don't eat alone

One of my dad’s favorite songs was “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” which was written by John Prine and Steve Goodman and most famously recorded by David Allen Coe. I don’t know the story of how my dad came to find the song, much less love it, but during some of his early days in the hospital we would play the song on my mom’s phone and sing along:

you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’
you never even call me by my name.

My name. I am named after the one I was singing with that afternoon, even as he was named after his father. When we here in America speak of someone else, we often say, “Her name is ___________ .” Across the Pond, they say, “She is called ____________.”

Called. Named. An interesting pair of verbs.

Ginger preached on the story of Jacob on Sunday, and from Genesis 32 in particular where Jacob wrestles with God even as he tries to come to terms with facing his brother whom he had so egregiously wronged. Jacob, whose name meant “heel grabber,” referring to the way he followed his slightly older twin brother out of the womb, had built a life based on deception, power grabbing, and manipulation. He played on his brother’s hunger to extract the birthright for a bowl of oatmeal and then tricked his father into giving him the blessing due the same hungry brother. And, yet, it was not enough because he was still a heel grabber, still one chasing what was just out of his reach.

He fled his family at his mother’s bidding because she was afraid his brother Esau was angry enough to kill him, so Jacob ended up living with relatives, which is where he met Rachel and fell in love. Laban, Rachel’s father, saw a chance to make sure both of his daughters were taken care of and tricked Jacob into marrying both of them; the plot took fourteen years to play out, and then there were children.

By the time we find Jacob on the wrestling mat, he has left what had become home to find a new life and had sent word to Esau that he wanted to meet. After two decades of deception and distance, the dawn would bring them face to face. As night fell, Jacob came to terms with himself and his God, perhaps not in that order.

In the darkness of the desert, the story moves between actuality and poetry. All the story says is “a man” came and wrestled with Jacob, and yet it was not just an average passer-by. The wrestling was both physical and metaphorical — at the same time, and both were very real. That which is most essential to us also becomes our working metaphor for life. I love to cook, and coming to the table is a primary metaphor. I led a retreat last week for a gathering of music ministers who conduct choirs and for whom music is the metaphor. Jacob had been a trickster and deceiver his whole life, wrestling from others what was not his, and how he was flat on his back in the sand, fighting for his life.

As I listened to Ginger on Sunday, I smiled because the first thing that came to mind was God as a luchador. I pictured the stranger in the brightly colored mask, jumping down from the rocks and into the middle of Jacob’s struggle. Jacob kept up the best he could, but the stranger knocked his hip out of the socket, and Jacob ended up clinging for his life. All he could do was not let go. “Let me go,” the stranger said, “for daylight is coming.”

“Not until you bless me,” answered Jacob.

“What is your name?”

“Jacob.”

“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”

In faith circles, we talk about being called to mean, as Frederick Buechner says, to find the place where our deepest desire and the world’s deepest need intersect. We are called, we sing, to be God’s people. The relentless wrestler told Jacob he would be called Israel, that he would have a new name, a hew sense of being after their encounter. So Jacob gave the place a new name as well, saying “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

And then he limped off to meet his brother and ask for forgiveness.

One of the biggest struggles my father and I had centered around my name. When Ginger and I decided to get married, we also decided we would both take each other’s name: we would be called Brasher-Cunningham. My father struggled with my no longer being Milton Cunningham III. We wrestled back and forth, trying to find each other. One day I said, “Here’s the way I look at it. In the Bible, when someone has a significant encounter with God, they get a new name. That’s what I’m doing. Marrying Ginger is the best thing I can do with my life; this is a significant encounter with God and I am getting a new name.” He didn’t agree, but somehow he understood and began his own slow walk to understanding and acceptance of us and our calling to one another.

Jacob spent much of his life named by his circumstance, which led him to a life of manipulation and self-preservation. Perhaps, most all of us can find ourselves in him in one way or another. That night at Bethel, he was named — renamed — by Love, by Grace, By God. His history had not changed, but he limped into his future more informed and more compassionate, called to forgive and be forgiven.

