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lenten journal: this is a gift

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Today was going to be a day to get some stuff done around the house, but the cold I’ve been fighting for most of the week set me down for the better part of the day – well, the cold and the Theraflu. As I dozed in and out, I caught up on a week of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, thanks to the magic of our DVR. His segments on the financial crisis and the Conservative Convention took me back to a sentence I read in Living Gently in a Violent World that has both stuck with and unsettled me. Hauerwas wrote:

It seems to me that democracies want to produce people who do not need to rely on trusting one another. (51)

I’m unsettled because the sentence is difficult to refute, based on the way we treat one another as Americans. Sharing with and caring for one another are not our strong suits. His statement was in the middle of a chapter talking about what it meant to be peacemakers. I got to his last chapter tonight – it’s a short book – and he had something else to say:

Long story short: we don’t get to make our lives up. We get to receive our lives as gifts. The story that says we should have no story except the story we chose when we had no story is a lie . . . Christian discipleship is about learning to receive our lives as gifts without regret. And that has the deepest political implications. Much of modern political theory and practice is about creating a society where we do not nave to acknowledge that our lives are gifts we receive from one another. (92-93)

I heard this week from an old college friend with whom I’ve had mostly incidental contact over the years. He wrote,

I wanted to let you know I’ve been reading your blog every day now for maybe a week or so. It has come to mean so much to me, to read your words and reconnect with you through them, knowing you as I have for all these years, and missing your presence.

The sentence was a gift all by itself because I don’t think I’m particularly good at keeping up the ties that bind. Most of my college friends are still in Texas and I moved away. In fact, moving away – or at least moving – has been the archetypal direction of my life. To have him reach across the years and not only find me, but recognize me was gift indeed. I’m working to take Hauerwas’ words to heart about receiving the gift without regret and respond in gratitude that miles and years have not broken a tie that binds, or at least retied it.

At the risk of using too many borrowed words, I’m going to lean into an old Rich Mullins song that could serve as soundtrack to Hauerwas’ thoughts:

Hello old friends
There’s really nothing new to say
But the old, old story bears repeating
And the plain old truth grows dearer every day
When you find something worth believing
Well, that’s a joy that nothing could take away

And so we meet again
After all these many years
Did we sow the seeds we’re reaping
Now that the harvest calls us here
It seems that love blooms out of season
And much joy can blossom from many tears

So old friends you must forget what you had to forgive
And let love be stronger than the feelings
That rage and run beneath the bridge
Knowing morning follows evening
Makes each new day come as a gift

Today, through various channels, I heard from college friends, got news about my 35th high school reunion this summer, got a note from someone in the church where I was youth minister in the 80s, a friend I went to grad school with in Boston, and someone I knew in Africa. Also, today, as Ginger and I took Ella out for an afternoon walk, we talked about the growing possibility that we are going to need to move her parents here with us as her dad’s Alzheimer’s worsens. The move is not imminent at this point, but we feel as though it is a gift we need to be prepared to give. The story of my life is one of connections flowing back and forth across time, conduits of love and grace that remind me I am much more givee than giver when it comes to love and grace.

The first visual image that comes to my mind, as I think about all of the connections that tell my story, is one of an old time switchboard with all the wires coming out and going every which way, each one with a familiar voice on the other end of the line. The glorious tangle of wires is a wonderful picture of how a life gets put together, as well as how lives are tied together.

The second is the credit roll at the end of a movie. Both Ginger and I are both in the habit of sitting in the theater until the last name scrolls by and the screen goes dark because we feel like it’s our little way of honoring everyone’s work on the film. The credit roll at the end of my life will take years. I share my story with many, many co-writers.

That is a joy that nothing can take away.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: 86

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Tonight was our last night of dinner service before Duke students go on Spring Break and we’ve had a rather spirited discussion about what to expect from the evening. My boss and I were looking at it from two very different vantage points: she didn’t want to buy food that would then be left over and I didn’t want to run out of food. I also expected to serve more than double her expectations. I was looking for seventy or so and she thought we’d be lucky to have thirty customers.

Here’s the part where I tell you I am not a business person. I don’t have an entrepreneurial gene in my body. I have had any number of good ideas that have cost more money than they have made. My boss, on the other hand, is a successful business person and her ideas are actually profitable.

The menu I presented this evening was evidence of a compromise. We ran out of a couple of things – the squash ravioli and sweet potato polenta – that will not be on the menu after the break, as we make some seasonal adjustments, so it made sense to let them go early. And she sent me some food for the other dishes. Six people sat down right when we opened and we had served thirty people by six o’clock. Soon after, the number 86 started to show up on the white board where the kitchen communicates with the servers.

