I could hear rain
in mid-December
days die incrementally
losing light almost
from the crack of dawn
suffocate them with
a blanket of clouds
and the only light
that lives is artificial
still light is not life
or so I was reminded
when I realized
I could hear the rain
not just the storm
but the tap dance
of drops on the patio
that had been silent
for so many showers
however dark the day
I could hear the rain
Peace,
Milton
interstices
the space between trees
the crack in the mortar
the time between floors
if we took away the spaces
between us among us
the universe would
collapse into a fist
the rest between notes
the breath before words
the pause to ponder
intervening emptinesses
waiting to be noticed
to be seen as something
other than nothing
the gap in the fence
the break in the clouds
the width of a room
what we see as vacant
is what connects us all
the substance of things
thrives in our in-betweens
Peace,
Milton
ritual in search of significance
the last thing I do before
I go to bed is to disconnect
my implant and hearing aid
and enter into quietness
it is necessary action
because both my batteries
and my body need to recharge
so I settle into silence
each device has a cradle
where it rests for the night
the batteries nestled as well
none of us hearing a thing
as my motions become more
deliberate and intentional
I find myself looking for
words to mark the moment
as I break open the casing
press the battery into place
and close the containers that
will hold things for the night
most of them can go unspoken
since I am not able to hear
better to trust than to speak
and let the silence do its work
Peace,
Milton
The woman in my poem from a couple of nights ago made it into my sermon today. She has still been on my mind.
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Sometimes when I look at the lectionary passages I wonder about the committee that put it together. I learned this week that the Common Lectionary for Protestant churches only came about in 1983 and was revised in 1992. I didn’t realize it was so new. Part of the idea behind it is that the scriptures for each week are somewhat thematic, which is difficult, whether we are talking about the Bible or about life because neither fits easily into thematic systems.
We are in the third year of the three-year cycle and, at least for Advent, the chosen passages are heavy on foreboding and warning about what is coming, when it comes to the applied theme, as though the point is what’s coming and not where we are right now. But, regardless of what’s coming, we don’t get to be anywhere but where we are right now—here in the middle of everything, without a clarifying theme.
As most of you know, I went to the hospital on Thursday for my ablation.
They called me on Wednesday and told me to be there at 8:30 am, so Ginger and I did as they asked. It did not take long to get checked in and then they took me to the pre-op ward where they said it would be about forty-five minutes to an hour. They came back three more times and said the same thing until I finally went into surgery around 1 pm.
I was frustrated and tired, but I also knew I needed to get my heart back in rhythm, so I waited.
Some time after we arrived, a woman was put in a room (well, a small space with a separating curtain) across from us. I didn’t even know she was there until she became vocal about her frustration and said, loudly, “I want to leave.” Everyone in the ward was there because of some heart issue that needed correcting. But whatever concern she had that had brought her in was overwhelmed by her fear and anger. She was determined to leave.
A doctor came to talk to her but did more talking than listening, maybe because she was startled by the woman’s resolve, or frustrated because she couldn’t fix the situation. I don’t know. But it became a power struggle. When the woman persisted, we could hear the doctor say, “You’re being rude,” which didn’t help things.
Then a nurse came and listened first and then told the woman what she needed to do to leave the ward, which she did. Both Ginger and I were saddened by what happened because the woman looked so despairing as she left. The whole scene was sad.
She has stayed on my mind as I worked on this sermon and thought about our lighting the Peace Candle this week because she was not at peace with herself or with her circumstances. I’ve been trying to figure out how to preach a sermon that would mean something to her—and, hopefully to us as well.
As I said earlier, life, in the moments we are living it, doesn’t necessarily fit nicely into a theme, whatever the theme is. We tell stories that make sense of it when we can look back and see connections that weren’t so apparent in the moment. We look back at the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth and retell them to focus our hearts, but it I imagine Mary or Joseph or some of the others must have thought, “I want to leave” as heavenly messengers appeared and their worlds crashed in around them.
They didn’t have an Advent wreath to tell them what week it was and which candle to light next.
