don't eat alone

Things started happening early here on West Trinity Avenue this morning. We were out the door at 6:30 to get Ginger to the bus for the 2012 Freedom Ride, then I came home in time to meet Jenny, our vet, who took Gracie with her for the day to see how the little dog is responding to the medication for her kidney infection, then my friends Lori and Terry came by to tell me about the friends so I can inscribe books for them for Christmas, then Rachel left for her Meals on Wheels run and Ellen, our housemate, left for work, and then Nicholas, a wonderful kid from church, stopped by with his mom to drop off cookies in celebration of St. Nicholas Day. When the house cleared, Ella, our youngest Schnauzer, and I took walk through the neighborhood. Then we came back and took a nap.

Our walk took us past Cocoa Cinnamon, our soon-to-be newest coffee shop (along with spices and teas and Mexican drinking chocolate), so we stopped to see how the progress is coming. Areli, one of the owners was there along with Heather, one of several artists who have contributed time and talents to what is going to be an incredible space. Heather’s project is the front room of this converted gas station, which is full of windows and light. Heather took a poem by Rumi (and I think a couple of other poems as well) and translated them into binary code and then worked out a pattern on the floor that visualizes that code. When Leon, Areli’s husband, described the idea to me I asked if the poem would be anywhere in the room. “I don’t know,” he said. “We may just let it be on the floor.”

When I asked Heather how it was going this morning, she said, “I need painters to help to put on a second coat.” There’s still a lot of room that has yet to see the first coat. She was sitting on the floor with a brush not bigger than a half an inch painting one small rectangle after another, displaying concentration and intent that will not likely be noticed by those coming in for lattes in the days to come.Yet she means every stroke and it matters that she does just as it matters that Ginger and the other Freedom Riders are crossing the South in a single bus that hardly anyone is noticing either.

Many Christmases ago, Ginger gave me a Byzantine icon writing class as a gift. Christopher Gosey, who was then artist-in-residence at Andover Newton Theological School, was my teacher and the class began a relationship that lasted a couple of years as I found deep meaning in the spiritual practice of painting the faces of the saints. His move to New Hampshire and then mine to Durham has left me with several unfinished works; one day I will find him again. One of the things I learned about iconography is the paint is almost translucent. We would mix the natural pigments into acrylic medium such that it required a great deal of repetition to bring the lines to life, going over each one twenty-five or thirty times. The point was to move deliberately and intently, to find meaning in the repetition, the ritual of tracing lines that had been handed down and then coloring them with pigments made of dirt and ash until they opened a window into heaven. A thin place. I leaned the Spirit could find me in the concentrated futility of that repetition, the motion that mattered for no other reason than I meant it — over and over. And no one else knew how long I had sat there to find that one line.

The story unfolding as we walk through Advent is a small story about a not-so-normal family struggling to make sense of their circumstance, going through the motions of life in hopes of finding a thin place that will help them understand what was happening. Mary was a hopeful young girl; Joseph was a confused and frightened man. No one in the story could see the poem they were painting. They knew nothing of shepherds and angels and magi. They knew about poverty and need and desperation and rejection. As Rev. William Barber said last night, “Stop saying swaddling clothes; say nasty! The Christmas story is violent! Mary forced to have a baby in a nasty manger.” Yet, they kept coloring in the boxes like Heather is doing and they stayed on the journey the way the Freedom Riders are doing and ended up giving birth to a baby in a barn in a small forgotten town.

Today would have been my father-in-law Reuben’s eighty-second birthday. He was a big hearted man who lived a small and important life. Until he moved to Durham, he had never lived more than ten miles from his birthplace. He spent his life tracing the lines of love that connected him to his relatives, to everyone Ginger brought home with her from school, and to all of those he encountered as he delivered Foremost Milk and Golden Flake Potato Chips. His was not easy and it was rich and full. Whenever you asked how he was, he said, “Fine. Wonderful. Marvelous. Fantastic. If I felt any better, I couldn’t stand it.” And he meant every word every time he said it. Tonight when the bus stops, Ginger will be back in Birmingham, where he was born.