When we run out of something in a restaurant kitchen, we tell the servers to “86” the item, meaning we have no more, so don’t take any more orders for it. The board began to fill up:

86 steaks
86 trout
86 roasted chix
86 mac rolls
86 shrimp

By eight o’clock, we were offering Chicken Alfredo and Chicken Parmigiana and Upstairs at the Commons had turned into Uncle Milty’s House of Pollo and Pasta. We made it to closing time and counted up the evening to find we had served 81 people. I 86’d myself and came home, with missions accomplished: everyone fed and very few leftovers.

Just before service, we noticed we were out of mushrooms, which we needed for a couple of dishes. I took a small pan and went downstairs to The Great Hall, a restaurant below us, and asked Vernon, one of the chefs there, if he could help me out. He and I have been talking because he is going to North Carolina Central to get a degree in Hospitality and Tourism. He was certainly hospitable and generous with the mushrooms.

Words do funny things sometimes, or we do funny things with them. Somehow we’ve decided that hospitality can be used as a name for a business: the hospitality industry. The two words together do the same thing to me that happens during church budget discussions and someone inevitably starts talking about how we need to run the church like a business. I struggle to let the words live together, even though I understand the rationale for their usage.

Restaurants are a business; hospitality is not. Neither is church.

The distinction is important because ultimately a business has to look at things the way my boss was looking at them today: the bottom line. When we run the reports at the end of the night, will the show we did well? Did we make enough this week to pay the bills? How do we keep the business going? But good business is not necessarily good theology.

One of the sentences that lives deep in my memory and rises to the surface is from the liner notes of a friend’s record so many years ago that it actually was a record says, “Thanks to God, the Ultimate Spendthrift.”

Spendthrift: a person who spends possessions or money extravagantly or wastefully; prodigal.

Now we’re talking theology. And, yes, it’s a stretch to think of the words wastefully and prodigal as descriptive of God, I know – but give me a chance. The nature of any institution – a church, a restaurant – is to spend a good bit of time on self-preservation. That’s not all bad. It’s harder for a church because we are building the institution around a God who is not a save-it-for-a-rainy-day kind of God. When the one we call the Rich Young Ruler came to Jesus and asked what it would take to follow him, Jesus looked at him (and loved him, the gospel account says) and then told him to give everything he had away and come along for the ride.

He couldn’t do it.

We had a discussion recently among the deacons on our church around how many cups to fill for Communion. The question was asked in the spirit of not wanting to be wasteful. I couldn’t see past the possibility that someone would go to reach for a cup and there wouldn’t be one because we had been too cautious pouring too many. As I am wont to do, I moved to metaphor. For me, the fuller the tray, the better the image. Drink one. Drink two or three or seven. There’s enough to go around and then some because we belong to God.

86 isn’t part of God’s lexicon.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: god is a river

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I’m tired.

This has been a busy week at work and I’ve been working hard to finish the ten gallons of soup for Empty Bowls tomorrow night, which meant I spent every spare moment of the last couple of days chopping and dicing until my hands are rough and cracked. Though dinner went well tonight, I spent the whole evening feeling a step behind and out of sync.

I’ve now been sitting in front of a blank page for the last hour and a half, trying to figure out what I had to say on a night like this. I got tired of staring and went looking for what others had to say, which led me to this video clip posted, on Cecilia’s blog, of folksinger Peter Mayer singing his song (new to me), “God is a River.” I’ve included the lyrics to read as you listen.

In the ever-shifting water of the river of this life
I was swimming, seeking comfort; I was wrestling waves to find
A boulder I could cling to, a stone to hold me fast
Where I might let the fretful water of this river ‘round me pass

And so I found an anchor, a blessed resting place
A trusty rock I called my savior, for there I would be safe
From the river and its dangers, and I proclaimed my rock divine
And I prayed to it “protect me” and the rock replied

God is a river, not just a stone
God is a wild, raging rapids
And a slow, meandering flow
God is a deep and narrow passage
And a peaceful, sandy shoal
God is the river, swimmer
So let go

Still I clung to my rock tightly with conviction in my arms
Never looking at the stream to keep my mind from thoughts of harm
But the river kept on coming, kept on tugging at my legs
Till at last my fingers faltered, and I was swept away

So I’m going with the flow now, these relentless twists and bends
Acclimating to the motion, and a sense of being led
And this river’s like my body now, it carries me along
Through the ever-changing scenes and by the rocks that sing this song

God is a river, not just a stone
God is a wild, raging rapids
And a slow, meandering flow
God is a deep and narrow passage
And a peaceful, sandy shoal
God is the river, swimmer
So let go

God is the river, swimmer
So let go

One of the ways I was taught to unpack dreams is to look at what happened in the dream from the perspective of each person or thing in the dream. As a youth minister, I found it was a great approach to looking at different Bible passages – especially the parables. What did it feel like to be the prodigal son, the father, the eldest son, the servants, the pigs? What I like best about the approach to either subject is it calls me to look at the interconnectedness of the metaphors, and the consequences of interpretation.

