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lenten journal: asked and answered

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

Brothers and sisters, from where have you come?

Such was the question that greeted us as we prepared to share Communion in our Maundy Thursday. Those of us scattered across the sanctuary had come from different places. The answer we were called to give in unison was compelling:

We have come from the dust, and from the earth, and from the breath of God.

I had spent the afternoon digging in the dirt, planting azaleas and hydrangeas and camellias and gardenias and all the other things that ought to grace the front yard of a Southern home. I looked down at my hands to see the dirt still under my fingernails. One of the reasons I love gardening is because of how it has helped me deal with my depression. Something about digging in the dirt centers me, encourages me – and it appears to be at an existential and theological level: I am handling the very building blocks of my existence. The difference between me and the topsoil is breath. God’s breath. Ginger begins most every service as she did tonight, inviting us to sit still and then “Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God.” It is a distilled metaphor of the flow of life: from breath to love, all belonging to God. As we sat in the pew, I could feel the air in my own lungs and hear my breathing, thanks to my allergies. The questions continued:

And why have you come?

Again, none of us was there for the same reason, or so I assumed. I was one of the readers in the Tennebrae service; I was also there because I love this service as much as any during the year. And, again, we were called to answer in unison:

We have come to receive the bread and the cup: the bread and the cup of promise, the bread and the cup of remembrance, the bread and the cup of hope.

Tonight after church, Ginger and I went to Six Plates, a wonderful wine bar here in town, to celebrate our twenty-first anniversary. We ordered the cheese plate, as we always do when we go there. Tonight, Manchego cheese was one of the offerings. It reminded me of the Manchego crème brulee I had at the Magnolia Grill on my first birthday in Durham. It was amazing. When I mentioned it, we began recalling great meals and dishes we had had together. Life happens around the table, in the making of meals and memories, in the sharing of food and friendship. And, on this night, it all came down to a meal for Jesus and those who loved him.

What is the bread and the cup of promise?
The bread and the cup of promise is Christ Jesus our Lord. We come to receive the promise of his life in ours.

Twenty-one years ago, Ginger and I looked into each other’s eyes and made promises. Outrageous promises. We used time tested words about better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health without knowing what lie ahead. We were mostly committing ourselves to grow into the promises. I read the passage tonight that described Peter denying he even knew Jesus – not once, but three times, each one more vociferous. Then he heard the rooster and remembered he had promised he would be true to the end. In the next week or two, we will read the story of the next meal Jesus and Peter shared together – a meal in which the promise was restored because of who Jesus was in his life.

What is the bread and cup of remembrance?
The bread and cup of remembrance is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to remember Jesus and his life in ours.

Most any time I come to Communion and we talk of remembering, I think of a youth camp many years ago when Kenny, who was the camp pastor, asked us to identify the opposite of remember, to which most answered, “Forget.”

“No,” he said. “The opposite of remember is dismember: to take apart. When we re-member Jesus in this meal, we put the Body of Christ back together again. Last weekend, Ginger and I sat around a table with Jay, Cherry, Julie, and Diane, who are our accumulated and intentional family. Over the years, we have chosen to put ourselves together and the bonds run deep. The call to re-member we are one in the Spirit is a call to remember love is an act of will, not an emotion.

What is the bread and the cup of hope?
The bread and the cup of hope is Christ Jesus our Lord. We have come to renew our hope in him and his life in ours.

Jesus shared the bread and cup with his disciples and was dead by the middle of the next afternoon. They knew nothing of Easter. They only knew the one they had trusted had been executed among common criminals. They ran. They hid. They went fishing. They went to the tomb. When it comes to acting out the Easter story, we know the Cross is not the Last Word. As Tony Campolo has preached more times than he can remember, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming . . . . In our daily lives, we, like the disciples, have no idea what tomorrow holds. We know only the pain and promise we find in today, and the hope we have mustered and saved from days gone by, based on the love we have found to be true. Or, perhaps untrue. Hope is keeping on. We hope when we set the alarm clock for tomorrow morning, when we plan whatever’s next, when we look beyond all that so easily besets us, when we sit down together for dinner.

