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an altar in the field

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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We are suckers for Christmas movies around our house and, as a result, last night ended with us all watching Miracle on 34th Street (the John Hughes version) before we went to bed. In the commercial breaks, whatever channel it was kept talking about “The Countdown to the Twenty-five Days before Christmas,” which I could not help making fun of because they were finding a way to add days to their promotion. And then I thought, “At least they are having a countdown.” Marketing scheme or not, they are inviting us to get ready.

For Christians, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. Our church year draws to a close and begins again anew on the First Sunday of Advent, our season of preparation, of waiting, of telling the story of how our God, the Creator of the Universe and Ultimate Expression of Extravagance, thought the best way to incarnate Love was to come in the person of a baby born to a Palestinian peasant family. We know the story as well as we know the lines a redeemed George Bailey yells as he runs home through the snow in Bedford Falls, or Tiny Tim’s words as the Cratchit family’s dinner table. We have our own countdown to Christmas.

While we wait in the weeks to come, we will hear what our new strategy in Afghanistan will be, how serious our elected officials are about healthcare reform that is serious about taking care of people over profits, who will get Grammy nominations, how bad the economy is, how rich the big banks continue to be, and how divided we are as a nation. We won’t hear much about the wars in the Congo or Darfur, and we’ll see a lot of commercials and holiday specials, which is to say most of what happens in this Advent season will not help us get ready for Jesus to come again into our lives.

Two thousand years of Christmases and the tidings of comfort and joy don’t seem to come any easier. The wars are even in the same places they have been for all those centuries. Mary and Joseph had to go through checkpoints for the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria and Bethlehem is still barricaded tonight. As best I can tell, there has not been in a year in the little over half a century that I have been alive that the world has been without war, much less known much of peace.

So how then, do we interpret our coming back to the story, year after year after year, to speak and sing of the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger?

One of my favorite Bible stories is in Joshua, after the Hebrew people have crossed through the Jordan River following the Ark of the Covenant. When they get to the other side, Joshua tells them to stack up the stones:

Joshua called out the twelve men whom he selected from the People of Israel, one man from each tribe. Joshua directed them, “Cross to the middle of the Jordan and take your place in front of the Chest of God, your God. Each of you heft a stone to your shoulder, a stone for each of the tribes of the People of Israel, so you’ll have something later to mark the occasion. When your children ask you, ‘What are these stones to you?’ you’ll say, ‘The flow of the Jordan was stopped in front of the Chest of the Covenant of God as it crossed the Jordan—stopped in its tracks. These stones are a permanent memorial for the People of Israel.'” (Joshua 4:4-7, The Message)

In the midst of a culture that values popularity over principle, chooses fear over faith, and puts stock in power over peace, I want to find the stack of stones (and add a few new ones) to remember what it means to see ourselves as namesakes of the one who grew up out of that manger and called us to be peacemakers. I want to stand in the eye of the hurricane of hope that is the Incarnation, that caught shepherds in its swirl and made magi change their way and wonder what new things God might birth in us this year.

Some years ago, Bob Bennett wrote a song called “Altar in the Field.” One verse says:

I build an altar in the field
in honor in memory
of the many graces I’ve been shown
and the ones I’ve yet to see
and so I leave this symbol
fashioned by my hand
the marker of a love
that I will never understand
I leave an altar in the field

I am waiting to begin waiting, and gathering some stones of my own.

Peace,
Milton

making pies

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

For the first time in a couple of years, I didn’t have to work the day before Thanksgiving, which meant I got to return to one of my favorite personal traditions: Pie-a-palooza. For reasons I cannot completely explain, this particular holiday compels me to bake pies. Some are for our own enjoyment, and we share them as well. I managed to knock out nine of them today: two sweet potato, two pumpkin, two pecan, two brown sugar buttermilk, and one blueberry (Ginger’s favorite). As I worked, I couldn’t help but hum one of my favorite Patty Griffin songs, “Making Pies,” about a woman who worked at the Tabletop Pie Company in Worcester, Massachusetts. May you have a joyful and thankful day.

