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lenten journal: tree hair

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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lenten journal: tree hair

Our last full day in Savannah began with the Gospel Brunch at the Good Times Jazz Bar and Restaurant, which is a few blocks from our hotel. The music, food, and conversation around the table were all nourishing. (I had a roasted boneless quail stuffed with collard greens over grits–and a side of catfish.)

Then we walked down to the River to meet Demetry, whom I mentioned earlier in the week, for him to tell us about himself, Savannah, and the art and sculpture in the hotel.

As he was telling us all sorts of interesting things, he mentioned, as an aside, that Spanish Moss needs trees to stay alive. If it is lying on the ground, it will die. Then he said, “If you see it on the sidewalk, put it back in the tree.”

The Indigenous name for the hanging curiosity translates as “tree hair,” but the colonialists changed that–mostly in jest. The French looked at the grey wisps as they dangled and called them “barbe espagnol,” likening them to the long scraggly beards of the Spaniards, who in turn called it “cabello francés” (French hair), but the French name stuck.

When I first saw how much of it hung from the majestic oak trees around here, I worried that it was a parasite–like kudzu–but it is not. It doesn’t take any nourishment from the tree it inhabits. The moss feeds on the dust and particles in the air, as well as the moisture, which is part of the reason it needs the tree to live: it gets to hang in the air where all the particles are. It also holds moisture until its host is ready to absorb it, which means it feeds the tree during dry spells.

The tree hair is a good metaphor to describe how I feel about our time here. We have hung around for a few days, feeding on particles–stories, conversations, encounters, surprises, food–not as parasites, but as epiphytes: those who need others to grow. We have also had an opportunity to give back to Savannah in a small way, I suppose, though that was not our primary intent. But good relationships are mutual ones. Mark Knofler wrote (and sang) “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” Perhaps there’s another version that would sing, “sometimes you’re the oak tree, sometimes you’re the moss.”

After dinner we sat in a circle in the lobby of our hotel and talked about what was on our minds these days. Members of our group range from age seven to those in their late seventies. We took turns being the moss and the tree as we listened to one another. Not everyone in the group knew each other well before we got here. Some of our sharing tonight was gratitude for new connections, some was gratitude for the chance to deepen relationships that are as well-rooted as the oak trees.

Tomorrow we go home to trees that don’t know about tree hair. I hope we can remember how to continue to nourish one another.

Peace,
Milton

 

lenten journal: small stories

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
lenten journal: small stories

Tonight we ate dinner at 2 Chefs Gullah Geechee restaurant in Savannah. Morolayo Akinrinnola and OriBemi Adetutu are the chef owners (and are married to each other), and they were the ones in the kitchen cooking all the goodness that graced our plates. Mine included fried chicken, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and rice with gravy. Oh–and a cinnamon roll right out of the oven that was legendary.

But I am getting ahead of myself. That’s how we finished the day.

We began by letting Johnnie Brown take us on a two-hour Black history tour of Savannah, which included a number of stops and an incredible amount of information, but the highlight was visiting the Beach Institute, which was founded in 1865 as the first official school for African-Americans in Savannah. Today it is Savannah’s flagship museum for African-American arts, history, and cultural preservation. We saw exhibits showcasing the art of Rudolf Valentino Bostic, a folk artist who painted on cardboard with discarded house paint because he didn’t have money to buy supplies, and the wooden sculptures of Ulysses Davis, a barber who “whittled” in his spare time to create amazing work.

From there we went to lunch at Rancho Allegra, a family-owned Cuban restaurant that started in a house twenty years ago and now offers not only great food but is an important live music venue in the city. The food was flavorful and interesting. The people were friendly and kind. It was good to be there.

We then drove about eight miles out of town to the Pin Point Heritage Museum, which is located in the old A. S Varns and Sons Oyster and Crab Factory. We sat in the rooms where they had picked crab and shucked oysters hour after hour and listened to Gail, a woman who had worked in the factory as a child, tell us about how the people who worked there found ways to buy the land and establish their community, in large part around the Sweetfields of Eden Baptist Church. The community dates back to 1896. The land has remained in the hands of the descendants of those folks ever since, making it the largest amount of Black-owned waterfront property in Georgia, and one of the most cohesive Gulla-Geechee communities left in America.