I came home from work at the computer store to find Ella asleep on the couch and Rachel in her room. After a little while, Jenny brought Gracie home and then a friend came to take Rachel to dinner and Ellen came in from work and we all sat in the kitchen and talked about this small day we had all lived, the lines we had gone over once again painting the poems that are our lives.

And then I sat down to write.

Peace,
Milton

By the time most of you read this, Ginger will have received her Christmas present. She will be on a bus headed for Birmingham, Alabama as a part of the 21st Century Freedom Ride, which has been organized by a group here in Durham. They are riding from here to Atlanta and then to Birmingham for two days of retreat and renewal and challenge as they look at race relations in our country today. I found out about it through Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, one of the organizers and a fellow resident here in the Bull City. Tonight, we kicked off the Ride with a mass meeting to address racial profiling that met at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in the Walltown neighborhood. Jonathan describes how the meeting and the ride go together:

I’m delighted that my friend and mentor Rev. William Barber has agreed to kick-off this Freedom Ride with a Mass Meeting right here in Walltown to address the problem of racial profiling and the ways it is connected to our present struggle against a new Jim Crow–”the same old hatred,” as Rev. Barber says, “just dressed up in a suit with a business card that says ‘James Crow, Esq.’” For us, this Freedom Ride is growing directly out of the struggle of our neighborhood. (I witnessed police harassment of two young men from Walltown on our streets this week.) It is, we pray, an invitation to grow deeper in the wisdom of those who’ve gone before us and root our efforts in the rich soil of the Freedom Movement. But it is also an opportunity to recognize the many ways that our efforts for God’s new world in this place are tied to the efforts of other neighborhoods and others’ concerns.
Because, as Faulker said, history is never behind us. It’s not even past.
The same powers that King and so many others learned to name in the late 1960′s are still fragmenting communities and dealing death in our world today. And, just as importantly, the same gospel way that King chose to walk–all the way to the cross–is still a way open to us today.
Indeed, it is the only Way.

As I sat in the church tonight, on the cusp of 2013 and the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I was troubled by the barrage of statistics:

• African Americans make up 20% of the population of North Carolina but 57% of the prison population;
• African Americans are pulled over by the police nine times more often than white people;
• African Americans buy 15% of the cocaine sold in this country but make up 70% of the arrests.

Fifty years on and the work of equality and justice is far from done. When Rev. William Barber, the President of the North Carolina NAACP, stood up to speak, he wound those statistics into the season. “If you’re not challenging injustice,” he said toward the end of his sermon, “you’re not celebrating Christmas.”

He spoke brilliantly about Christmas being an “ugly story” of a poor and pregnant woman in her eighth month being forced to ride across the desert to pay taxes because the king wanted more; a violent story of a king who was willing to profile and kill all of the baby boys because he wanted to hold on to power; a compelling story because it calls us to trust in transformation: “Sometimes,” he said, “the people we look at most suspiciously might be our saviors.” He returned to talking about the challenge of dealing with the injustice in our country embedded in race and poverty and said, “This is Bethlehem. If you’re not challenging injustice, you’re not celebrating Christmas.”

The words bear repeating.

On the bus with Ginger are folks like Vincent Harding, who worked with Martin Luther King and has spent his life celebrating Christmas, and others like David Ramirez who are celebrating for a new generation dealing with immigration issues. Ginger is traveling, on her father’s birthday, back to her hometown where she was born in the downtown Birmingham hospital during the Children’s Crusade, just blocks away from the jail where  Martin wrote his Letter from the Birmingham Jail not even a month before. I expect she will come home with her own sense of transformation.

After the meeting tonight, I realize I have some celebrating of my own to do,even without a bus trip. After all, this is Bethlehem.

