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lenten journal: life together

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I was a history major in college.10003910_10152013780184716_1109751339_n

I love the stories. And the history department at Baylor had some great story tellers. Robert Reid told of the rise and fall of the Greeks and Romans, Pat Ward appropriately skeptical insight on American foreign policy, and Wallace Daniel knew both Russian folktales as well as the tales of Russian folk. For all of the battles and boundaries, charters and cheaters, what I learned most was the real history of humanity happened around dinner tables and in factories, in churches and union halls; what connects us across the chapters and epochs is our being human.

I’ve been thinking about history today because I’m helping to facilitate an “adult confirmation class” for our church on Tuesday nights during Lent. We have a number of folks in our congregation who have asked for such an offering and I’m always happy to teach. My task tonight was to give an overview of church history. I prepared some timelines and my list of councils and copies of creeds, and the more I went over the material the more I wanted to distinguish between church history and the story of faith because it seemed the history of the church as an institution has had more to do with money and power and less with, well, living like Jesus.

I don’t mean that as cynically as it might sound. Whatever the group or cause, life beyond the first generation means dealing with an institution. No way around it. One of the challenges in that is the institution takes on a life of its own: it demands energy, resources, administration beyond the reason that gave it birth, so we end up spending a good deal of time focused on self-perpetuation for reasons of self-perpetuation. On beyond Jesus, those who had followed him had to begin to figure out how to be the church. Some things they could control, others they could not. I mean, if the emperor decides to convert, you hit the big time without having much say. And, certainly, over the course of Christian history there are any number of things we could have done better, to put it mildly. The Crusades. The Inquisition. You get my drift.

The fifteen of us gathered around the table at Fullsteam Brewery for our class tonight reminded me why both my faith and my church matter to me. Even our small group was not uniform in our theology or perspectives. We got to Pilgrim by different roads, carrying different baggage, even using different language — and yet here were are: together. For me, that’s church. Life. Together. In Jesus’ name. When I read the stories of Jesus, I see him connecting with people and connecting people to one another, whether by introduction or by reminding us we are called to take those around us into the circles of our lives.

One of the folks around the table tonight noticed the Apostles’ Creed used “I” language and the Nicaean Creed used “we.” He wondered if they were making theological statements. I didn’t know. I said I found the difference in language to be the creative tension within which the church must live, between the I and the we, the individual and the community, figuring out life together. As much as I don’t understand about the Trinity, it helps me to see the same creative tension in a God whose very nature is somehow communal, another picture of life together.
When we think of the church as an institution, it becomes something we have to protect. When we understand the story of faith as a pilgrimage together, it becomes a story of love, of how we risk ourselves for one another. As I said last night, Jesus is the risk.

One of my favorite statements of faith comes from the United Church of Canada:

We are not alone,
we live in God’s world.
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

We are not alone. Good news. Hard news. Hopeful news. We are in this together — every last one of us. That’s the story of faith at its best.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: true grit

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

I’m excited the NCAA basketball tournaments begin this week because that means baseball is not far behind. I do IMG_0263love watching baseball. When my book came out, one reviewer commented that I must have included the chapter titled “Striking Out” just because I loved baseball and wanted to write about it. As I reflected on his comment, I decided what I didn’t do well was explain the connection I saw between the ball park and the kitchen because I see them both as places that are home to faith, failure, and forgiveness.

I failed today.

I had a certification test to take today at work that will let me move on to my next level of training and expertise. No, the world didn’t swing on its passing. Still, I have been studying for it and I want to keep learning and growing, so it mattered to me whether or not I passed. And I didn’t pass — by one question. One question. But I didn’t and the notice came back on the computer screen: “You did not pass the exam.” My coworkers were great in rallying around and encouraging me. My supervisor was quick to point out that I could take the test again next week and that I would do well. I walked next door and got a cup of coffee, shaking off the disappointment the way a dog shakes off fleas, and then I went back to work. It was not, as I said, an earth-shattering defeat.

The point of the certification exam is more about me actually learning the application than it is passing the test. If it were simply a matter of parroting material to pass, the test wouldn’t be worth much. I spent a half an hour before I left this afternoon going back over the application to see what I had missed. I know more now than I did before I failed. Next week, I’ll take another shot.