We watched a documentary about the oyster and crab factory, looked out across the Moon River (named in honor of Johnny Mercer, who was from Savannah) and the marshes, and listened to Gail tell stories as we stood in the places where folks had done such backbreaking work for very little pay. The spirit of the people shone through in all of it. Gail also told us some of her story–how her mother and father got her through college, and how she found her way back to work in the museum because she wanted people to know the story.

Then we went to dinner. I’ve already told you about the food–well, my food. Others had fried shrimp, red rice, smothered shrimp, and most all of us had cinnamon rolls. After dinner, I asked Chef Morolayo if they could come talk to us for a minute. She told us about Gulla-Geechee food and how she had learned to cook from her grandmother. She also talked about Pin Point, and when we said we had been to the museum earlier, she said, “Did y’all meet my cousin Gail?”

That also seemed to open her up to share more about their life and how the restaurant came to be. She had a catering business that she had to close. Her husband was also struggling. They had lost everything, she said. They both decided to go to a culinary school they saw advertised on television, both got scholarships, and both got their certifications. Then they opened the restaurant. The other astonishing detail was they had eleven children, ranging from age thirty-one to five. Through all her story, it was clear that this was a woman who loved her life, as hard as it might have been, which was also what it felt like to look at Bostic’s paintings, or Davis’ woodwork, or hear Gail talk about why Pin Point mattered so much.

Some of our group were talking after we got back to the hotel, and it struck me that it’s not so much the actual circumstances of our existence as it is how we tell the story of our lives. None of the places we were in today are thriving in the sense that they feel secure about their future. Neither of the restaurants have webpages. Though the works of both Bostic and Davis have gained in value, both men died without their art doing much for them financially. Each one of their stories could be told as though their presence on the planet was incidental to humanity, just as the story of our trip from Connecticut could be told as though it won’t make a difference in the quest for equity and belonging in our country.

But that’s not the way the people we met told their stories. They told their small stories like they matter–and they do. Fame is not the same as significance any more than wealth and intelligence are synonyms.

The world is made of small stories of significance, of lives built of cardboard and wood chunks, of oyster shells and cinnamon rolls, all of them reminding us there is enough love–enough of everything–to go around if we are willing to share it.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: why are we here?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: why are we here?

We decided to walk to breakfast this morning instead of eating at the hotel. When we walked outside and it was raining lightly, we were undaunted. The place we were going was about a mile and a half down MLK Blvd. in a direction we had not gone before, so we got to see some new parts of Savannah, some of which were those that are not benefitting from the city’s prosperity.

The place where we had hoped to go wasn’t opening for breakfast today, but we did make arrangements to go there for dinner tomorrow. I’ll save my review until then. Our next destination was supposed to be Forsyth Park for the Greening of the Fountain, so we meandered in that direction and found Blue Door Coffee and Waffles, which was a quirky little gem of a coffee shop in a changing neighborhood.

The little building had two or three rooms with random tables and chairs. The walls in the room where we sat were covered with Arnold Schwarzenegger memorabilia. Other spaces had Star Wars stuff, and the bathroom was covered with Marvel comics. The breakfast sandwiches were made with mini waffles. The woman who served us moved from the country outside of Athens, Georgia. She had found a home working there.

We ate and then continued down Bull Street until it ran into the park and then we walked yet another tree-lined sidewalk until we got to the fountain. I did not know, until we got here, that Savannah had such an Irish connection. Nine of the original settlers of the city were Irish, and soon after the founding, a ship of Irish indentured servants bound for New England wrecked near Savannah and James Oglethorpe, who imagined a city that welcomed everyone, took them in. They were still indentured servants, but they got to stay. That was 1734.

When Irish immigration began to explode, in part because of the Potato Famine, Savannah remained a welcoming port when cities like Boston and New York were doing all they could to keep the Irish from getting in. The immigrants were crucial in building the infrastructure of the growing city.

With St. Patrick’s Day just a week away, we have noticed increasing bits of green everywhere. We will be back in Connecticut when the parade happens, but today we went to watch them “green the fountain.”