After we answered the questions, we prayed and then we sang:

Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart
In my heart in my heart
Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart

And then we shared our meal of promise, remembrance, and hope together and went out into the night, knowing tomorrow is the day that marks God’s magnificent defeat,
and knowing we will gather again on Sunday morning for Resurrection and pancakes.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: wildflowers

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

the wildflower patch is coming
back for an encore performance
after last year’s inaugural run

right now everything is a verdant
vibrant and bloomless array of
weeds and flowers, best I can tell

so I hesitate to pull anything
up by the roots because I just
might be pulling up wildflowers

from the highways of my youth
I remember fields of bluebonnets
surely weeds were among them

is it reason enough to pull up
what I don’t recognize because
it’s not something I planted

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: considerable love

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

Because Easter is a moveable feast, our twenty-first wedding anniversary falls on Maundy Thursday. So we celebrated tonight. The Playmakers Repertory Company at UNC is doing a production of Big River, a musical telling of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The musical was on Broadway in the mid-eighties. The songs were written by the King of the Road himself, Roger Miller. Playmakers put on a great show, as usual, and we had a wonderful time.

At one point early on in the play, Jim tells Huck that life has “considerable tragedy and considerable joy.” One comes with the other. I would go as far to say one is essential to the other. When we have the capacity to experience considerable tragedy, it opens up to considerable joy, and vice versa. To be able to feel deeply means all of the feelings. To keep pain at arm’s length is to do the same to joy. It is also to keep others at bay as well. The shared experience of considerable emotion, regardless of the emotion, is a tie that binds.

One of the songs that most moved me this evening was called, “You Oughta Be Here With Me.” A daughter was singing in grief at the death of her father and in uncertainty of what the future might hold.

if you think it’s lonesome where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
if you think there’s heartache where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me

because with you I’m whole, without you I’m cold
so if you think about me where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me

if teardrops are falling where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me
loneliness calling where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me

because with you I’m whole, without you I’m cold
so if you think about me where you are tonight
then you oughta be here with me

“There’s bound to come some trouble in your life,” Rich Mullins used to sing, “but that ain’t nothing to be afraid of.” Poets and songwriters all the way back to Ecclesiastes have known what Jim was telling Huck. The contour of our existence goes as low as it does high. The human race is not run on a flat track.

I listened to the woman sing, “You oughta be here with me” seated next to the person who has been here with me more than anyone in my life. Twenty-one years ago, we were juggling last minute wedding details and imagining a life together. The years that followed have brought highs and lows that neither of us could have anticipated. We grew into the promises we made on our wedding day as we walked into days that offered both better and worse, sickness and health. We’re still waiting on the wealth to show up. Now as Ginger’s dad continues to disappear incrementally as his Alzheimer’s takes a stronger hold, we are learning new levels of feeling and sorrow.

The joy takes the face of gratitude for me these days. In the midst of hard times, I lie in our bed at night and listen to the symphony of breathing sounds offered in concert by Ginger and the Schnauzers and I am grateful to be in the room listening to what joy sounds like. The best news I have is, after twenty-one years, the best place I know to be is with my wife.

A number of years ago, I wrote a song with my friend Billy where I tried to imagine what love looked like farther on in a marriage than I was at a time. The title I came up with was “Well Worn Love,” which conjured up an image of lives that had been gently and daily softened and polished by the love they shared in much the same way that the stairs on the old buildings in Boston were changed by the daily foot falls, or the tails of library lions worn smooth by thousands of small touches. The chorus says,

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

We’re not yet as old as the couple in my song, and I look forward to many more years together. I’m also happy to say, twenty-one years on, I wrote a pretty good song back then. It was not just my imagination running away with me. I am grateful for the considerable love that Ginger and I share in both our tragedy and joy.

And that we still stay our late on a school night.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in remembrance of me

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

We drove to Hampton, Virginia Sunday after church to surprise our friend Charles who turns fifty tomorrow. We walked into their house around suppertime, ate, and then sat around the table talking as old friends do. Our conversation turned to music and then to the music we grew up on, which is gospel. Thanks to Youtube, we were able to share a few of our favorites, starting with Vestal Goodman and Johnny Cook singing, “Looking for a City.” I know. I’ve written and linked before to several gospel video clips because I do find something there that moves me even though the theology of the songs doesn’t always match up with mine.