I know that road as well.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe.

october is warming up
like august — two months ago
where we stood in a summer
cemetery singing gospel songs
and saying goodbye

goodbye

grief, I think, is hot — not cold
a burning, swarming absence
that gets under your skin
and won’t let you find
a cool place to relax

these feelings are as old as
the weather; the heaviness
is humbling when I see others
who have carried the weight
far longer than I . . .

and this is my story
I am the last one left with
the name we both carried
the family resemblance
even through changes

in this season little feels
reliable beyond loss and love
still we keep moving
through the deceptive heat
and the warm shadows

Peace
Milton

these are my favorite days
when the summer’s shellacking
is painted over by fall’s crisp palette
of expectancy and comfort

I want to match the colors
with aromas savory and sweet —
layers of flavor and hope that
sustain as the nights grow longer

and winter hangs on the horizon
barren branches and grey mornings
the chill that goes bone-deep
as the world curls up and falls asleep

on my best wide awake days I see
the trees — each one a burning bush
their leaves flaring up and letting go
letting go and falling to earth

I turn on the lights in the kitchen
and stir the same reds and oranges
in the pan relishing the sound of the
squash and peppers — suppertime

yes, these are my favorite days
when we eat supper in the early dark
and remember we too are falling
falling — and love will catch us

Peace
Milton

During the days I was in Texas before my dad died, my friend Christy sent me a record by Darden Smith called Love Calling. The whole album is filled with songs of informed hope and determined love. Her offering was truly a gift I needed in those moments. One line from the title track says,

some days the heart beats the rhythm of the falling tear.

What he was saying in the song was different than what I heard, I think, but in the context of my grief I found comfort in the rhythm of life (and death) that he described. I could feel the drumbeat, sometimes quiet and slow and at other times hard and exhausting; in both cases, it was the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, of emptying and filling out, of holding on and letting go. The lightness and the weight, the relief and then the pain, felt like breathing without being able to get enough oxygen.
Trying to live on thin air.

My acupuncturist, Shea, says that in Chinese medicine they talk about how we carry our grief in our lungs, which makes more sense with each passing day. When the sadness settles, I feel like my breaths are shallow, as though I have over-extended myself, and my lungs are full, but full of empty and absence. I walked home from my appointment with an unexpected song in my head: the Hollies:

sometimes all I need
is the air that I breathe
and to love you

And I thought of Ginger’s invitation to worship each Sunday at our church:

Open your hands and relax
Breathe in the breath of God
Breathe out the love of God

The rhythm of life. And death. Alongside our inhaling and exhaling is the beat of our hearts, the pulse of our existence, the quiet drum of grace that keeps us going. In these days of grief, the beating of the heart takes on a new meaning. The syncopation of sadness is excruciating. At the risk of mixing metaphors, grief feels like improvisational jazz: there is a form, even a pattern, but it is difficult to follow for the uninitiated, leaving us to be surprised, if not sideswiped, by its seeming randomness.

Yet there is rhythm. The rhythm of the falling tear, or the breaking heart; the rhythm of memory, of absence, of getting up and going on. By the beat and breath of life and death we keep time (we don’t make time, or tell time) — sometimes we don’t know what we keep it for or from, but we breathe as best we can and keep going.

Today marks a month since both my father and Gracie, our eldest Schnauzer, died.

As one who lives with depression — and who has had three relatively light years of late — his death opened the doors in the floor in many ways. The one saving grace is at least this time I know why I’m depressed. And, I trust, it has not come to stay indefinitely. The sadness sits on me like a lead coat; I can feel the weight. I find relief in the doing of daily things: going to work, going down my to do list, and cooking.

I have one main recurring thought. I find that I want to contact friends who have lost parents and spouses and siblings and children over the years and say, “I had no idea what you have been through.” My seminary training, my years as a hospital chaplain, or even my years just living on the planet did not inform me well. I don’t know how I could have done it differently, but I understand things now I did not before. I feel a rhythm I had only heard described. The initiated around me have offered profound comfort because they know they cannot fix it. There are no words, no actions, only the rhythm of the falling tear. And unending love. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” So, it might be said of the arc of grief. This is going to take time.

One of the biggest surprises for me is how painful it is to be in worship on Sunday morning. Being there is heavy and hard. Sunday, I didn’t go to church. I stayed home and cooked and spent time in the garden and basked in the companionship of Ella, our remaining Schnauzer. I’ve worked not to over-analyze what makes it so hard. Mostly, I feel as though the relationship between faith and grief, between sadness and grace, is more complicated and layered than simply saying, “God will make it better.” One of my favorite songs is “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.” The chorus says,

his eye is on the sparrow
and I know he watches me

Watches. Not catches. Nothing separates us from the love of God and there is much, including death, that separates us from those we love. Some days the heart beats the rhythm of the falling tear. Many days in fact. Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God. That will have to do for now.