The festivities were to start at noon; we got there about 11:30, and the rain arrived soon after. As we watched people gather, I felt like they could be put in three general categories: those who made the event happen (men in green suits or kilts, lots of hats, Catholic school kids, a bagpipe player), those who knew about the event and came on purpose (both locals and visitors), and those who stumbled into it while walking through the park.

One of the last group was walking with a friend and was quite disoriented as she took in the crowd. She turned to the people sitting on the bench near me and said, “Why are we here?”

I thought it was a great question.

As those of us who were spectators waited, we watched three or four city workers carry small (green) pitchers of dye to the properly dressed folks on the other side of the fountain. Then, as the rain fell in earnest, many of them moved inside the fence that surrounds the fountain and the emcee began to speak. Though the sound system wasn’t adequate, you could glean by the posture of the people who could hear him that they said a prayer and the Pledge, and then some other stuff. One by one, with casual ceremony, they began to pour the dye from their pitchers into the water and we could see it begin to spread unit it finally got pulled into by the pump and the whole fountain sprayed green.

We cheered as though that was why we were there, and it struck me that, Irish or not, we gravitate to things that enhance our connectedness. As I sat down to write, I searched for the word “gather” on this blog to make sure I wasn’t reusing a title and found this post from last December about the Tree Lighting in Guilford. I wrote, “I walked home in wonder that we, as humans, are built to need each other, to think up reasons to be together.”

I mean, someone said they were going to throw green dye in the fountain and hundreds of people showed up–in the rain! As I read about the history of the event, which goes back to the 1980s, I learned of Fred Elmgren, who has participated in it since the beginning.

“I was there for the beginning, but I didn’t know it,” he said. “The origination of it was hooligans, dying the fountains, or people with good intention, maybe not even just hooligans dying the fountains and making it cool for St. Patrick’s Day. All of a sudden the realization, this stuff could ruin our fountain pumps. They knew they couldn’t stop it so they started dyeing it themselves.”

One of the things I loved about the event was the passer-by who asked, “Why are we here?” didn’t leave. She and her friend found their place in the crowd and stayed until green sprayed from the fountain, as did the old men in green coats with fancy sashes whose blood is probably as green as the dyed water, and me, who loved looking around at another gathering of people who can take something silly or accidental and turn it into a ritual of belonging.

The best definition of ritual I know is that it is meaningful repetition. What I saw today is that the meaning doesn’t have to be the same for everyone for it to remind us we are together. It just takes someone–like Fred Elmgren–to say, “This is going to happen anyway, so why don’t we mean it?” Who knows where it goes from there. As he said, he was there in the beginning and didn’t realize it. Forty years later, there we were standing in the rain, cheering for green dye because this is why we’re here.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: defined by defeat

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: defined by defeat

I spent the better part of today walking with nowhere to go. It was a gift.I looked at houses, talked to dogs (and some people), found a bookstore, stopped for coffee, got lost without having to worry about it, read a bunch of historical markers, and saw a bunch of memorial statues.

The heart or the city of Savannah is built around squares–twenty-three of them. They are beautifully cared for parks with giant shade trees and benches. Each one is named after a man who was significant to the city in some fashion (and it was all men) and most of them had some sort of monument or memorial to another man; I couldn’t find much connection. The Pulaski monument, for example, was not in Pulaski Square.

The first one I came upon was a large granite platform that held five figures who represented the Chausseurs Volontaire de Saint-Domingues–the voluntary soldiers of St. Dominic–who were gens de coleurs (men of color) from what we know as Haiti. They came with the French to fight alongside the American colonists against the British, who held the city in the Revolutionary War. The battle was known as the Siege of Savannah in 1779. They were free men for the most part; some enslaved men volunteered as well with the promise of being freed after the battle.

But they lost. The combined forces suffered heavy casualties.

As I moved from square to square, I found other monuments that centered around the same battle: William Jasper, Casimir Pulaski (who both died in the battle), and John Oglethorpe, who lived. Again and again, I saw ways in which this town defines itself by defeat–that defeat in particular. The statue of William Jasper has him posing with his hand against the mortal wound in his side. Though he is still fighting, it is not a victorious posture. The cost of the siege was enormous: almost 250 soldiers killed, 600 wounded, and 120 taken prisoner.