One of the singing experiences that had a profound impact on my life was being a part of a production of Celebrate Life, which was a youth musical by Buryl Red and Regan Courtney based on the gospels that was a centerpiece of Baptist youth choirs for many, many years. The songs are receptacles of memories and emotions from long ago; some of them remain essential tracks in the soundtrack of my faith. As Holy Week begins, one in particular appears — a Communion song called “In Remembrance.”

in remembrance of me eat this bread
in remembrance of me drink this wine
in remembrance of me pray for the time
when God’s own will is done

in remembrance of me heal the sick
in remembrance of me feed the poor
in remembrance of me open the door
and let your brother i, let him in

take eat and be comforted
srink and remember too
that this is my body and precious blood
shed for you, shed for you

in remembrance of me search for truth
in remembrance of me always love
in remembrance of me don’t look above
but in your heart, in your heart
look in your heart for God

do this in remembrance ofme
do this in remembrance of me
in remembrance of me

After the weekend with Julie and Jay here, a great night with Charles and Jennifer and Samuel in Virginia, and the chance tonight to help out some of my Durham friends on their food truck, I feel full and fortunate. I am grateful that I can look around me and quite easily see the love of God in the faces looking back. As we move through this significant and holy week, I’m carrying this song, and the line in particular that sings:

in remembrance of me always love.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sunday sonnet #26

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

This Sunday is one with two faces,
from shouts of hosanna to curses,
and which emphasis that one places
or whether one reads all the verses

that take Jesus from palms to Passion
and us from fanfare to forgiveness.
We move in liturgical fashion
to do all we can to bear witness

to a love that will not let us go,
even when we’re the cause of the pain.
The two things held together help show
our untamed God cannot be detained.

Did ever such love and sorrow meet?
This is our magnificent defeat.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: being elmo

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I’ve spent the last three days volunteering with the Full Frame Documentary Festival, one of the highlights of the Durham calendar and the largest documentary film festival in the world. I was assigned to the Artist Hospitality Team whose job it was to take the film makers and subjects of the documentaries to and from the airport. What I loved most about the gig was I had twenty-five or thirty minutes with these folks in the car to find out about their movies and to brag a bit on my fair city. I met some wonderful people who had worked hard to get their stories to the screen.

The thing they all had most in common was that their stories took years to tell. Often they had followed their subjects for four or five years, not to mention the time and effort it took to actually get the film funded and produced. The highlight of my weekend was my last run of the morning when I picked up Elmo from the airport.

Kevin Clash is the puppeteer who is the subject of the documentary Being Elmo that showed here this week. I took one of the film’s producers out to the airport to pick up Kevin so he could be here for the screening this afternoon. When I picked up his luggage, he pointed to one small bag and said, “Don’t let that one get crushed; it’s Elmo.” Having been a serious Muppet fan for many years, I was very careful with the luggage and quite excited to be the one driving them all back to town.

This afternoon, I got to see the movie.

When Kevin was nine years old, he saw Sesame Street and the Muppets and was so captured by them that he started making puppets of his own. He then began doing puppet shows in his yard, which led to someone in Baltimore discovering him and bring him to a local TV kids show, which led him to be discovered by Captain Kangaroo and then Jim Henson. When he joined Sesame Street, Kevin didn’t have a set character that he played with any regularity. Elmo had only a small part on the show and the puppeteer who was doing him was frustrated with what he was doing. One day, he tossed the puppet to Kevin and said, “Do whatever you want with this one.”

And Elmo, as we know him, was born.

When Kevin talked about how he developed the character of the little red puppet, he said he began to study the other successful characters on Sesame Street and realized that each one had a defining characteristic. The more he thought about Elmo, he realized what defined Elmo was he loved everyone. From that realization, Kevin brought the Elmo we know into being, who is one who loves better than he does anything else. “Elmo loves you,” the little red guy said over and over, and that unabashed, unfiltered love was the driving force of the movie.

I could feel the tears running down my cheeks as I watched people of all ages fall into the arms of the little red ragamuffin or break into smiles when he laughed. What Elmo understands is when we share love from the core of who we are we create space for all of us to teach and learn and pray. I watched Elmo and I wondered about my own defining characteristic, about what animates my life and my faith.

After the movie, I met Ginger to go to a wedding reception for a couple whom Ginger married while I was watching Elmo. The groom was English and the bride from Durham. They are living in England and got married here in her home church and town. As their friends and family talked about them, what became clear was they, too, were defined by the way they loved both one another and those around them. The evening was one of pure celebration.

