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advent journal: incidental contact

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

The first Sunday of the month means we celebrate Communion at our church, as in many Protestant congregations. Of all the things we do together in worship, Communion lands at the top of the list for me: we remember the story that binds us together in word and in action, we feed one another, and we do some thing that every Christian who came before us has done all the way back to that First Supper in the Upper Room.

I come away from the meal each month feeling filled and connected.

This afternoon, Ginger and I went to an assembly of Durham CAN (Durham Congregations, Associations, and Neighborhoods) which is a community organizing group made up of a wide cross-section of people from across the city who connect to bring about change in our city. They organized neighborhood audits a couple of months back where people walked the streets of various neighborhoods – particularly some of the poorer ones – and made note of all the things that needed to be fixed. They gave that information to the city. Today, the City Manager stood before the assembly and one of the Durham CAN leaders asked him if he would be accountable to come back in ninety days and report on how the needs on the list were being addressed. He said he would.

Durham CAN doesn’t raise money or hire lobbyists. They connect people in the community and bank on the relationships to call people to accountability. The trust of the organization is in the power of relationships. After the meeting ended, Ginger introduced me to Mauricio, whom she had met at an earlier meeting.

“I want you to tell Milton your story,” she said to him.

Mauricio is from El Salvador and came to the U. S. in early 1980 at the encouragement of his mentor, Bishop Oscar Romero, who helped him and several other your Salvadorian men get out of the country to tell El Salvador’s story and to escape being killed by the death squads. Romero himself was assassinated in March of the same year. I was speechless. I was standing next to someone in Durham, North Carolina who was standing next to me because of the actions of one of the heroes of my faith. For a moment, I stood in a small church connected across miles and years to someone who had helped to shape my faith, connected hand to hand, person to person.

When we left the meeting, Ginger and went home, fed the pups, picked up the pot of chili I made this afternoon, and headed for Fullsteam to break bread or at least eat chili and drink beer some folks who had been at the assembly and a few others who were just coming for the food and fellowship. The chili was hot, the beer was cold, and the conversations were rich and flavorful. I met some wonderful people. As we were getting ready to leave, one of the folks with us pointed out a large table of Duke Divinity School students and mentioned several of them had gone to Wheaton College in Illinois, where our nephews went to school. Ginger and I walked over to the table, introduced ourselves, and then asked if they knew Ben and Scott and several faces at the table lit up. For a moment, I stood in a pub connected across miles and years to two guys I love deeply through people I can’t even call by name but who share the affection for Ben and Scott.

The incidental contact of an introduction, a conversation, or passing the Bread and the Cup is the stuff of glory, or community, of incarnation. We make our way across oceans and opinions, across aisles and attitudes in small steps and gentle gestures much more than huge leaps and grand actions. We serve one another, hand to hand, all the way back to the Upper Room.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: vegetative state

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

the farmers’ market is an act of faith,
the sky starting to smell like snow . . .
we are all dressed like vegetables
are the last things on our minds, yet
we are as determined as the kale to
make the most of this descending season.

one friend finds me in the sweet potatoes
and we swap stories for sustenance;
he talks of reading with his daughter
great stories of friends and loyalty and
I think of my friends: tenacious as turnips,
hardy as collards, and true as beets.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: us with us

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Years ago, at a youth camp with my dear friend, John, I watched as he led his group in a visible expression of their connections with one another. One person started with a ball of string and tossed it to another while holding on to the end. Then she told the other what the connection meant to her; that person tossed it to another and so on until they had created a visible expression of the love they shared for and with one another.

It matters to feel connected.

One of the ways that we stay alive is trusting that those kinds of connections are still there and then days come when we need a more tangible sense of the tenacious tether of love: we need to see it, to say it, to step in and do what it takes to tighten the bonds and pull close together. Tonight is one of those nights for the very friend who showed his kids how to love each other. The story is his to tell, but the short version is his life took a hard turn this week and he is leaving the church where he has pastored without knowing what is coming next.

Another tangible expression of love, for me, has been Patty Griffin’s song, “When It Don’t Come Easy,” particularly for her stunning articulation of what love looks like:

if you break down I’ll drive out and find you
if you forget my love I’ll try to remind you
and stay by you when it don’t come easy

Tonight’s post, therefore, takes a more personal tone than usual in its focus. On the way to Bethlehem, I want my friend to know he is not alone. I want to remind myself of the same. The angel’s response to Joseph’s fear and questions about the unknown that lay ahead was to tell him what to name the child: Emmanuel, God with us.

Yes. And us with us, too.