I don’t mean to romanticize failure. It hurts — and some failures more than others. Today I was reminded that many of the moments when we strike out are not bottom-of-the-ninth-two-outs-get-this-hit-and-we-win kind of situations, any more than our successes are all grand slams. A great deal of life is like the middle of the fourth inning when no one is on base and there is little urgency attached to what happens beyond our walking, head down, back to the dugout or when we connect and send the ball past the shortstop and on into centerfield for a solid single.

As I was getting ready for work this morning, I heard part of a story on NPR about teaching “grit” in education: resilience in the face of failure. One of the professors said,

I’m not saying that we have the secret solution to all of education’s problems. But you can create a classroom culture in which struggle and risk taking is valued more than just being able to get the right answer.

My oldest nephew is studying to take his ordination exams in April so he can become a Presbyterian minister, officially. He is already a minister in the way he lives his life, but in a few weeks he will be expected to get the answers right to move on. My next door neighbor is one of the smartest people I have ever met. He defends his doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology about the same time my nephew will be taking his tests. They both know their stuff. They both know way more than they need to. And they have to pass the tests, take the risk, so they can go on to what they want to do. The stakes are high because they are both reaching for once-in-a-lifetime kind of moments. I can take my test as many times as it takes, so I would do well to spend a good bit of time encouraging both of them.

The basketball tournament that starts tomorrow is a one and done affair: win or go home. Sixty-eight teams will begin and one will be called champion. As much as I find grace on the baseball diamond, the season is aimed at seeing who will win the World Series. As much as I love the game, here is where the metaphor breaks down. The point of life is not to win, but to live. What rides on our every swing is not success, but our solidarity. There’s an old gospel song that says, “Jesus is the answer.” I think not. Jesus is the risk. To live like him is to incarnate what the prophet Micah articulated: “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.”

Henry James said, “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” To embody kindness is to understand failure, even grief. To be resilient is not to triumph over others, but to bless the ties that bind. True grit requires a good dose of grace both for ourselves and for each other. Such is the lesson I keep learning again and again.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: digging in the dirt

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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I spent some time in the yard today. Weeding. We were promised more rain this afternoon, so I tried to get out IMG_4150ahead of it to weed the side of the front yard around the dogwood we planted a little over two years ago in memory of Reuben, my father-in-law. I learned the hard way last year that if what looks like little clover leaves get too big they have these nasty, sticky seed pods that almost require you throw away whatever you’re wearing when you pull them up. This year I was determined to get them early. And I did.

My plan was to do more than pull them up. Once the ground was cleared, I put down a layer of cardboard and then I covered them with about four inches of mulch. The result was happy trees and a good looking yard, even though I know the weeds are already plotting their response, for, you see, I did good work, but I did nothing permanent.

When I started back in therapy after my depression hit in the fall of 2001, my therapist asked if I liked to garden. I had not done much of it to that point other than fill container boxes around our row house in Charlestown, but by then we had moved to Marshfield and we had a yard. That next spring, Reuben and I dug holes and planted trees in the front yard, moved a stand of lilac bushes from the back to the front, clearing the way for a vegetable garden. I found pleasure and meaning in the work — a reminder of my finitude and a connection with something more eternal all in the dirt under my fingernails.

What my therapist explained (with some scientific backing) was there was something physiological as well as spiritual that happened in my digging in the dirt. Whether it was the chance to get close enough to the ground to ingest some of the minerals and bacteria from which I was mostly removed, or simply to connect to the stuff I was made of (dust to dust, remember?), weeding and planting raised the floor on my depression and lowered my blood pressure.

There’s more. To pay attention to what I was planting meant I had to tell time in seasons, to listen to the weather for more reasons than what I should wear, and to understand I was doing nothing permanent. Whatever I was doing was going to be undone or covered over. The vegetables live only for a season; others have to be pruned and fertilized. And then, of course, there is the weeding. Something is always growing even as something also is dying or fading away.

This summer will mark four years in our house, which means close to that many layers of cardboard and mulch in the yard. I use cardboard because it turns into soil, along with the mulch, which means every layer improves the soil and makes it better for other things to grow. Many of the cardboard layers have come from the computer store where I work because we have loads of it all the time and they are happy for me to take it with me. The cardboard layer this year came from boxes I saved from last summer when I drove a U-Haul truck from Waco packed with stuff handed down from my parents and grandparents that needed to find a new home because my parents and moved into a smaller place. It also happened that the day I packed the truck was the day after my dad had his stroke.

I began unfolding the boxes and couldn’t help but read the labels as I laid them down on the ground:

“Milton — Kitchen”
“Milton — Books”
“Milton — Fragile.”