Neither did Paul or the people in Philippi, which was a young fledgling congregation. All of the churches who received the letters in our Bible were first generation congregations. They didn’t know what church was. They didn’t have bylaws to guide them or minutes to read. They were people responding to God’s love and trying to figure out life together.
As confident as Paul sounded when he wrote, he was in and out of prison because of his actions and was also learning as he went. In almost every letter he sent, he began with a statement of gratitude similar to the one we read this morning: “I thank my God when I remember you, for you fill my life with joy.” And then he said, “This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight.”
His prayer reminds us that love is an act of will—something we do on purpose. And it is something we can practice. We can get better at it. We can grow in insight and tenacity.
One of the Advent figures every year is John the Baptist, whom the gospel writers say reminded people of the old school prophets who called people to straighten out crooked roads and make the rough places easy to travel through. After being on some rough roads myself lately, I hear those words as a call to love with insight and determination.
We do not have to go far to find folks who are hurting and who are not sure what is going to happen next. We just have to look around the room. And we need to risk asking questions of one another to find out what is going on, even as we need to risk asking for help even when we know no one can make all the pain go away. Perhaps the starting place is to first make sure we are vocal about our gratitude for one another and for the chance to be here together.
In this season, we are telling the story of God’s willingness to incarnate love so we would know we are not alone. As the angel said to Joseph, “Call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.” God is with us and we are with each other. Right here in the middle of it all. That gives me hope.
We light the candles and we sing the songs and we tell the stories not because they organize Advent into a cohesive system that answers all our questions and lets us know what’s coming. We do all of these things to remember God has chosen to be here in the middle with us, no matter what we are feeling or facing, no matter how badly we wish we could leave. God stays and invites us to do the same. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
breakfast potatoes
in our favorite
breakfast joint
on the way home
from the hospital
for the first time
in a long time
I heard the sound
of one chef chopping
the rhythm of the knife
beating in my new ear
a sound my brain
knows by heart
when I caught his eye
I asked, “making soup?”
“chopping potatoes,”
came the answer
“we always need
breakfast potatoes”
it was almost noon
his preparation was
an act of fleeting hope
he will have to do
again tomorrow
after breakfast
hope can’t be
stored any more
than hash browns
the beat of blade
on cutting board is
what keeps us alive
Peace,
Milton
fear factor
it was not long after
the third doctor came by
to tell me it would be
another hour until
I was taken back
to the operating room
that the woman
in the next cubicle
began to assert herself
“I want to leave”
a sentiment shared
on almost every stretcher
but she was serious
and her proclamation
upset the rhythm
of the cardiac ward
the anesthesiologist’s
attempt to subdue her
became a power struggle
as she chose control
over compassion
and stormed away
missing the fear in
the eyes glaring at her
the nurse who followed
said she would help
the woman get ready
and then led her out
past the rest of us
perhaps more fearful
of leaving than waiting
my time finally came
but not before the
doctor offered a litany
of possible complications
all rare he assured
and when I woke
in the recovery room
a few hours later
groggy and aching
I wondered how she
was recovering
and whether either
of us would get
much sleep
Peace,
Milton
ablation
the word rings in my ears
like a rite or a ritual
though I am not sure
exactly what role I play
it means “a carrying away”
in its oldest form though
medically it’s “a removal
of something harmful”
they will carry away
broken bits of my heart
to restore its rhythm
that sounds sacred
and I listen for sacred
holy means healthy
I’m an arhythmic pilgrim
hoping for healing
my doctor practices
this ritual most everyday
he repeats his rhthyms
of remove and restore
my role is to offer my
heart and trust him to
know what to remove
and what to let remain
none of this feels normal
I’m in over my heart
my badly beating heart
come all is now ready
Peace,
Milton
Since I had my cochlear implant surgery eight weeks ago, I have been writing a poem a day to help me reflect on what is happening to me and my hearing. This is today’s poem.
cartography
we forget
the word map
is short for
mappa mundi
map of the world
or perhaps
map of a world
since no cartographer
can cover it all
my audiologist
uses the word map
to describe
how she programs
my cochlear implant
the longitude
of volume
the latitude
of frequencies
she tested how
I am navigating
my new world
with sounds
and sentences
expanding the map
expanded my horizon
by a factor of ten
is what I heard
leaving me to dream
of places to hear
and songs to sing
of words on the tip
of the universe’s tongue
Peace,
Milton
Everything that is going on in the Brasher-Cunningham household alongside of Advent beginning before we were finished with Thanksgiving leftovers mean I am a day late beginning my annual Advent Journal, which starts this year with my sermon from yesterday, “Mooing at Kyle.” I hope your Advent is full of hope and wonder.