Peace,
Milton

thank you

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

cynicism comes with coffee
as artificial as sweetener
we’ve grown accustomed
to the bitter aftertaste
negative is normal
critiques and criticisms
pass for conversation in
a culture short on courage
and long on loud

gratitude is hard work
to choose to be thankful
requires the tenacity
of a heart broken open
and willing to sit silently
on a starlight night or in
the shadow of a bee’s wing
the opposite of fear
is thank you — thank you

Peace,
Milton

roots music

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

A couple of weeks ago, I took a Friday morning to do an exercise from Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, which was to construct a time line of my life. I left the house thinking I would be gone a couple of hours. Almost three hours later, I came home with one section done: from my birth to age five. I wrote about things I remembered and things that had been told to me so often I feel as though I remember them, looking back to my birth in Corpus Christi, Texas to moving to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia to coming to Fort Worth, Texas for our first furlough from the mission field, using the vocabulary of those days.

As I began to write what specifics I could remember, my mind began to turn them into larger themes, giving me eyes to see the traces of melody in my early childhood that have continue to inform much of the soundtrack of my life. One of those themes is a sense of rootlessness. We were on a ship to Africa when I turned one year old, so Corpus was nothing more than a birthplace and I never went back there with any intentionality, either as a child or as an adult. When we returned to Africa, we didn’t go back to Bulawayo, but moved north to Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia because my parents saw greater opportunity there. I’ve never gone back to Bulawayo either. Fort Worth has some long standing connections for me, but those grew later rather than earlier in my life. I was married and faraway from both Africa and Texas before a place (Boston) ever became home.

I’ve written before of Arnaldo, the Cuban dishwasher who works with me at the Duke restaurant. He is a wonderful and kind man who came to this country as a part of the Mirabel boat lift in 1980, after having fought in the Cuban army in Angola. Last week he asked if I could find someone to work for him on Tuesday night because he was graduating from his recovery program at Urban Ministries of Durham. (I feel comfortable sharing this with you because his picture was on the front page of the paper.) Though he has not been in Cuba for almost thirty years, Cuba is home to Arnaldo. I love to hear him talk about the country, the people, the food, and the music. On any given night, he will regale us with a Cuban song without much cajoling at all. And so, as a graduation present, I gave him a copy of Ry Cooder’s production masterpiece, The Buena Vista Social Club.

Last night, he came into work with his graduation certificate high above his head, and we cheered for him. “Arnaldo,” I said, “I have something for you,” and I gave him the CD, which he immediately unwrapped and put into the old boom box in the corner of the kitchen. He began singing along from Note One.

“I knew these guys,” he said. “I knew these guys.” And he, Abel (our Guatemalan cook), and I danced around the kitchen, except, in my case, danced is a euphemism.

“Thank you, Milton,” he said. “It’s the best thing you could have done for me.”

In the garden of life, I’m a potted plant, able to moved about as the need arises. I thrive fairly well, though I appear to need increasingly larger pots as I mature. Arnaldo is an old oak, even though he is far from the land where his heart took root. He has the dirt in his DNA. They may have shipped him off because he wouldn’t stay in the army, but he is Cuban to the core.

I have very little idea of how that feels, yet I did learn yesterday that even those of us who don’t know much about home can help someone else find their way there, which turns out to be an incredible gift for everyone involved.

Peace,
Milton

start the revolution

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Mondays are long days in the restaurant at Duke because, in the parlance of the kitchen, we have to “rebuild our prep”: we have to make all things (0r most things) new. We are open Monday through Thursday nights, and, well, we don’t really want to serve stuff that has sat around while we were gone. Some stuff can go in the freezer or gets used or taken home, but some things we have to let go and make new come Monday. Today that list included cutting fresh steaks, breaking down whole chickens and roasting them, cutting pork chops, cutting the calamari rings and preparing the dredge mixture, making the “tobacco onions” (onions sautéed and then cooked in equal parts molasses and Worcestershire sauce), making the pasta sauces (rosemary and marinara), making the desserts (brownies, apple crisps, chocolate chip pan cookies, banana nut bread pudding), preparing the sweet potato pancake mixture, cooking fresh pasta, making rice, mashing potatoes, prepping the side vegetables, making the macaroni and cheese pastries, and baking cornbread.