The defeat was not the last word of the war, I know. But there are not a lot of places with monuments to the victory, perhaps because what happened here was such a profound loss.

I am not one who finds much value in war, or war as a metaphor, so I see a whole other rabbit to chase when it comes to finding our identity in conflict, but I was moved today by the imprint of defeat on our lives, both individually and collectively.

I have never lived in an active war zone. I read about what is happening in Ukraine, or think about what has gone on in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I don’t know how to really imagine it. I look at the number of casualties and imagine the palpable absence that hung in the air like Spanish moss after the siege ended.

In a couple of the parks, I sat and watched people interact with the monuments. Some stopped and read, others took pictures. Most walked by carrying food, following pets, of talking to a companion. Even the largest of them is diminished in scale by the giant oaks that surround them.

Later in the day, Ginger and I walked to Whitefield Square, built in 1851 to honor the minister George Whitefield who founded the oldest orphanage in America. The main reason we were there is the First Congregational Church sits on one side of the square. It was built in 1895 and it was a Black church. The center of the square holds a beautiful gazebo surrounded by azalea bushes. There are markers about Whitefield, but there are none that tell that land was a burial ground for enslaved people. Andrew Bryan, the founder of the First African Baptist Church is buried there. I could not find a marker.

The same white people who so intently defined themselves by defeat were not as quick to put up monuments to their conquest and oppression. Those whose graves were erased left a legacy that became the struggle for Civil Rights, which has been fed by an enduring defeat in its push for equity and beloved community: We shall overcome . . . someday.

Hope lies in trusting that defeat is not the last word. The white colonists in Savannah used the defeat to define themselves as people who were determined to gain their freedom, even as they blinded themselves to the myriad ways they were refusing freedom to and inflicting defeat on an almost equal number of the population.

How we are defined by our defeat is not an easy question to answer.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a moveable feast

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
lenten journal: a moveable feast

Today Ginger and I walked all over downtown Savannah and its nearby surroundings. And I mean all over–as of this writing, I have 17,019 steps. I also ate well and had some great conversations.

We walked first to Forsyth Park, which is six blocks long and two blocks wide and lies south of downtown. Beautiful moss-covered oaks line the walks, and there’s an iconic fountain at the northern end that dates back to 1858. My favorite story about the fountain is what happened on the day it was dedicated. The city had just installed new waterworks and no one had thought to test the water pressure. Dignitaries and the wealthy white folks that lived around the park had gathered to see the new fountain. Everyone got soaked when they turned the water on.

The park is beautiful and well-used. We strolled along the walkways and then we saw a huge monument-forty–eight feet tall–at the other end of the park. Apple Maps told me it was the Confederate Memorial. I took a moment to search for more information and learned it was erected in 1875, just a decade after the war had ended, unlike many of the monuments that went up across the South in the 1920s along with Jim Crow laws. That doesn’t justify the monument, but I found it significant that it was an expression of grief.

After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, the town questioned what to do about the memorial. A local tour guide and blogger, and a native of Savannah, wrote:

Savannah began it’s own introspection and realized, perhaps with some relief, that we hardly have any offending statues to fret about. We really love to avoid unpleasant conversations and difficult decisions in this city. But what to do about the one really big statue in Forsyth Park?

The city changed the name to the Civil War Memorial and replaced the plaque so it now reads:

This memorial was originally erected in 1875 to the Confederate dead, redesigned in 1879, and rededicated in 2018 to all the dead of the American Civil War.

The Georgia legislature and the governor passed laws that made it illegal to do much more.

I started to write that it feels like a lot simmers under the surface in this town, but simmer is too strong a verb. Walking underneath the moss-bearing oaks and down the brick sidewalks in the Historic Section, you can feel the stories, but it is hard to find folks who want to tell them–or even know them.