Peace
Milton

One of the traditions in church I don’t take easily is that of changing the lyrics of hymns — for whatever reasons. Down the years, however, those who have served on the committees who have collected and compiled the hymns have felt free to alter the texts (as they call them) and move on by simply adding an “alt.” next to the composer’s name. I understand that they may have their reasons, but as one who has written lyrics for songs and hymns, it leaves me a bit unnerved not only for personal reasons, but also because there’s no particular standard by which the changes are made. In our hymnal, for instance, the second verse of “Come,Thou Fount of Every Blessing” has gone from “here I raise mine Ebenezer” to “here I am on my sojourning,” which doesn’t feel like much of an improvement. If Ebenezer needs explaining, then explain it; don’t just dumb down the lyric. That said, as we sang in church Sunday I found myself wanting to change the words.

The song we were singing is embedded deep in my spiritual DNA going back to my days in youth groups: “I’ve got peace like a river, I’ve got peace like a river, I’ve got peace like a river in my soul . . . .” As we sang I could see faces from both past and present and my hands wished for a guitar. We continued through the other verses:

I’ve got joy like a fountain . . .
I’ve got love like an ocean . . .

and then we sang, “I’ve got faith like an anchor” and I thought, “These words are wrong.” I don’t mean they were printed wrong. I’ve heard and sang them before. I mean they missed the mark, mixed the metaphor. They needed to be changed — and I knew the change to make:

I’ve got faith like a row boat. The first three verses are all about water — river, fountain, and then ocean — each one building a bit until we are singing of the great expanse of God’s love in much the same way that Paul talked about it in Ephesians 3:15-19:

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

In the middle of the ocean, an anchor won’t do a thing. The point of an anchor is to hold you safe in the harbor, to keep you in place, and there are ways of looking at like where faith is an anchor, in much the same way that we can talk about God’s love as a rock and a refuge, but if love is an ocean, then faith is what keeps us afloat. And by faith I mean trust. The ocean that is God’s love calls us out of the harbor, out into the open sea, out beyond our comfort zones, and we set out in the frailest of vessels — the row boat of faith — trusting we will not ever reach a place where we will run out of love.

As I sat in church writing as fast as I could think (while other stuff was going on), another song came to mind: “Rowing Song,” from Patty Griffin (my favorite hymn writer), which still astounds me with its profound simplicity.

as I row row row
going so slow slow slow
just down below me is the old sea
just down below me is the old sea
nobody knows knows knows
so many things things so
so out of range sometimes so strange
sometimes so sweet sometimes so lonely
the further I go more letters from home never arrive
and I’m alone all of the way all of the way alone and alive

Faith like a row boat. Faith: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith: trust that love will not let us go, that there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, that the deep deep love of Jesus is underneath and around us. Whatever these days may hold, whatever might have been, whatever has yet to happen, I’ve got love like an ocean — deeper and wider than any circumstance or loneliness — and that is what will keep me afloat in my little boat of faith.

Since my father’s death, the heaviest hour of the week for me has been Sunday morning worship. The thin place that is grief hits me hardest there, and the music plays a big part in both the weight and the comfort. Perhaps that’s what sent me searching for options when the anchor dropped in the fourth verse last Sunday. I’m not looking to sink anymore; I want to know what will keep us afloat. This is not a period of safe harbor in my life. I am not looking to stay put. I am at sea, far away from much of what I have known for sure, following those who have charted this course ahead of me, wondering what will happen next. In the midst of it all, I was reminded by my singing congregation that we’ve got Love like an ocean.

If that’s true, then I’ve got faith like a row boat.

