Peace,
Milton

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