We ate lunch at the Crystal Beer Parlor, the oldest continuously running restaurant in Savannah, which opened in 1933, and was one of the first places that served alcohol after Prohibition. The place stays busy and never takes reservations. We sat at a bar that ran the full distance of the large rectangular room that was the main dining area. One of the servers was stocking glasses at the bar and Ginger asked a couple of questions. He told us he moved from Houston about fifteen years ago. When we compared notes on our times in South Texas, I found out he went to the high school nearest the one from which I graduated.

We were going back down to the river and walked past The Grey and one of the people that worked there was spot cleaning the windows. He said hello and I told him that my secret hope was Chef Mashama would be in the window and I would get to say hi. He smiled and said she was in Africa this month, but if we came back right at five we could get a seat at the first-come-first-serve diner bar. His name was Laron. As the conversation continued, I told him how I had been inspired by the book and he said, “You gotta come back. I love working here.”

Since it was not yet four, we walked down to the river to check out the JW Marriott because the wonderful desk person at our hotel had said it was worth seeing because of the art and mineral collections there. The hotel is more of an events center that encompasses four or five buildings along the waterfront. As we approached the entrance, a man greeted us and Ginger stopped to ask a few questions. His name was Demetery. That turned into him giving us about a fifteen minute orientation to what was there.

As we talked, he told us he was a science major at Savannah State and planned to go to medical school. He works part time at the hotel. When Ginger talked about our trip and asked about local activists we might contact, he said he was a part of the Savannah chapter of 100 Black Men, and then told us about what they did. Ginger asked him if he would talk to our group and he agreed.

On the river walk in front of the hotel we found a kiosk and in it was Amelia, a local artist who is chasing her dream–no, she’s making it happen. Her artwork is whimsical and enchanting; her personality was engaging. I bought a sticker for my journal that reads

Normalize being a kind human being.

Then we went back to The Grey. I didn’t see Laron, but we did get seats at the bar, which had been the segregated lunch counter in the old Greyhound Bus Station. The room filled up as soon as the doors opened. The menu was one page and was made up of descriptions so brief that they bordered on ingredient lists. We had planned to just get drinks and appetizers, so Ginger found a cheese plate and I perused the menu trying to figure out what one thing would be my culinary souvenir. I chose

Trotter Toast
chicken liver mousse, dates, aspic

That’s all it said. The dish arrived with more description: sourdough toast spread with chicken liver mousse, crispy pig’s trotter meat, dates, and sherry aspic (a jelly made from the trotter stock). I didn’t order it because I eat those things all the time. I ordered it because I loved the way Chef Mashama had talked about her food and I wanted to try something unfamiliar. I wanted to trust that she knew what she was doing and would make it worth the trip.

She did. It was one of the best things I have ever tasted.

It was a fitting close to our purposeful meanderings, and a good metaphor of a day made up of some ingredients we knew well and some that caught us by surprise. All together they became a day of hope and sustenance. I would order a day like this any time.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the weeping time

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
lenten journal: the weeping time

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day in Savannah. The high temperature was in the upper seventies, there was a consistent breeze, and very little humidity. We walked from our hotel down to Bay Street, one block up and parallel to River Street, to find a place to eat lunch and then to traverse the Historic District to get our bearings as we prepare for the rest of the group to arrive in a few days.

The downtown area of Savannah is built around twenty-two squares, which are beautiful block-sized parks with giant oak trees whose branches are hung with Spanish moss the way my mom used to hang icicles on our Christmas tree. We probably saw seven or eight of them, each with at least one historical marker. In between we passed other buildings that had significance in Savannah’s story, and we began to recognize names: Oglethorpe, Greene, Wesley, to name a few.

We ate lunch at Treylor Park–because of the name, mostly–and had good food. Then we followed the cobblestones down to River Street, passing all kinds of tourist shops, and found the Waving Girl statue built to commemorate Florence Martus who greeted the ships entering the harbor by waving a cloth from the lighthouse on Cockspur Island in search of her lost lover–and she did it from 1887 to 1931, so I don’t think she was a girl.

Another marker in front of Independent Presbyterian Church honored Lowell Mason, a sacred music composer from New England who lived in Savannah for a time. He wrote, among other things, the hymn “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” which we sang in church last Sunday.