Here’s is Justin McRoberts’ cover of Patty’s song.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: allergic reaction

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

they catch me
coming and going
my eyes itch
my sinuses clog
like an old drain
whether the trees
are budding
or the leaves
are taking their
parting shot
on their way
to death
how can some
thing as simple as
coming and going
budding and falling
cause so much
pain and discomfort
in the midst of
beauty and color?

I think I’m still
talking about leaves.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: fully human

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

At church last Sunday we lit the first candle for hope. At school this week, we are preparing to send out midterm progress reports. At my school, the reports have both a grade and a narrative. Most all of my students struggle in one way or another; some more than others. One boy is new this year and is having a hard time. Even at a school aimed at the kids that don’t fit in a more conventional structure, he is an outsider. It’s painful to watch. He had been at school about a month when he asked me at the end of class one day, “Mr. B-C, am I a bad person?”

“No,” I replied, “you’re not.”

“Then why don’t people like me?”

I didn’t have an answer. This term, he has stopped doing most all of his homework. Today, I pulled him aside, along with our academic dean who is wonderful with kids, not to chide the boy but to see if I could find some way to reach him. Over the past several days, when I have asked for his homework, his head drops, he lets out a deep sigh, and his body physically deflates. He looks defeated and disgraced all in one motion. As we talked this afternoon, he sank deeper and deeper into the chair as he talked about feeling paralyzed by perfectionism. He wasn’t turning in the work, he said, because he didn’t think it would be good enough and he would feel like a failure.

Three different times I told him the homework assignments (reading journals) were things he got full credit just for turning them in. If something was not right, he could revise it without penalty. Then I would ask him what he heard me say and he would talk about not being good enough. We talked long enough to agree that his best way out of the hole he has dug for himself was one assignment at a time. Bird by bird, if you will. I didn’t ask him to make any promises other than he would turn in the next reading journal, which is due on Friday. He agreed. As I drove home, I remembered a poem I wrote a decade ago about a young man who was being beaten down by high school. I dug back through my files and found it.

high school

say you start with
a thousand candles
tiny little beacons
beaming together
in adolescent brilliance

say you blow out one
it doesn’t take much
this one here
at the edge
in the back

say you blow out one
no one will notice
one each night
just one
how could it matter

come back
in a thousand nights
the eyes
will have nothing
left to say

only the light over
the kitchen sink
goes out
with the flick
of a switch

the light inside
dies incrementally

My student thinks failure is the default setting for what it means to be human. No matter how hard he tries, sooner or later he is going to come up short – too short – and be exposed for the failure that he is to the core of his being. And he’s not alone, which makes me wonder if perhaps grade reports in the middle of Advent are not so out of place. One of the most powerful implications of the Incarnation is what Jesus being born “fully human” says about what it means for any of us to be human. Yes, we are all capable of doing damage to our selves and to one another, but because of the birth in Bethlehem, because the Word became flesh, I am reminded that my student is not most human when he is deflated and despairing and neither am I.

It is good to be human. Jesus said so with his birth.

Keep lighting candles.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: mothers of metaphor

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet people die miserably every day…
…for lack
of what is found there


— William Carlos Williams

Today I hit a wall I didn’t see coming.

I ran into people who couldn’t see the metaphor sitting right in front of us. They weren’t stupid or belligerent or intractable; they just didn’t see it. And I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in Pakistan trying to carry on a conversation and I was the only one who didn’t speak Urdu. I knew what I wanted to say, but none of the words I had seemed to work.

I think I was so flummoxed because talking about faith means talking about poetry: it’s all metaphor. Let me say here that I learned something from my conversation, so I want to clarify: to say it’s metaphor is not saying it’s something other than true. Poetry, for me, is our best chance at truth telling. For the sake of definition: metaphor is comparison – using one thing to talk about something else.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37)

OK, so technically it’s a simile because Jesus used “as,” but he wasn’t claiming to be a hen as much as using the metaphor to talk about the ache in his heart. The word metaphor can be traced back to the sixteenth century:

lit. “a carrying over,” from metapherein “transfer, carry over,” from meta- “over, across” (see meta- ) + pherein “to carry, bear”

A word bridge, if you will: to carry over, to bear across. This is the way truth travels. When I was looking up the word origin, I came across a philosopher who was new to me: R. G. Collingwood. His introduction was this quote:

It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another; it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add “All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense”: to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.

I don’t know much at all about Mr. Collingwood’s faith perspective, but he’s on to something when it comes to realizing that the language of faith is one where “the truth and the imagery are identified.”