From the reception, we headed to Watts Grocery where we met Jay and Julie, two of our intentional family, and we ate and drank and laughed and talked as we have done more evenings than I can count. As we laughed, I thought of Elmo’s giggle as he hugged the kids of all ages that gathered around him after the screening was over, of Kevin Clash as he called an eight-year old girl to the front who makes her own puppets and whom he is mentoring as others did for him. I looked at Ginger, to whom I will have been married twenty-one years this coming Thursday and I thought, much like Elmo we all come to life when our love is what defines us.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: confession

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

perhaps this could be seen
as meeting the minimum
requirement of my promise . . .

I far exceeded, however,
my quota for laughter,
baseball, and my spirit

soared like a fly ball
in the thin night air . . .
forgive me if I am

a man of few words

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: what language shall I borrow?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Marco Werman, the anchor for The World, said, “texted” in a sentence as the past tense of the verb “to text.” Though I’ve come to terms with the transition “text” has made form noun to verb (notice I didn’t say, “transitioned”), I’ve struggled with how to speak of texting in the past tense. It rolls off the tongue like a grammatical mistake, an expression of miseducation, a triumph of convenience over thoughtful expression. I have worked hard not capitulate, choosing instead to say, “I sent you a text message,” hoping I could keep English from yet another assault of verbiating.
And there it was. On NPR, no less.

We Americans, the champions of expediency, have less and less need for verbs it seems. We find it easier to simply put nouns in their place. We friend each other on Facebook (“friended”?), where once we became friends with one another. Perhaps the one that gets me most is hearing people speaking of “gifting” something to another. What’s wrong with giving?

Catching up on other NPR stories I missed, I found this one on new books for language lovers a bit later and a review of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter.

John McWhorter, who specializes in linguistic change, takes us across dozens of tongues and thousands of years, even speculating about the first human speech. We learn the process that turned the Romans’ femina (woman) into the modern French femme, shedding two syllables and even changing vowel sounds. But it’s not all erosion and wearing down. McWhorter also shows how words can become more complicated over time, explaining, for example, where Italian verb endings came from. Seeing numerous languages laid out over history gives a valuable pause for those who mutter about decline. Languages don’t decline; they change. Getting too attached to one moment in time is like getting too invested in the position of the goo in a lava lamp, McWhorter says. You can be bitter watching them shift, or you can be absorbed by the beauty in the process.

I’m sure he texted people who had friended all day, once he heard his book would be impacted by a review.

Reading the last couple of sentences caused me to smile at myself: “Getting too attached to one moment in time is like getting too invested in the position of the goo in a lava lamp.” The English I’m fighting for is a bastardized version to those a generation or two before me. As the speed of life accelerates, circumstances change faster than vocabulary. I’m blogging, after all – and even as I write, my spell checker doesn’t know what to do with that verb.

In semi-related semantic news, David Brooks had a great editorial in the New York Times this week on the quotidian role poetry plays in our lives.

To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it. 

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses. 

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

Sometimes our language changes out of laziness, sometimes out of creativity, sometimes out of necessity. I saw a video clip of Ken Burns talking about the impact the Civil War had on one particular phrase. Before the war, he said, Americans said, “The United States are,” seeing themselves as loosely connected units. After the war, Americans began to say, “The United States is . . . .” The conflict that almost destroyed us made us realize we were inextricably connected.

“Languages don’t decline; they change . . . . You can be bitter watching them shift, or you can be absorbed by the beauty in the process,” says John McWhorter. The way I best understand what he’s saying is to read his words about language as metaphor for faith. Our idea of who God is and what God can do in and through us changes as we learn more about the world around us. The world is not the same as it was during Lent last year, much less two thousand years ago when Jesus was walking around. Most of us wrestle with some of his metaphors and miracles because we don’t keep sheep or know much about leprosy first hand. Some of the issues we face in our world today were not even on the table when Jesus broke bread with his disciples. The world has changed. Our faith has changed. God has changed. Our choices are to fight the change as though it were a threat or to allow ourselves to be absorbed in the process of God’s continuing revelation and redemption.

Change is in the DNA of the universe, in the very core of our Creator.

And I still don’t want to say, “texted.”