Indeed. For a fair part of the fall, a good portion of our living room was full of the very boxes I was putting down in the dirt. We unpacked layers of family history: blankets Mom had crocheted for me in Africa, cufflinks Dad had bought in Africa, old sermons, all kinds of kitchen things, my grandmothers’ cookbooks, my dad’s parents’ wedding gifts. These were the layers that have fed my life, helped to make me, well, me.

And today those boxes became a layer of preparation, of protection, of perpetuation. They will decompose and go back into the ground, an undetected layer of memory and meaning, something through which new things will grow, something that will be layered over. While I was working, a little girl kept riding up and down the sidewalk on our street, complete with pink bike helmet and training wheels. At first, she just stopped and watched. About the time I started spreading the cardboard she showed up again and this time she talked to me. I don’t know her name. I know she lives a couple of houses down. I loved that she felt safe riding on our street and I felt a little worried at the same time. She asked why I was putting boxes in my yard and I did my best to explain what I was doing. She returned to inquire again when I began dumping the mulch and I described what the layer of smelly brown stuff would do.

I didn’t give her the whole story about faith and futility, about weeding and wondering how long before the weeds come up again. She’ll find out soon enough once the training wheels come off. And she’ll learn, I hope, how to tell time by dust and ashes, by seasons and seas, by friends and family, and by mornings when the best there was to do was ride your bike down the sidewalk and wait for the rain.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: paint me a picture

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7

These two quotes crossed my path today.

A person is a kind of sacrament: something made of molecules by which we become aware of something else which is not made of molecules.
— Sydney Carter

Christianity is art and not money. — William Blake

Here is where they took me.

paint me a picture

bread and wine
paint and brushes
turn of a phrase
song of the heart
dancing eyes
sunlight smile
trail of tears
statue of limitations
body of work
work of art
harbinger of hope
act of faith

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: pi(e) day

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Tonight marked the Second Annual Pi(e) Night here at our house. Last year 3.14 fell on a Thursday, so the inaugural IMG_4099event (please remember there is no such thing as a “first annual”) fell on our regular dinner night and we had a blast. Eleven of us gathered this evening — some veterans, some rookies — and we ate and laughed an talked our way through seven different kinds of pie, since each course had to be a pie of some sort. The menu was:

  • BLT Tart (bacon, smoked mozzarella, tomato tart; greens tossed with ranch dressing along side)
  • Pork Chile Relleno Pie (ground pork, corn, roasted poblanos, cheddar cheese, with avocado puree)
  • Caribbean Shepherd’s Pie (Caribbean pot roast, roasted plantains, grilled pineapple, topped with mashed purple sweet potatoes)
  • Fig Marmalade and Marscapone Pop Tarts
  • Chocolate Pecan Tartlets
  • Goat Cheese Tartlets with Blackberries and Basil

I had the best day making pies and an amazing evening sharing them. Now the day is done and I spent most of my words around the dinner table rather than writing here. This has been the kind of night that reminds me how much it matters that we come to the table to share our lives, pass the pie, and remember we belong together, to each other.

Oh — I will post recipes.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: songs in the key of lent

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

This has been one of those days when I have had music running through my head. It has also been a day of doing — of carrying out quotidian tasks — rather than reading or contemplating. So I offer songs tonight — a Lenten soundtrack of sorts — drawn from songs that have spoken to me or spoken for me over the last several months. In the spirit of the Psalms, these are songs than name feelings more than anything else, to acknowledge what is difficult and painful alongside of all that gives us hope.

First, a song of lament. Patty Griffin’s “Wild Old Dog,” which begins:

God is a wild old dog
someone left out on the highway . . .

What I hear in the song is the ache of grief. (She wrote the album after the death of her father.)

it’s lonely on the highway
sometimes a heart can turn to dust
get whittled down to nothing
broken down and crushed
in with the bones of
wild old dogs
wild old dogs

The honesty of our lament opens our hearts to the possibility of comfort and even healing. I love this song.

I suppose there are several Indigo Girls’ songs that would make my all-time playlist, but one to which I keep returning in these days is “All That We Let In.”