Peace,

Milton

As many evenings as we can, Ginger and I take a walk around our neighborhood, which, in our case, is downtown. Old North Durham sits just a few blocks north of the center of the city, not far from the Farmers’ Market Pavilion and a bunch of old warehouses and abandoned buildings that are coming back to life as different people bring their dreams to life. It’s even become informally known as the DIY District. Not too many years ago, downtown Durham was a wasteland; now it has come to life because people have done what it takes to chase down their dreams and many others have done all they can to encourage them.

Last night as we made the next to last turn toward home, we ran into a friend we met through the Wild Goose Festival a couple of years ago and who is now working as a social worker and living around the corner from us in a shared residence designed to support people with developmental disabilities. There are a couple of blocks of abandoned apartments that a developer bought and those with the dream of offering affordable and accessible housing got him to do more with the buildings that just go for the biggest buck. He is now finishing the third or fourth of the buildings with more to come. These are not temporary group residences, though I know there is a need for such housing.. People are buying these homes to put down roots in our neighborhood. Our friend’s dream is to help found a L’Arche community here in Durham; these homes are a step in that direction.

These new houses face the back of Fullsteam Brewery, now in its third year, which I continue to call The Most Encouraging Room in Durham. A couple of afternoons ago, I stopped by for a beer and, as usual, the place was crawling with kids and dogs. As I got to the door, a couple was coming out and the father was carrying a rather distressed and inconsolable child. “Why? Why, Daddy?” she cried. “Why do we have to leave Fullsteam?” I understood how she felt. Yet what is only a couple of years old to most of us is, I’m sure, a much older dream in the heart and mind of Sean, the owner, just as the accessible houses didn’t happen overnight. The same with Motorco Music Hall, or Geer Street Garden, and Cocoa Cinnamon (our soon to be newest coffee shop). Dreams take time to grow.

As I sat here this morning, thinking about the dreams coming to life all around us, I began to wonder how long God thought of the Incarnation before Jesus showed up in the manger. Yes, I understand God is not shackled by the constraints of time that bind us, and I still wondered how it all rolled out. The way the story of the Great Flood get told, God looked at what was going on in the world and made a decision — as though the flood had not always been on the calendar. To think it was all mapped out feels a bit mechanical, if not cruel. So what compelled God to decide it was time to know experientially what it was like to be human? Why wait so long or show up so soon? Why open things up?

When we as humans tell the story, it seems we somehow end up at the center of it. Jesus came for us. Why was God paying so much attention to our little pebble of a planet that matters only to those of us who live on it. Why would Jesus come here?

The hallmark of Jesus’ ministry was his care for the oppressed and marginalized. He came for the poor and outcast as much or more than anyone else. He taught the ones who had already flunked out. He kept saying, over and over, that our call was to care for the poor and downtrodden. Jesus was born as a poor kid to a less-than-important family on a throwaway planet to demonstrate incarnationally that God’s love reaches for every last one of us.

“When I gaze into the night sky,” said the Psalmist, “I wonder who we are that you are mindful of us?”

We are the throwaways on a dispensable planet. In a universe of possibilities, we are the afterthought, the center of absolutely nothing. We are the ones who could disappear and no one would notice. And Jesus came here. For us. On purpose. Because that’s what God does.

And that’s what God calls us to do. The greatest implication of the Incarnation is we are to go and do likewise. For those of us who have roofs over our heads and more food than we need, who have had the luxury of an education or the advantages of connections that allowed us to feel as though we deserve to be where we are, that call is difficult to hear because then we have to come to terms with the circumstances of our lives being something other than God’s blessing on us for being such good people.

As the rhetoric aimed at the poor in our country becomes more divisive and acerbic, looking at the manger or the stars or both must remind me Jesus became human not to say who deserved to be left behind but to know what it felt like to be dispensable and to make sure we knew no one deserved to be thrown away. Or maybe I can just look at the houses that are becoming homes alongside of the warehouses that are now gathering spots and the tienda where I can get a homemade empanada and the TROSA house full of folks in recovery.