We walked and read and walked and read and found nothing that spoke about the city’s history with slavery, or its history with civil rights. I learned tonight that there is an African American monument that was erected in 2002 (2002!) down by River Street, but we didn’t see it or any signs pointing to it.

We walked up Bull Street and came to Johnson Square, which holds a giant granite obelisk commemorating Nathaniel Greene along with eight markers that tell about Washington’s Southern tour, Christ Episcopal Church, John Oglethorpe, John Hearndon Mercer, the city plan of Savannah, and the Historic District itself.
But here’s the thing: Johnson Square was the site of the largest sale of human beings in the history of our country that took place in March of 1857. Over four hundred enslaved people were sold for a cumulative cost of $303,850, which would be about $10 million today. They called it “The Weeping Time.”

A hundred and sixty-six years later, we stood in the place where it happened–in a city built by enslaved people–and found no mention of it.

One of the enduring stories for me in the Hebrew Bible is that of Joshua telling the people to build an altar after God had delivered them. “Stack up the stones,” he said, “so that when the children ask why they are there you can tell them the story.”

Savannah is full of monuments and markers, stones stacked up to tell the stories of white people who founded the colony, who fought in wars, who built churches, and pretty much all of them owned slaves, though that part of the story is not repeated. None of the stones we saw were stacked up so the stories of enslaved people would be remembered, even though the city–hell, our country–would not exist without them. Instead, people walked through a beautiful park on their way home from work or to do something fun, because this is a fun town. They hid the story so well they have almost forgotten it.

A big part of there reason Ginger leads these trips is to remind us that the stories we learn as we travel are much like some of the stories that are closer to home that we have not told well. Connecticut was essential to the success of the slave trade, and a number of people were enslaved in the state. Eighty were enslaved in Guilford, one of them owned by a Congregational minister.

It’s hard to write about this without sounding sanctimonious. I know I am not saying anything new, or even saying it better than it has already been said. But walking across land that holds such a heinous and invisible history I saw that whether we tell the stories or not, we live with the consequences. Then again, if we don’t tell the stories, we will continue to magnify the consequences because we aren’t telling the truth. Until we do, we will live in the weeping time.

Peace,
Milton

 

 

lenten journal: disquieted

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
lenten journal: disquieted

We flew to Savannah today.

This coming weekend is the annual Civil Rights History Trip that Ginger leads with a group from our church. In past years we have gone to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery; Richmond; Durham and Greensboro; Memphis; last year to Hartford and Boston; and this year to Savannah. Each year, Ginger and I go a day or two early to make sure all the details are in place. Since Avelo Airlines only flies from New Haven to Savannah on Mondays and Fridays, we have a bit more time.

On the flight down, I read a good chunk of Black, White, and the Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant. The book is written by the two co-owners, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano. She is the executive chef and he is the entrepreneur that bought the old Greyhound Station to turn it into a restaurant. She is Black and he is white. Their restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday. I will report on Wednesday, I hope.

Neither Mashama or Johnno, as he is called, are from Savannah but they found their way here to open The Grey. She had some family ties here and lived in the city for a short time as a kid. He came here as an adult. Both moved from New York. Part of their story, beyond their partnership and friendship, is about working to feel like they belonged here. In many ways, that has always been the story of those who came to this city.

I learned from the book that James Oglethorpe settled Savannah for King George II in 1733 with three distinct rules: no Jews, no Papists, and no slavery. For Oglethorpe and the other trustees of the colony of Georgia, these were prerequisites for the utopia they imagined they could create.

In the summer of that year, severe illness gripped the young settlement. Serendipitously, a ship carrying a group of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews landed seeking freedom to worship–and they had a doctor among them. Oglethorpe relented on the ban and welcomed the group. Congregation Mickve Israel is the third oldest synagogue in the US. However well-intentioned, the slavery ban was never enforced. About four hundred enslaved people lived in Savannah when it was founded and they were the ones who did the construction work to build the city and then were moved to work on farms. The Catholics were admitted because of General Casimir Pularski, a Polish Catholic soldier who fought against the British during the Siege at Savannah. Those who fought with him got to stay after independence. The Catholics and Jews assimilated into the city in ways the Black community did not, like most American cities regardless of location.

i put the book back in my bag as we landed. We got our luggage and found our way to the Rideshare Area where Muhammad, our Uber driver, picked us up to take us to our hotel. We shared the ride with a couple from our church who came early to have a few days to themselves, so I sat in the front seat on our ride, which meant I got to talk to Muhammad.