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. (Luke 22:19-20)

Jesus’ words are crammed full of metaphor, still when I take the Bread and the Cup in worship there is more going on than figurative language when Ginger looks me in the eye and says, “The Body of Christ.” And it is with the same sense of full contact poetry that I hear one of my favorite Advent quotes (and the one at the center of the conversation that started this post):

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God fourteen hundred years ago and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be Mothers of God. — Meister Eckhart

When we come back to the story that birthed our faith, we usually see ourselves among the shepherds working our way to the manger and staring up into the starlit night to hear the angels sing. Sometimes, we journey with the Magi, or perhaps come to terms with our inner Innkeeper. Still it seems to me the heart of the story is in the young peasant girl who carried the baby to term and then gave birth to the Incarnation. Eckhart calls us to engage the story as viscerally as it is possible for truth and imagery to collide: hurt and push and scream and struggle and labor to do what it takes to let our lives give birth to Love in the middle of our world. We are all meant to be mothers of God, being created in the image of God who is Mother to us.

A neighbor sent an email on our listserv asking if anyone had a copy of the movie Ishtar. It has never made it to DVD and she said she was one of the few who liked the movie and really wanted to see it again. I was happy to let her know there were at least two of us in the neighborhood and I was glad to let her borrow my copy. The song at the heart of the movie begins,

telling the truth can be dangerous business . . .

As goofy as the song is, truth is dangerous business – dangerous and wonderful business. I don’t mean the kind of truth that becomes a weapon or a measuring stick, but the truth that gives birth in us to a sense of what God can do if we, like Mary, are willing to say, “Let it be.”

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: it’s about time

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7

Madeleine L’Engle would have been ninety-two today.

I think of her every Advent (and a number of other days as well) because she is the one who taught me about the Liturgical Year – through her writing, that is. I never got to meet her, though I had a couple of near misses. If you click her tag in the sidebar of this blog you can get a sense of the way she has been a mentor to me in faith, life, and writing going all the way back to my fourth grade year when I read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time.

I said I think about her, but that’s not the right verb. She haunts me during Advent the way a spirit haunts an old house. I’m not trying to conjure up a spooky vibe, but haunt is the right verb. In these days of brilliant darkness, the night is full of shadows and saints, the substance of things hoped for brushing up against us in the hallways, their whispers sliding down the banisters and slipping into the corners of our hearts. Thin places the Celtic Christians called them, where the divine and the human can touch.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)

Her statement is so over the top that it captures the subversive nature of Jesus’ birth. To celebrate God with us is to grasp to all that is good about being human. The Word became flesh on purpose, with purpose, and it was good. Then Jesus walked from town to town, eating and drinking, talking and healing, as if he had all the time in the world. There was no strategy to employ other than to love people face to face. In A Wind in the Door, my favorite of the Time stories, Meg Murry has this interchange with Progo, a cherubim.

“Progo,” Meg asked. “You memorized the names of all the stars – how many are there?”

“How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.”

“I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that’s a great many.”

“But how many?”

“What difference does it make? I know their names. I don’t know how many there are. It’s their names that matter.”

We had a discussion around the dinner table the other night about what the word “normal” means and whether or not that word is useful or helpful. For me, it depends how its used. If it is used to describe what can be expected in a given situation, it offers something of value. However, when it is a means of comparison, the word does far more damage than it does good because it becomes a semantic weapon: I am normal (meaning straight, white, and male – or whatever the dominant power group) and the rest of you don’t measure up. No need for names because the un-normal don’t count. In the face of normalcy, Jesus came from the very womb of the Great Unwashed and turned a feeding trough into an altar where everyone is welcome.

And the angels called him by name: Emmanuel – God with us.

Two of the central callings of Christianity are to wait and to remember. Both require us to come to terms with time, which is the quintessential thin place. In A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs. Murry says, “Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” Madeleine talked about the moments in our lives stacking up on one another, like an altar. She said it this way in Walking on Water:

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide…

Her image stayed with me such that in one of my rare forays into short fiction I wrote about a man in a doctor’s waiting room:

I am fourteen at my brother’s military funeral;
I am seven putting a tooth under my pillow;
I am twenty-eight and my son has survived the surgery;
I am sixteen pulling out of the driveway for the first time;
I am fifty-four holding my first grandchild;
I am thirty stretching to touch a name on the Wall;
I am nine going to the principal’s office for cutting off Sally Jeffrey’s pigtail;
I am twenty-five laying down next to my wife for the first night in our first home;
I am seventy-two being pushed down a colorless hall to a semiprivate room;
I am eighteen registering for the draft;
I am forty-five with my Christmas bonus;
I am sixty-one at my wife’s funeral;
I am thirty-seven waiting to hear the results of my brain scan.

Remembering is putting the stack of time back together again; waiting is being content to sit in the thin place as though time were more essence than schedule, more holy than hurried. When time stands sacredly still, waiting and being are the same thing and I can see the shadows and saints that haunt me with their hope.

and you beneath life’s crushing load
whose forms are bending low
who toil along the climbing way
with painful step and slow
look now for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing
o rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: the night is far spent . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

The night is far spent . . .