Jesus would like Durham.

Peace,
Milton

For the last twenty Advents I have been a prophet.

My calling began at First Congregational Church of Winchester, UCC where Ginger was serving as Youth Minister. We lived in Charlestown, which was eight miles away and didn’t have a car. I was teaching full time and going to grad school full time to finish up the requirements for my teaching certificate, so I didn’t get up early on Sunday morning to catch the bus to the commuter rail, which she had to do to get to work. Instead, I walked over the hill (Bunker Hill) to St. John’s Episcopal Church for the early mass and then came home to read like the wind. Until Advent, when she came home and asked me to be the prophet.

Those were the days when I had hair. Long hair. John the Baptist hair. And she and Skip, the senior pastor, thought it would be cool for me to come in from the back and announce I was the prophet and read the lectionary passage for the day. And it was cool. No one in the congregation had ever seen me until I came down the aisle and proclaimed, “I am the prophet Isaiah and this is the word of the Lord.” After Advent, I kept coming to church and found a home there with ties that still feed me. The next year, we came up with the idea for me to come in singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from Godspell and I have kept singing every Advent for the last twenty Advents from Winchester to Marshfield to Durham as a way to make meaning out of words said centuries ago to people we know mostly by association.

Making meaning. My earliest memory of the phrase comes from my days in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. CPE is a pastoral internship that might best be described as psychic surgery without anesthetic. For much of the time I worked there, I was assigned to the Oncology floor. Fairly early on, I remember reading an article that sought to address how to respond when people ask, “Why is this happening to me?” The question is a normal one, but the author of the article thoughtfully pointed out it was not a helpful one. There’s not an answer to that question that offers much in the way of healing. So, he said, we need to help folks learn to ask a different question: how do I make meaning of out what has happened?

When I read the article, I was not a person acquainted with grief. Looking back, I can see I was dealing with the beginnings of what would be come a full blown depression, but I didn’t know that then. In the Fall of 2001, when the ground opened up and the darkness became visible in ways I had not known before, I found myself asking why it was happening to me. And I actually could answer that question to a point, but even then I found the answers didn’t lead to healing. So I began to learn how to ask, “How do I make meaning?” And I began to find the answers that led me to love. Love at the bottom of life.

Part of finding my way out of my depression was finding my way into the kitchen. I started working as a chef because the kitchen was a depression free zone for me; I could actually function and make a living despite the encroaching darkness. In some ways, I suppose, I learned to make meaning the way I learned to make meals. Without realizing what I was doing, I wrote my recipe for meaning, for redemption, for finding my way back to myself. For me, the ingredients included walking, poetry, forgiveness, confession, talking out loud about it, and writing. The recipe is not as easily replicable as these Bacon-Cheddar-Grits Balls, but it’s worth sharing nonetheless.

Like many churches, yesterday was our Hanging of the Greens Service. In our rendition, we look at the stories behind how the different elements became part of the recipe of meaning that is Advent, and even Christmas. What becomes quickly apparent is most everything we consider a part of the season was appropriated from preceding tradition, from the greens to the candles to the holly and even the date on which we celebrate Jesus’ birth. The third century Christians chose December 25 to go full in the face of a Roman celebration as a way to make meaning of the Solstice and the ever shortening days and remember “the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.”

The other thing that struck me was the fantastical nature of the stories, each one following a formula of the poor child who has nothing, grabs what she can on the way to the manger, and then turns it into something beautiful and meaningful — usually because she cries and her tears are transformational. The legends grow out of what people know to be true in their hearts, what has been handed down from one generation to the next, what helps us make meaning of this life where the sorrow runs deep and darkness seems unending.

One of my favorite carols is “In the Bleak Midwinter,” an old English carol that puts Bethlehem right in the middle of a blizzard that first Christmas:

snow had fallen snow on snow,
snow on snow in the bleak midwinter long ago.