I pass the cemetery, walk my dog down there
I read the names in stone and say a silent prayer
when I get home, you’re cooking supper on the stove
and the greatest gift of life is to know love


Mavis Staples has so many songs of faith and feeling that we could rewrite the Psalms using just her stuff. Here she is singing Jeff Tweedy’s song, “You’re Not Alone.” (He’s the one playing guitar.) I find deep encouragement here.

a broken dream
a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone


John David Souther has written his fair share of the songs that make up the soundtrack of my life. This one, however, I didn’t know until just a couple of years ago: “Little Victories”

little victories
I know you need one
little victories
of the heart

they say that these are not the best of times

but they’re the only times I’ve ever known
and I believe there is a time for meditation

in cathedrals of our own

I’ll let Billy Joel’s “Summer Highland Falls” finish today’s playlist. The words in the first verse I found meaningful at several different stages of my life. I love that this video is a fresh recording. Both he and the song have aged fairly well.

The path through Lent is one of focus and faith, of trust and temerity, of wonder and weariness. It’s good to have songs to sing as we go.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: lollipop moments

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I love it when I get caught by surprise.

lollipop-fundraiser

I got up this morning a little early so I could read a little more Niebuhr and perhaps plant a seed tha

t would grow into my blog post for tonight. I came away well fed by a sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known. And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

I marked up the margins with notes to go along with his challenging words about the pace of change we face andhow we keep some sense of ourselves and our connectedness, both globally and close up, and how we are to embrace the uncertainty of life in order for our faith to be substantial.

Trust in God also means trust in life itself, despite the obvious patches of meaninglessness which sometimes drive us to the edge of despair. If we do not admit that these patches of meaninglessness are there, then our faith becomes sentimental. (32-33)

Where was I? Oh, yes — getting caught by surprise.

I finished reading, finished my breakfast, and headed for work. Our mornings at the computer store often begin with a word of challenge or encouragement; this morning, I arrived to find everyone gathered around a computer monitor to watch a TED Talk by a guy named Drew Dudley. The talk was almost over when I got there, and I arrived in time to hear him say,

There is no world only 6 billion understandings of it. And if you change one person’s understanding of it, you’ve changed the whole thing.

I’d been sitting and scribbling at the computer for about an hour tonight when I remembered I had written down that quote, and so I found his talk and watched the whole thing. He calls for a new definition of leadership that teeters on the same precipice of sentimentality and is also wonderfully challenging. Here’s the talk:

After listening to Dudley, my mind and heart are filled with lollipop moments, with the faces of people I need to call or write and say thank you because those encounters are the ones that encouraged me to trust God and trust life; to stare down the meaninglessness, or even embrace it; to trust the Love will not let us go.

I’m carrying these words with me:

We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments, how many of them we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward, and how many of them we say thank you for. Because we’ve made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There’s only six billion understandings of it, and if you change one person’s understanding of it, one person’s understanding of what they’re capable of, one person’s understanding of how much people care about them, one person’s understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you’ve changed the whole thing.

. . . and the greatest of these is love.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: walls

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

We’ve had two absolutely glorious days in a row here in Durham. The mornings have had a bit of a chill, but not a 20110311-tsunami-w_2162733kserious one. Instead, they have quickly given way to the kind warmth of an early spring day — one that knows you need to feel the sun but are not yet ready for the weight of summer. The sky was the kind of blue that makes you believe hope is a color, running from one horizon to another with hardly a wisp of cloud to contest its resonance. It must have been a day like today when the Psalmist wrote, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” More than glad, I have felt joyful as though each breath wanted to stretch my lungs and increase my capacity to take in all that was being offered.

On the way to work this morning, I was reminded by the good folks at NPR that today marks the third anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that was so devastating to the people of Japan. I don’t imagine there were many that day who have found much comfort singing

all nature sings and ‘round me rings
the music of the spheres . . .

Though I am grateful for our gorgeous day, I’m also aware that holding the creative tension between perfect day and powerful destruction calls for theological reflection in much the same way that reading Niebuhr did for me the other night because to look for God in one is to be challenged to find God in the other. And God is in both, not as instigator but as presence, as Love.

The NPR story talked about some of the security measures being taken in light of the devastating storm. At least two cities were building giant sea walls — over seventeen feet high — along the coastline to stop the possibility of a repeat performance, which means beaches will be blocked, along with the chance for the people to just see the ocean on the beautiful days. Looking at photographs like the one above makes me wonder if the sea wall would make any actual difference. For now, the government seems determined to do something that shows they did something.

Robert Frost wrote in “Mending Wall”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

He was talking about a neighbor who came out each spring to rebuild the wall between them that winter had dismantled. Frost wondered aloud why the man thought a wall was an answer to anything. The best stories from Japan, or anywhere else acquainted with grief, are those of people taking care of one another. Those are the bonds that will hold against the storm long after the concrete has collapsed.