Yes, there’s another half to that sentence, but it’s too early to write it down. We still have weeks of days growing shorter, of darkening afternoons, of lying down to sleep in the middle of all that is not yet. While the new year we mark with our shared calendar comes with countdowns and confetti, the new year that begins with Advent starts with a pregnant pause and silence as thick as the dark.

We are waiting: preparing, anticipating, getting ready.

Last night, Ginger, Jay, and I walked down to Fullsteam, our neighborhood pub, with Ella, our most social Schnauzer, in tow. She was the hit of the bar. One guy came over to pet her and stayed to talk to us. His wife is eight and a half months pregnant. “This is my last night out before the baby comes,” he said, with more excitement than regret. He was already marking time by the birth.

I got home last night and realized today would have been my friend David’s fifty-ninth birthday had he not died suddenly last December. He was one who incarnated the presence of Jesus as much as anyone I know and he died for no good reason. When I sat down to write tonight, I got word that the son of a friend here in Durham died on Thursday. He was born only two weeks ago. Even as I prepare for Christ to be born again in my time and in my culture, I am marking time by who is not here, by whom I have lost, by death. As we talk about Advent as a season of waiting in the best sense of the term, I realize I am waiting for and watching as my father-in-law disappears due to his Alzheimer’s. He walks the halls of our home, lost in the short passageway between his room and the sunroom where he watches television, lost in the corridors of his mind, trapped in the excruciating pause that is now his life. Sometimes when he’s moving down the hall, we ask where he’s going and he says simply, “I don’t know,” and then waits for further instructions. This is some of the pain I know of, and I am barely scratching the surface of the shared pain of humanity.

The night is far spent and its taking names.

Our Hanging of the Greens service, which marks the beginning of Advent, centers around the various traditions that Christianity appropriated over the years to make them part of our expression of the hope and faith we find in Christmas. As the holly, evergreen wreaths, poinsettias, and lighted trees were brought in and we heard the stories, I realized I am a part of a faith tradition, a citizen of a country, and a speaker of a language all of which have thrived on appropriation, by which I mean they have found ways to take what they find interesting around them and make it part of themselves as a way of improving and growing – and, sometimes, conquering.

The particular point in the service where it hit me was when two children brought in the poinsettias. The legend, which came from Mexico, told of a little girl who had nothing to bring the Baby in the manger, so she picked a plain branch. By the time she gave it to Jesus, it had blossomed into the beautiful flower we see at Christmas. The story has the same magic realism as a good Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story, where healing happens because something is transformed by hope, or pain, or tears, or love.

The Gospel passage for today wasn’t pointing to Bethlehem quite yet, a reminder that endings are prelude to beginnings. Jesus was talking about the end of the world, using a break-in as metaphor:

But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.

Whether with a bang or with a whimper, the world ends with about as much warning as Reuben’s Alzheimer’s or the little girl’s flowering branch. The world ends over and over everyday all around us without much regard for purpose or preparation. We know the thieves are coming and we can’t stay awake because we’re exhausted.

The night is far spent and has dragged us with it.

Ritual, as an act of faith, is meaningful repetition. The words we read and the songs we sing invite us to move with the sacred and subversive muscle memory of all those who have come before us lighting one candle at a time in the face of the gathering dark, telling the stories over and over, sharing soup and bread and hope, and waiting as the world ends again and again for another beginning.

The night is far spent . . . .

Peace,
Milton

a christmas story

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

A couple of years ago, I recorded a story I wrote some years before that for a Christmas Eve service at our church in Marshfield, Massachusetts. I have some of the CDs available for purchase, should you wish to share them, or have one for yourself. Paypal says you can buy one by clicking the button below.

You can read the text of the story here.

Gift message

Peace,
Milton

sunday sonnet #14

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

When it comes to spiritual metaphors, kingdom is problematic for me. I’ve written about it before. Thus, my sonnet offering for today.

When Jesus talked of God, he spoke of shepherds and of kings –
the metaphors held meanings people knew;
they’ve survived the centuries when we speak and when we sing,
yet the original meanings struggle to get through.

So let us ask why, when we’re trying to speak in present tense,
we chose to cling to things that are archaic?
When we see that no one’s laughing, it certainly makes sense
‘Cause we keep on telling jokes in Aramaic.

With any of the parables, the reader has to work,
and that labor deepens with distance from the telling;
our interpretations must be more relevant than rote,
less compliant, more subversive and compelling.

Jesus wasn’t kidding when he warned about new wine,
New eyes and new wineskins are needed by design.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — In preparing for Thanksgiving, I also offer new pie recipes here, here, here, here, and here.

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