Like I said, Monday is a long day.

At the Durham restaurant, the whole menu changes four or five times a year, in large part to maintain our commitment to seasonal and local food, but also for some of the same reasons we prep new stuff on Mondays: to keep things fresh and interesting, to help us sharpen both our skills and our imaginations, to keep us from getting complacent about our cooking. It also requires we stare down our fear to risk. After a month or two, a menu becomes comfortable and reliable, and customers become attached to particular dishes. Replacing all the entrees means knocking off the favorites and asking our diners to risk with us. For the most part, they do.

Seeing both things as metaphor has been on my mind today after finishing Parker J. Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, where he spends a good bit of time talking about how the working metaphors for our lives affect how we live them out. He also talks about leadership, and the “shadows” we have to live through in order to find the lights of inner strength and outward community, one of which he describes as the “denial of death itself,” and he says:

Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: fear of failure. In most organizations, failure means a pink slip in your box, even if that failure, that “little death,” was suffered in the service of high purpose. It is interesting that science, so honored in our culture, seems to have transcended this particular fear. A good scientist does not fear the death of a hypothesis, because that “failure” clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds. The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative – if it was tested for good reasons – is always a source of new learning.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything – and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is done, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.

I had the morning off on Friday before going to work on a catering gig, so I went with Ginger to hear a discussion at the Duke Divinity School being moderated by one of our church members. One of the presenters asked, “How do we think about our Christian tradition in new and radical ways?” She went on to say, for instance, two of the archetypal themes of Christian history were radical generosity and iconoclasm. The Christian tradition has, at its core, a stream of a radical re-looking at our blind spots and asking, “Who is being denied their imago Dei?” We do better, she said, when we chose to see revolution as normal in our lives of faith.

On Saturday morning, I was a part of a deacons’ retreat at our church. We worked hard with an eye to how we can help our church grow to be stronger and more vital in our witness to our community. I gotta tell ya, it’s easier to latch on to revolution as normal when it is a grand idea in a seminar than when it is talking about line items in the budget of a local congregation. I thrive on change probably more than most folks and I also understand every institution, large and small, requires a certain amount of steadfastness for the sake of self-preservation. The paradox of that preservation is that it is less secure in keeping everything the same than it is when things are allowed to die and revolution is allowed its natural place in the order of things. We are evolutionary creatures; we were created to thrive when we grow and change; we were not built to stay the same.

I’m grateful to say I saw some seeds of faithful insurgency planted around our table Saturday morning. I’m looking forward in seeing what takes root in our hearts, even as I am aware of the fledgling rumblings of revolution within my own heart. What would that be: a coup de coeur?

That I’ve been reading Palmer is no accident. I’m working hard to listen to my life because there is much to hear. These are days full of invitations to follow, which also means being willing to follow and fail, and learn and grow. As much as it makes for great devotional writing, the prospect of failure gets more foreboding with age, or the attachments and entanglements that come with being on the planet for over half a century. It’s just tougher to strip the gears and head a new direction, that’s all. On the other hand, when I look ahead believing I am far from finished with my time here, why would I not want to let it all ride on the next big adventure, the next chapter in the story, the next menu, if you will?

Why not, indeed.

Peace,
Milton

a poet’s bible

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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As I was reading this morning, I reached for David Rosenberg’s A Poet’s Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text and his translation of parts of Job and Ecclesiastes took me on a wonderful little journey.

A Poet’s Bible

I found it used, on the shelf
in the basement of the Harvard
Bookstore, one blurb proclaiming,

“The best translation of this century,”
yet relegated to life among the
remnants and returned, years ago.

And this morning, after coffee and
my own reflection on my daily
work, I found it again and pulled

it from my own shelf and a place
it had sat unread far too many
days for a best translation.

I opened to Ecclesiastes
(turn, turn, turn)
to see how the poet heard what

I know by heart because he knew
the words behind the words,
all unrecognizable consonants

to me, running right to left,
as if we were playing the record
backwards to see what was being

secretly said; but there’s no secret
when I can sit and listen to
my life, to his words:

the grace to be still
in the flow of all creation
for a moment

I read it repeatedly in silence
and the chill of this rainy morning
glistening with the grace that has

traversed millennia, transcended
language, and is aged with the
understanding of fallen leaves and

broken branches, life and death,
failure and hope: used books,
used lives found in translation.