And out of the bitter cold of that dark winter night come these words:

what shall I give him poor as I am
if I were a shepherd I would bring a lamb
if I were a wise man I would do my part
what I have to give I will give — my heart.

As I write tonight, we are finishing up a day of seventy degree sunshine, but the sorrow is not far under the surface. Whatever the season, we are still left to make meaning of a world that doesn’t often make sense. And so we wait, together, for Love to find us.

Peace,
Milton

Beginning Advent this year is an exercise in finding a centering rhythm as I come back to writing daily during the season, which has become my spiritual practice. Over the past few months, with the publication of my book and the corresponding learning curve  of how to begin to get the word out that the book is even here, I have not been consistent in my writing either here on my blog or on the larger project that I hope will become a sister volume one day. These are days I have committed to writing everyday to focus my heart and mind, to learn more about how to pray, to point myself toward the indefatigable light of Christ even as the days still grow shorter.

Spiritual practice: an intriguing phrase for me, and helpful, too. Practice — as though there is something new to learn, more to hone, something for which to prepare. There is a sense in which this practice is different than practicing a song or a part in a play because there is never a designated performance per se; we don’t have the climactic moment when the curtain goes up and the announcer says, “And now, being Christian, Milton Brasher-Cunningham.”  Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the spotlight. I am an extrovert to the core of my being. But the trajectory of life is not an ascending line of fame or fortune or power. We do not have to earn the love God offers us.

The paradox is, however, that each day is open practice: no performance, but also no discards. Even the practices count. Every time we have to go back and do it again, every time we have to say, “I’m sorry,” every time we pick ourselves up from failure it’s for real. We don’t have to earn love, but life counts. It has consequences. Ripples. Still, contrary to cliche, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes faithful. The point of practice, in the best sense of the word, is growth. I am a better guitar player when I play everyday. I’m a better cook when I practice to learn new things. I’m a better writer when I practice both reading and writing. I’m a better Christian when I practice praying and listening. I’m a better person when I see every day as an opportunity to practice being human.

Many years ago, Billy Crockett and I wrote a song inspired by the movie, Dead Poet’s Society, called “Walking on the Earth.” The opening lines caught the theme of the whole song:

walking on the earth for a little while
how do how do we make it count
kicking up the dust for another mile
how do how do we make it count

As the song continues, one line says, “There is no practice life, this is it.” I know what we  meant by that line and I still stand by it and, in light of what the word practice is coming to mean to me, I am going to offer a contradiction: this is a practice life. That’s the point. Practice. Practice. Practice. The circular motion of the liturgical year from Advent to Advent, Lent to Lent, Ordinary Time to Ordinary Time is at the heart of my realization. We are practicing and preparing, over and over, year after year, to go nowhere — but to God.

On his last night with his disciples, John says of Jesus, “Knowing . . . that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist.” (John 13:3-4) He was going nowhere but to God, and so he knew he could do what he needed to do in that moment to show those who mattered most to him how much he loved them.

Our lives are not about practicing for success or perfection, but open practice with room for both fun and failure as we circle round to meet the One who spoke us into being and who welcomes us with open arms. God’s grace means we have room to try and try again, to keep growing and changing, to keep learning. To practice. So we begin to mark the days, circling toward the manger that Christ might be born again in us, retelling the story, re-singing the songs, practicing the presence, and learning — again– that we were made, even called, to go nowhere but to God, over and over again.

If you were to go through the almost seven years of blog entries, you would soon find this theme is not new for me. I have spent more days that I can count trying to figure out how to matter enough and have come up wanting at the end of most all of them. I am weeks away from my fifty-seventh Christmas and I still have to remind myself that I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Period. I am more practiced at sharing that truth than digesting it for myself. And so I practice — writing it, speaking it, singing it — that I might hear in ways I have not before. And I am. I am.

Or at least I’m practicing.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — New recipes here and here.