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: keepsake

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

there are some nights
when the sky turns
the color of friendship
and fades into the crisp
darkness of gratitude

we ate with friends
drank and talked as well
and then walked away
dropping bit of hope
like breadcrumbs

along the sidewalks
and silent porches
finding our way home
to our porch light
our beacon of belonging

summer will come
and winter will follow
and footprints will fade
but not this indelible
wisp of memory

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: if darwin prayed

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

If you haven’t heard, Rob Bell has written a book.

I haven’t read it, but he apparently has a lot of nerve claiming God loves everyone. What I have read are any number of blog posts, articles, and straight out rants claiming that Bell’s argument that Hell might not exist is not just wrong but evil or dangerous – or both. A Facebook acquaintance posted a link – without irony – to an article by John McArthur entitled, “Rob Bell: A Brother to Embrace or a Wolf to Avoid?”

Seriously?

I used McArthur’s own search function on his blog to see if he ever called Fred Phelps into question and found nothing.

Michael Morrell is a Facebook friend I have never met, but I count him as a friend because he sends me books, thanks to theOoze.com. The latest one will probably make John McArthur invite Rob Bell over for dinner just because of the title: If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics by Bruce Sanguin. The author is a pastor in the United Church of Canada and writes wonderfully about what it means to come to terms both with our ev ever-changing God and our ever-changing universe. Here is an excerpt from the Prologue:

Within the miracle of a living and evolving universe, our understanding evolves regarding God, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, what it means to be a faith community, and what it means to be human. There is no final, un- changing form of Christianity. God’s last word was not uttered two thousand years ago in Nazareth. We can detect in the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and in the stories of His resurrection, the evolutionary bias of an eternal, loving Presence. The failure to update our theological and liturgical models has resulted in modes of worship, spiritual practice, and images of God, that are out of sync with reality (and Reality) as we know it to be.

I’ve been meaning to write a review for awhile, but reading McArthur’s post – and my acquaintance’s willingness to pass it along – gave me the impetus to pass along some words intended to foster faith and community. Sanguin wonders aloud in his opening poem how Darwin might have responded had faith been framed differently for him. Though the poem is long, I’m posting the whole thing here because I couldn’t figure out what to cut.

If Darwin Prayed

I wonder, if Mr. Darwin
had imagined a God
bigger than the theist’s puppeteer—
and less aloof
from nature’s ways—
how he might have prayed.

I wonder,
if he had viewed the great march of time
with a mystic’s eye—
as Spirit’s unhurried play with form and function,
not creation leaving God in the dust
and pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—
if his heart might not have burned with faith.

I wonder,
when the push of Eros
and the pull of the possible
caused him to close the City of God
and leave the dreary seminary
to set sail on board his Beagle destiny,
if he ever imagined that he embodied Spirit’s
irrepressible urge to evolve.

I wonder,
when he reflected on the mystery of a finch’s beak
and the glories of the Galapagos,
if Mr. Darwin considered his own adaptive brilliance
that brought forth The Origin of Species
(his great gift to theology)
an occasion of an even deeper Mystery—
evolution awakening in him.

I wonder,
if, hunched long years
over beetles and mollusks,
he ever considered
St. Paul’s self-emptying God,
touching all with a rising,
noncoercive Presence,
and then going on ahead of us—
as did the Galilean—
calling from an undissected future,
beckoning this sighing creation
toward freedom and fullness of being.

I wonder, Mr. Darwin,
if your beloved Emma might have worried less
over your apostasy
if you could have played the prophet
and announced, with the Baptist,
evolution was filling every valley
making low the mountains,
preparing a highway
through Descartes’ desert,
for the advent,
and not the end,
of God.

(If I were God,
I too would keep my presence hidden,
an allurement of love that predestines no fixed future,
conferring maximum dignity upon life,
as together all that is
joins in the great procession
of the formless,
assuming forms most glorious,
crowning the human ones
with a distinctive diadem—
the capacity to select our own future,
naturally).

I wonder
if Darwin prayed.

The rest of the book offers prayers that follow the ecclesiastical seasons, each tied to a scripture passage, with most of them having been used in worship at Sanguin’s church. The overarching sense of the prayers is one of wonder and openness. These are not the prayers of people convinced they have the answer, or that they need to protect God, but people thriving on questions and committed to being lost in wonder, love, and praise.

I want to be dangerous like them.

Peace,
Milton

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