_____________________
We have had a two-year-old at our house these past few days—and me made me think about angels.
This Thanksgiving, Ginger and I were fortunate to have a table filled with people we think of as chosen family—nine in all. Among them was our former foster daughter and her wife and their son, Rafa, who is two. He is bright and curious and in love with the world. He brought so much joy to our time together.
When it came time for pie—and the rain had stopped—we all went out to our barn to have pie together. When we got to the barn, Rafa said, “Where are the cows?” Kyle, one of our other friends (who is also a great father) responded with a really good cow impersonation that both startled and scared Rafa.
Over the next few minutes we watched and listened as his mothers helped him get beyond his fear. Neither of them said, “Don’t be scared,” or “It’s no big deal.” They asked him questions about what he had heard, they identified Kyle as the one who had made the sound so Rafa would know where it came from, and they helped him form a response: “Go moo at Kyle.”
It wasn’t too long before Rafa had walked around the table to where Kyle was and boisterously shouted, “Moo!” And we all laughed.
Here’s where the angels come in.
One of the hallmarks of the story of all that leads up to Jesus’ birth is the messenger who brings the news, and pretty much every time they show up they offer the same greeting: “Fear not!” or “Do not be afraid,” depending on the translation.
I’m not sure that is the most helpful thing to say, when it comes to fear.
Maybe it crosses some sort of line to critique a divine messenger, but bear with me. Fear is not a choice; it’s a reaction. A response. If something frightens us, we get scared. That’s not a flaw, or a mistake. Life is populated with frightening things and scary situations. Being afraid is not a flaw.
The task is to do what it takes to get through or beyond our fear, to not be paralyzed by it. We have to learn how to moo at Kyle, if you will. And that is often a big task, depending on the moment. When we look at the story unfolding in front of us during Advent, we can see how Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, Zacharias, and others did more than simply not be afraid when they heard a voice they didn’t recognize. They figured out how to moo at Kyle, to get to what comes after fear.
Hope is what comes after fear. Love is what comes after fear. Laughter, often, is what comes after fear. So are rest and peace and growth. Fear is not the last word, in part, because fear is a response not a choice. Love and hope are choices.
We can hear overtones of that in the passage we read this morning. Paul wrote to the young congregation in Thessalonica, which was a diverse group of people trying to figure out how to live together, and said he prayed they would have overflowing love for one another—that they would choose to grow together, to grow with and toward each other.
Perhaps that’s what the angel was trying to get at as well, if we look closer, or translate it differently. Maybe “Fear not!” was intended less as a divine imperative and more in the spirit of Rafa’s moms helping him figure out how to make fear a temporary place rather than a full stop.
At the heart of Jesus’ story is that God poured God’s self into human skin and became vulnerable. To be human is to be vulnerable; neither of those are choices either. Jesus did what the angels could not. He walked the earth as a living, breathing, fearing, loving person. He was vulnerable, too. He understood grief and pain and loss and joy with those understandings called us to live like the lilies and birds we talked about last week, to choose to live through and beyond our fear and to grasp, as poet David Whyte says, “the essential, tidal, and conversational foundations of our identity.”
Life is not about being fearless, it’s about being together, about sharing our griefs and losses, about honoring the details of one another’s lives, about investing in a legacy of love that makes us all better at mooing at Kyle.