Peace,
Milton

the fellowship of the broken

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I have several friends who are authors.

Not that I’ve ever met them, you understand. They don’t even know who I am. Yet I count them as friends because their words have helped me to learn and grow. And so I carry deep gratitude and affection toward Madeleine L’Engle, Frederick Buechner, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Henri Nouwen, to name a few. I thought of Nouwen in particular tonight when I got email today about The TED Prize that was awarded to Karen Armstrong (also an author) in 2008 and culminated today in the launching of the Charter for Compassion. Armstrong is a former nun who has become one of the world’s best and best-known religious historians and probably one of the few people in the world who actually understands Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Charter for Compassion is her initiative to call people together by beginning with the understanding that compassion and interconnectedness lie at the heart of most all of the world’s religions. The charter begins:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

I still haven’t gotten to how Henri Nouwen fits in to all of this. Well, I have to back up a few years.

Try twenty-five years.

In the early eighties, Nouwen wrote a book called Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life that I bought and read and read again. In it, he gave me the best working definition of compassion – voluntarily entering the pain of another – and he made the case for that compassion being a “uniquely Christian virtue.” As one blurb explains:

At first sight compassion seems to be a natural, instinctive, human response to others’ pain and suffering. But on closer inspection the authors conclude that for the Christian true compassion is born only out of prayerful reflection on the implications of the Incarnation and the demands it makes on all who would follow in the footsteps of the Man of Sorrows.

As I listened to Armstrong talk, I wondered what he would do if he were here to read her offering. Would the priest and the former nun find they were on the same page? The question is fun to think about, but it’s not the one driving me to write tonight. Listen to Nouwen:

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.

The Fellowship of the Broken. Yes.

As I read his words again, I realize I understand what he is talking about because of the Incarnation, because of my faith in Christ and the lessons I learn from Jesus’ life. When I listen to Armstrong, I understand the Fellowship of the Broken is not limited to Christians any more than we can claim to have a corner on the truth (or the Truth). We are called to care for one another because we are all God’s children.

God’s broken children.

Nouwen was compelling because he lived a life of true compassion, actually entering pain he could not comprehend. He asked to be sent to the poorest parish in the world to work even as he was becoming a well-known writer and speaker; he also spent years as a part of the L’Arche Community. No doubt his faith was what compelled him to make those choices. The same was true for Gandhi, yet the faith that led him down the same path of brokenness was not called by the same name.

Before we even join churches or mosques or synagogues, we are a part of the Fellowship of the Broken. Coming to terms with that connection and committing ourselves to compassionate living is what will begin to put us back together.

Take a minute and watch the video.

Peace,
Milton

fall music sampler: rainy day edition

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

As the remnants of Ida make their way through our neighborhood, I thought tonight might be a good one to think about rain songs. I’ll start with a great clip of Usher dancing along side of Gene Kelley and “Singing in the Rain.”

I’ll follow with a clip of a very young Nanci Griffith singing something those of us who are not so far removed from our drought days might still be willing to sing: “I Wish It Would Rain.”

And speaking of youngsters, here is Stephen Bishop in an American Bandstand clip singing “Save It for a Rainy Day.”

One title can lead to two good songs; here’s the Jayhawks (also from long ago) singing their song of the same name:

James Taylor covered the song “Rainy Day Man” with great success; here’s Bonnie Raitt singing it back to him at a tribute show.

I’ll let her song be the segue to James Taylor and Elvis Costello covering the Everly Brothers’ “Crying in the Rain.”

She’s got a song that fits the category, so I can’t pass up the chance to share Patty Griffin’s “Rain.”

And I’ll close with another cover: the Boss singing John Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

Stay warm and dry, my friends.

Peace,
Milton

of cardboard and connectedness

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

The loading dock area behind the West Union at Duke, in which my restaurant is located, is also where we go to throw away our trash. The singular term no longer applies because of the way we are expected to separate and organize our refuse for disposal. There is a giant dumpster where the garbage goes, but first we keep any food-related trash for the compost area, recyclables (plastics, glass, aluminum) in recycling bins, and all cardboard boxes have to be flattened and put into a baler.