I learned he moved from Baltimore a couple of years ago and has traveled mostly up I-95 as far as Philadelphia, seeing Virginia and the Carolinas. He drives part-time and works in a lumber yard, but his main job is at Fort Benning, where he goes for two week stints with some regularity to teach troops about Islamic culture before they deploy to the Middle East. I asked if there was a significant Muslim community in Savannah and he said there were about 350 families and a mosque. I wondered what it was like to teach people about your culture and your homeland when you knew they were going there uninvited. I didn’t ask.

I was disquieted. I felt grateful for the conversation, and I was troubled to think he was being used by the military for his knowledge even as he lives in a country where many will assume he is nefarious because of his name.

When we pulled up to our hotel I realized it was almost next door to The Grey. The window facing the street is just as it was when people came to catch buses. In those days, you would have looked in on the segregated lunch counter. Today it is a beautiful bar where anyone can sit. Both the hotel and the restaurant sit on Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is the western border of the Historic District. The two establishments sit in a liminal space between the high end tourist area and the projects and a neighborhood, I assume, is inhabited by many who keep the Historic District humming for tourists but who do not reap many of the benefits of the wealth displayed there.

Let me be clear: We are not here to learn about Savannah because none of these disparities exist in Connecticut. The biggest difference between Guilford and Savannah’s Historic District is our restaurants don’t stay open as late. Well, that and the people who work in our town but can’t afford to live there have to travel farther than crossing MLK Blvd. The systems in our state that make sure we have “good schools” are well entrenched. We are here to learn more about who we are as we learn some of the stories of Savannah.

Disquietude is a good teacher.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: spokane

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: spokane

spokane

a family is eating
outside Spokane
the daughter is still
in her soccer uniform
the mother chats as she
passes the potatoes
the father is tired
and trying to engage
the dog is waiting for
someone to share

they will finish
their dinner
their conversations
their homework
they will turn on
the television
their phones will
ring several times
it will not be me

none of them knows
I live in Connecticut
or what I did today
they don’t know
I can cook or sing
that I’m writing
a poem about them
or that I’ve never
been to Spokane

they are finding
their dreams
building their lives
breaking their hearts
living out their days
without missing me
or knowing me
and they are not
the only ones

my phone has never
carried the message
“come to Spokane
we can’t live without you”
i could say the same
about any number of
dinner tables right here
in our little town
that thought carries
both relief and sadness
I’m not sure which one
is easier to live with.

Peace,
Milton

`

lenten journal: architecture and allen wrenches

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
lenten journal: architecture and allen wrenches

I grew up hearing about Nicodemus coming to see Jesus at night, but we didn’t say much about him other than Jesus told him he had to be “born again,” which made him a hashtag ahead of his time. As I thought about him this week, my mind found a connection with architecture and Allen wrenches. I can’t explain the thought process, but I like where it took me.

________________________

When I was a youth minister in Texas, I got to know a man named Mike who taught Sunday School for ninth grade boys. He did a good job. He connected well with the kids, yet he was serious most of the time. I met him for breakfast one day just to get to know him better and found out he was an architect. We were contemplating a renovation of some of the space we used for our young people and when I mentioned it he came to life. He began talking about how we are shaped and influenced by the spaces we inhabit, and how our sacred spaces both reveal and affect our understanding of God and ourselves. When we change our surroundings, we open ourselves up to new possibilities.

When I worked as an editor, one of the potential authors I interviewed had been the rector at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, which sits right on the Common and that defines itself as “a house of prayer for all people.” For several years, they shared space with a Muslim congregation that met in the basement. When the main sanctuary was to be remodeled, the church talked about how their space might better reflect their motto. They pulled out all of the pews and replaced them with chairs that could be moved around. They built a labyrinth in the floor tiles. Then they put the necessary sinks and faucets in the walls so the Muslim congregation could do their cleansing ritual on the main floor rather than the basement. They changed their surroundings to reflect who they wanted to become.