So, be afraid. Life is often scary. And then listen for the voices of love that call us to what lies beyond fear, what will get us through our fear, what reminds us love is stronger than fear. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
It’s been a while since I posted a sermon, mostly because all of the medical stuff I have been dealing with has made what I have offered from the pulpit less than postable. But I’m back and talking about the birds and flowers that Jesus pointed to as examples of how to be human.
_____________________________
Ginger and I went to breakfast after one of my recent doctor visits and from the window of the coffee shop we could see these small black birds sitting on the cable that ran above the street. I don’t know what kind of birds they were. Sparrows, maybe starlings. Every so often, based on some signal we could not discern, they flew off the wire in formation and then swirled and darted and banked all together until they returned to their perches. They would sit quietly for a few minutes and then they did it again.
It was amazing to watch the skill and whimsy of the little creatures as they zigged and zagged across the sky, accomplishing nothing specific other than being themselves, which is what every last one of us, from starlings to stars was put here to do: to be ourselves and to be together. It’s right in Jesus’ words that we read a few minutes ago:
Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet God feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?
I learned this week that the root of both the words worry and anxious has to do with choking or strangulation. When anxiety takes hold it constricts us. Gratitude, on the other hand, puts air in our lungs; it is expansive. Listen to the words of poet David Whyte:
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things must come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.
He closes by saying, “Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. . . . Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.”
Gratitude finds its full measure through participation and witness. I love that. And I needed that word this week. As many of you have experienced, one of the hardest part about being sick is it makes us self-focused. That is not a bad thing in and of itself—sometimes we need to pay attention to ourselves—but when we turn inward we can lose sight of all that connects and supports us. We can’t see beyond ourselves. Our view of the world and who we are in it becomes constricted.
One of the definitions of depression I learned early on was that it was “anger turned inward.” I would add that I think it’s just about everything turned inward. When I am depressed, I can’t see beyond myself.
Illness is not the only hardship that can alter our perspective. Sometimes it’s just life. Do you ever catch yourself thinking, “I just have so much to do?” And you’re telling the truth. Life is hard and demanding and exhausting and even constricting. And so, Jesus said, consider the starlings and the lilies.
The root of the word consider means “observe the stars.” Look up at the heavens. Instead of focusing on all that feels like it’s going to strangle us, consider the universe, from flowers to galaxies far, far away.
To live in a spirit of gratitude—to pay attention—is to actively point our minds and hearts at something: to look up, look out, look for, look beyond individual selves and see the ways in which everyone and everything is essentially connected.
We sit here this morning in a building constructed by our forebearers, a tangible reminder of what has been handed down. Look out the window and we see cars that belong to Quinnipiac students and the staff from the restaurant across the street, as well as the beginnings of the Boy Scout troop’s Christmas tree lot. We will share coffee and snacks together in a building that will house people this week for twelve step groups, Jazzercize, contra dancing, and several meals. The fruit and vegetables that adorn our Communion table this morning will go, along with the bags in the parish house, to feed people across Hamden this week.
Hear the words of David Whyte again: “Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.”
I think thankfulness also finds its full measure in the temporary. By that I mean, the fact that we aren’t here forever can be an expansive truth rather than a constrictive one, if we so choose.
Do you know how long a starling lives?
I had to look it up. Two to three years. A sparrow can live up to five. Lilies bloom only a few weeks out of the year. We don’t last that much longer. Writer Amy Leach says, “Our transience is our tragedy but also our beauty, because when you don’t have forever, intensity is imperative.”
The writer of Ecclesiastes said, “I know there is nothing better for us than to be joyful and to do good throughout our lives; to eat and drink and see the good in all of our hard work is a gift from God.”
And it’s in the last verse of the hymn that will close our service this morning (which you’ve heard me quote several times because it’s one of my favorites):
For the harvests of the Spirit, thanks be to God.
For the good we all inherit, thanks be to God.
For the wonders that astound us, for the truth that still confounds us,
Most of all that love has found us, thanks be to God.
May be we stargazers and starling watchers; may we pay attention to all that swirls around us; may we breathe deep the breath of God and choose to be intensely grateful for these days that we share together. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
PS—my sermon reminded me of this wonderful Bill Mallonee song.