Peace
Milton

Many years ago, my friend Billy Crockett and I read an article about a ship captain who, with his crew, abandoned ship when it began to sink, leaving the passengers on board. The story led us to the song title, “Down With the Ship,” which ended up being a song about Martin Luther King. When I first posted this, I had put images to the song, thanks to iMovie, but I couldn’t get the video to move over here. I have spent too much time this morning trying to figure out how to insert that video into this post, so I offer the lyrics as my way of giving thanks for Martin’s life and legacy, and a link to the video (and the older posting) here.

down with the ship

martin was ahead of his time
and time was so far behind
he had no eye for an eye
in his point of view
but what he could see
it was a beautiful dream
the trouble with dreaming things
is seeing them come true

when you set out on the high sea
when you set out on a hope trip
sometimes you get to your bright tomorrow
sometimes you’ve got to go down with the ship
sometimes you’ve got to go down with the ship

martin had the fight of his life
stared right into the enemies’ eyes
tried to wake them from their comfortable lie
that’s how ships go down
he wasn’t ready for a long white robe
he prayed for brave hearts and hands to hold
and people right here to sing and know
that we shall overcome

when you set out on the high sea
when you set out on a hope trip
sometimes you get to your bright tomorrow
sometimes you’ve got to go down with the ship
sometimes you’ve got to go down with the ship

the truth won’t die just because your heroes fall
someday all flesh will stand to see it all
see the mountains laid low
and the rough made plain . . .

and we’ll go sailing on the high sea
oh we’ll set out on a hope trip
set our eyes on a new horizon
and don’t look back
and we’ll go sailing on the high sea
believing love has got a firm grip
set our eyes on a new tomorrow
set our hearts to go down with the ship
set our hearts to go down with the ship
set our hearts to go down with the ship
sometimes you’ve got to go down with the ship

Peace,

Milton

One afternoon, when I was in fifth grade, my father bent down to pick up an ice cream freezer in the carport of our home in Lusaka, Zambia. The freezer was well-used and I have fond memories of sitting on a towel folded across the top of the gears as Dad cranked the handle to make homemade ice cream. That afternoon, however, the freezer was empty and he was simply moving it. When he picked it up, something snapped in the small of his back — a bone deformed from birth, we would later find out — that left him in a great deal of pain. The doctors in Zambia discussed surgery, but the consensus was the operation was best done stateside. In 1966, however, getting across the Atlantic was no easy feat. Our next scheduled leave from the mission field was about eight months away, so my father had to learn to live with the pain until the days could be accomplished for him to get help and relief.

And he did. They fashioned a brace that held his back rather rigidly so he could on about life; he put a piece of three-quarter inch plywood under his mattress so he could sleep. I don’t remember him talking about it much beyond the matter of factness required to get things done. He just lived with the pain and didn’t complain.

One of the consequences of his stroke a few weeks ago was he was unable to swallow thin liquids. He could chew steak or swallow thick liquids — he kept asking for ice cream — but he couldn’t drink water without choking. One of the nurses explained to me that one of the things the voice box does is to move over the windpipe when we swallow liquids. Larger heavier things move it over with simple gravity, but the liquids require it to move on its own. However the circuits blew in the stroke, one of the results was the voice box quit moving over, so he could no longer swallow a simple sip of water.

The two stories connect for me in these days because of the ways in which my grief has found physical expression. I went with a group of folks from our church to Washington DC on Friday and Saturday as our pilgrimage to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. Two of the folks in our group were there fifty years ago. The drive home took almost twice as long as it should have because of inexplicably heavy traffic on I-95. By the time I got home, my back was in a knot. And it has stayed that way. I feel a deep abiding pain just about the place where my father’s bone broke just a couple of summers after Martin spoke from the Lincoln Memorial. Then last night, as I was watching baseball with Ella, our remaining Schnauzer curled up next to me, I felt a catch in my throat and then pain, as if someone had punched me in the voice box. It was Sunday evening, and Sunday has been the hardest day for me. Worship pulls me into a deep sadness for reasons I cannot completely articulate other than to say grief is a thin place and the air is heavy there.

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing what I need to keep going. Tomorrow is my first day back at work and a return to a regular schedule follows. I will need to get back to keeping my promises, even if that means carrying my pain with me. No. Of course it means carrying my pain with me. We all do that in some sense everyday of our lives. This is just a new kind of pain for me, and it is one that feels as though it colors everything. As I think about my dad learning to live with his back pain, I am aware that it is my turn to do the same. Not to be Stoic and act as if there is no pain and just soldier on. No. I mean to learn to live with the pain, to weave it into the story, to figure out what it means and how it might shape me for the days to come. Long after my back settles down and my throat relaxes, he will still not be here. I have to learn to live with that, as my wife, Ginger, did when her father died almost two years ago, and countless others have done as well. Grief is a primary color in the art that is our lives.

And so is grace.

Peace
Milton