At First Church in Guilford, Ginger overheard the ministerial intern use the phrase “the theology of boxed pews,” meaning people get accustomed to being in their place in church. Box pews, which are those that have the doors on the aisle side, allowed allowed families to sit together in a regular spot and provided shelter from the cold in a drafty building. They were typically purchased or rented by families and the cost could be substantial—sort of like the private boxes that ring stadiums today.

It’s hard to know whether theology made the pews, or the pews shaped the theology. Maybe we could call it congregational anthropology. Either way, the nature of the pews and the room invite people to stay in their places. There is one way into the pew and one way out. To get up to pass the peace takes effort. They are a warm congregation. They like to be together. And the pews make it hard to show that to one another on Sunday morning.

We are shaped by our spaces.

Nicodemus, the religious leader who came to see Jesus at night, was a person who was defined by a specific religious architecture, if you will. He was a Pharisee, which meant he was a part of a group whose job it was to make sure everyone followed the religious law to the letter–that they stayed in their place. My friend Sid talks about “flat box theology” as a way to describe folks who want life to be like an IKEA kit with (sort of) clear instructions that mean if you just do what they say you end up with the furniture you want. If I follow that metaphor, Nicodemus was one of the people with an Allen wrench.

The traditional take on Nicodemus has been that he came to Jesus by night because he was too frightened or embarrassed to be seen talking to Jesus in the daytime. Rabbinical sources reveal that nighttime was the preferred time to study the Torah. Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, who lived in the early 200s, said, “The moon was created only for Torah study.” And when Nicodemus found Jesus he said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.”

He spoke to Jesus as if he was a part of the group, as though he understood the flat boxes. Perhaps he came at night to have a significant conversation about theology, as rabbis often did. Jesus’ response blew up the furniture, in a way: He said, “Unless you are willing to be born anew, you can’t understand God’s architecture.” Then he went on to talk about how the Spirit of God cannot be confined by a kit or a pew or any kind of structure that thinks it provides all the answers.

Life changes. People change. God changes as we learn more and become open to the creativity of the Spirit. God did not create us to become accustomed to or expectant of things staying the same. The God who continues to give birth to the universe calls us to new birth again and again and again.

Nicodemus heard what Jesus said and replied, “How are these things possible?”

It’s a great question that Jesus doesn’t answer directly, other than to say God is in the habit of extreme makeovers, and those willing to trust the renovating power of the Holy Spirit will find life larger and more creative than any structure or system that promises perpetuation. The point is not to see how long we can make things last but to see how God can make things new.

As we sit in this room where the pews have been in place for a long, long time, and we try to figure out what it means to be the people of God in Hamden in 2023–everything from what worship should look like, to what committees we need, to how we meet the needs of the community around us, to how we honor our history without being beholden to it, to how we grow in our love for God and for others–we may want to ask the same question: How are these things possible?

Let’s start here: we are not furniture. We are people created in the image of God, in the image of One who cannot be controlled or defined, a God who is Love so radical and relentless that it knocks all the walls down if we are willing to look up from our manuals, drop our Allen wrenches, and pay attention.

What is waiting to be born anew among us here?

This morning we share Communion, the bread and cup that tell the story of life and death and rebirth. As we come to God’s Table together to share the meal Jesus shared two millennia ago, how can we be reborn in this ancient ritual? How can we create space for God to break loose?

Come, let’s talk about it over supper. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading. I write a free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors that comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.

lenten journal: you have nothing to say

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
lenten journal: you have nothing to say

you have nothing to say

forget what the flowers
told you or the smile
from the little one
in front of you
at the coffee shop

how can you give voice
to the joy of a schnauzer
or speak to the grief
that rises with the sun
day after day

anything you say will
only reinforce
your insignificance
no one is waiting
to hear from you

stay silent say nothing
you are depressed
you are depressing
that’s old news
no one wants to hear

no–you are not broken
you’re broken-hearted
speak through the pain
write into the night
sing songs you know by heart

and listen shut up and listen
not to the noise and nonsense
listen to friends and trees
who never believed that
you have nothing to say

Peace
Milton

 

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