I suppose it is easy for me to talk in tsunamic metaphor since I spent my day in the sun and the sun doesn’t shine here everyday. A two-story wall may keep away the water, but won’t it also keep away the stories of walks on the beach, or what washed up on the shore, of sunshiny days?

I don’t want to miss the sunshine.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: snapshot

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I’ve carried a picture of the sunrise IMG_4321
in the pocket of my mind all day long —
the memory of this March morning:
the promising chill and the sunlight
that snuck up like a stage whisper,
reminding me of . . . autumn.
I know, I know — spring is not
yet fully alive or arrived, but
take a look for yourself. See the
long, luminous reaches of light —
don’t they remind you of the
golden October glows across our
old brick buildings downtown;
the world waking up or going
to sleep looks much the same —
good to know if you are facing
east or west, whether to get ready
for bed or a brand new day.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: if faith, then . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

Because I work at the computer store, I have an inordinate number of apps on my iPhone because most every time MousetrapGame2one of my coworkers tells me of a new app they have discovered, I end up downloading it. One of those is called “IFTTT” (If This, Then That) which allows you set up sequences (recipes, they call them) so you can always have things happen a certain way — if you take a post a picture on Instagram, then it will also put a copy in your Dropbox folder — like a giant game of Mouse Trap. I put the app on my phone last summer and then removed it earlier this year when I realized I don’t use it. As I read Reinhold Niebuhr this morning, I realized I part of it may be I don’t think about life rolling out that way, for the most part.

The books that have found me this Lenten season — both gifts from friends — have been around awhile: first Thurman, and now Justice and Mercy by Reinhold Niebuhr, which was edited after he died by his daughter and published in 1974, though the material comes from the Forties and Fifties. Niebuhr is the one who said, “Justice is what Love looks like in public;” he was also one who worked hard to find a faith that mattered, that was relevant to a nuclear world, to a world that had known the tragedy of two world wars. The pages are filled with his prayers and sermons.

The opening sermon is “The Providence of God” and he makes a distinction between “the instinct of religion” and “the gospel of Christ,” even as he says we find both in scripture. Without offering a quote fest, let me see if I can explain what has captured me in what he said.

“The natural instincts of religion demand that my life be given meaning by a special security against of the insecurities of life,” he says, quoting from a couple of Psalms to show it is natural for us to expect punishment for evil and reward for good. If it should seem those “were not being properly correlated in life; then God will guarantee finally that they will be properly correlated.” He goes on with examples from scripture and history of those who expect God to be on their side (cue Bob Dylan), that believe that judgment will set things right in their favor. “These are natural religious instincts,” he says, “the natural efforts to close prematurely the great structure of life’s meaning.”

Life is not IFTTT. There is more to faith than security and favor. We diminish what it means to follow Christ when we distill the structure of meaning to those two pillars.

For life is not completely at variance with itself. There is reward for goodness in life, and there is punishment for evil, but not absolutely. The same law which punishes the criminal punishes the Savior. And there are three crosses: two for criminals who cannot meet the moral mediocrities of life, and one for the Savior who rises above it. This is life. (18)

I read the sermon before I went to church today where we looked at the temptatio

ns of Jesus. As I thought through the sequence of the Tempter’s offerings — turn the stones to bread, jump and the angels will catch you, play the game and all this can be yours — I saw them as a picture of the very tension Neibuhr describes: Satan offers security, power, favor; Jesus chooses love, grace, mercy. Jesus understood what he had come to do was beyond making sure he felt safe in the Rock of Ages or knew that God was on his side. So he

said, “No.” Over and over. And then came out of the desert to deliver the sermon that was Niebuhr’s inspiration:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

A little more from Reinhold:

It is not true that God gives special favors, and it is not true that there are simple moral meanings in the processes of history. We cannot speak simply of a moral order which, if defied, would destroy us. . . . The Christian faith believes that within and beyond the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon [God’s] loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality towards all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil. (20)

Christ calls us to expect more out of God than security, attention, or even fairness, because though all three requests have their validity at certain times, we live in a world that is not safe, that is inattentive to most of the suffering of humanity, and is certainly not fair. If those three things are all we expect of God, our religion will fail. But that is not the last word.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we must be saved by love.

And nothing can separate us from Love.

Peace,
Milton

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