I am sharing all this scintillating information to get to this detail: every restaurant in our building has to take a turn being responsible for keeping the trash area clean and emptying the baler everyday for a week, and that week comes round for us every other month. Our latest week began today. Billy, the daytime chef is a Duke institution, knows everyone, and takes great pride in the area being cleanest when it’s our week. That also means when someone just dumps their cardboard, he figures out who it is, goes and gets them, and makes them clean up. Up until tonight, he has been the one to do the baling, and I have helped enough to know how to do it. It’s just never been full at the end of my shift.

Tonight it was. More than full. So full Abel and I had to take out almost a third of what was in there to get the baler to work. For those of you who remember when David Letterman used to crush things with a pneumatic press, that’s what this baler does. The cardboard gets loaded in the front, a giant press keeps squeezing it down, and that process continues until you have a full bundle. Then you manually keep the press in the down position, open the front of the machine, thread two twenty foot metal ties through the machine so they wrap around the bale and bind them, release the press so the bale is free, set a wooden palette in front of the open machine, raise the floor so the bale rolls out on the palette (we’re talking a ton of cardboard here), roll the palette down to the loading dock, put some fresh pieces of flat cardboard down so the threading will work the next time, and close the front door so people can start stacking stuff in there again. Tonight, we got to add the steps of cleaning up after two restaurants who, when they saw the baler was full, decided it was cool to jus throw their boxes next to the machine without even breaking them down.

If you are still reading at this point, here’s my question: when you know what it is like to have to deal with the baler because you have to take a turn, why would you make life more difficult for those who are baling when it’s not your turn?

Seems like an obvious question (and answer), yet I notice most every time I take out the trash, whether assigned to bale or not, that cardboard is strewn about without much thought for who does have to do the cleanup. And, I’m afraid, that kind of insensitivity is not confined to recycling at Duke. We, as human beings, often fall short in the “do unto others” category. We may not want it done to us, but we don’t necessarily choose for that to also mean we won’t do it unto others.

In restaurants that serve more than one meal, as the ones I work in both do, all of depend on the kindness of coworkers to leave the station in shape for us who follow. And we are expected to leave things ready for the next shift to come in. That means everything from cleaning well to leaving notes about what might have been used up or will need to be prepped, to taking time to refill squeeze bottles or consolidate the produce in the walk-in refrigerator. And, though I realize this has to rank right up there with a shaggy dog story when it comes to lengthy set ups, I am struck that life is the same way. Whatever the action or the situation, we are, for the most part, following someone into that situation and will be followed by another. It’s as true about grocery lines as it is about churches.

Somewhere in my blog reading when I got home from work (and I lost the reference by the time I got out of the shower and came back to write), I came across a wonderful post challenging churches to think beyond the present tense and be mindful of those who will follow. Their point was looking at a grand theological idea; I’m looking at the same idea on a more hands-on level. Think about who will be walking into the room next, pulling into the parking place next, using that shopping cart next, stepping into your spot once you have moved on. I’m not advocating Random Acts of Kindness (though I like those) as much as making a case for Intentional Acts of I Knew You Were Coming After Me.

We are all being followed, even as we follow someone into most every situation. We may not be able to control much of any of the situations we walk into, yet we can determine how we will leave things for those who come after us. Though I wish more folks would remember this week, while I am baling the cardboard, I’m writing mostly so I will remember next week and next month when I’m not.

Peace,
Milton

best lights

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

It’s not so much the words
as the way they sometimes
line up, the way they are
placed on the page —
single syllables can speak,
tear open false healings,
deep calling to deep
with faith and familiarity
both brand new and ages old.
I saw these four words:
our own best lights
at the tail end of a sentence
about being true

and I wondered where
my best lights had gone,
why I become too easily
accustomed to beams
buried under bushel baskets
of daily living, how I can
forget what brightness is,
how easily dim becomes
the definition of normal.
Yet, found by four small
words, I remember the light
shines in the darkness and
the darkness cannot put it out.

Peace,
Milton

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