Mayer’s image isn’t new. He’s leaning into those who have sung before him:

like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace
overall victorious in its bright increase
perfect yet it floweth fuller everyday
perfect yet it groweth deeper all the way

What he does with the image that knocks me out is put us in relationship with the metaphor. His is not abstract poetry; we are called into the action with an amazing line:

God is a river, swimmer

He names God, and then he names us. The metaphor would mean something different were we fishing, or farming, or building bridges, or (as Loggins and Messina used to sing) watching the river run. But in this story, we are in the water — not taking from or adding to or going around or sitting it out; we are in the river, swimming.

I’m grateful for such an image to feed my dreams tonight.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: cooking with love

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Part of my job everyday is to make soup. For our lunch buffet for the faculty at Duke we always have two soups (one of which is vegetarian) and the selection changes daily. On Fridays,, we always serve New England Clam Chowder, but the rest of the week is wide open. One of the favorites of the past few days was Chickpea, Garlic, and Spinach.

This is an even bigger soup week because the Durham restaurant is taking part in Empty Bowls, a fundraiser for Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD). The idea is cool. Thirty bucks buys you a ticket in and a hand made ceramic bowl. Around the room are several local restaurants serving soup. You can fill your bowl as many times as you like and your money goes to feed others in our city who are hungry. Since the kitchen at the Durham restaurant is about the size of a beverage napkin, I offered to make one of the soups at Duke and she took me up on it and even gave me a choice of the soup I wanted to make. When I read the email message out loud to Ginger she said, “Make the corn chowder.”

I’ve made a lot of corn chowder – even posted a couple of recipes here and here and here – but I’ve rarely made it the same way twice. I know what I want in it, but I’m still tweaking the recipe. What I do know is I need corn, celery, potatoes, red peppers, roasted jalapenos, black beans, vegetable stock, cream, and cumin. I’m making it without onions so Ginger can eat it (she’s allergic to onions).

This afternoon I peeled enough potatoes to fill two five gallon containers, cut a whole case of corn off the cob and soaked the beans. Tonight, I made a vegetable stock including the corn cobs to sweeten it up a bit. Tomorrow I will dice celery, and potatoes, cook the beans, and begin to bring the soup together. I’ll do my best to come up with a recipe. First I have to come up with ten gallons of chowder.

I was telling Abel about the event and the soup last night and he began to wave his hand as if to stop me.

“My sister, she makes this soup. This is a very important soup. It is very hard to make.” He began to describe how her sister created her soup and then he said, “You know not just anyone can make this soup. It is a special soup. My sister, she says if an angry person is around her when she is making this soup, then the soup will break. Sometimes she and my mother say no one can come around while they are making this soup so that no one will ruin it.”

Abel talks a lot about his sister’s cooking. He is from a family of cooks, but it seems when the family wants to feel like family, she’s the one who takes over in the kitchen. He beams when he talks about her.

In the novel (and movie) Like Water for Chocolate, there’s a batch of beans that gets made by an angry cook and pretty soon everyone is throwing up. One of the consistent themes of the story is the emotions of the cook go out through her hands and into her food, making her feelings seem almost contagious.

I think she’s on to something.

You build a soup the way you build a life, I suppose, adding ingredients as you go, changing the recipe, and adding in the flavors around you. What Abel’s sister knows is some of the flavors add themselves. Be careful, then, what or who gets near the soup. As I finish the soup tomorrow, I will be around Billy, the daytime chef, who cracks me up; Mauricio, Abel’s nephew who is equally good at smiling and working hard; Jorge, our unflappable dishwasher; Abel; and Tony, our evening dishwasher, who understands very little English and seems to be soaking up everything around him.

This is going to be a good soup.

I’ve still had Communion on my mind today. As I reflected on Abel’s words, I also thought about Paul’s admonition to make sure your heart was clear before you sat down for the Lord’s Supper. If something is wrong between you and someone else, go fix it and then come back to the Table; don’t let it poison the meal because the Supper is more than a stop along the way or a ritual worth repeating; the meal is the point. If we can’t come to the Table together, then we can’t come together.

One of the soups I made today was chili. We will serve it Thursday or Friday, because a good chili needs to sit for a couple of days. I’m a good chili maker (here’s one of my recipes) and the staff at Duke looks forward to it. As Billy was leaving to go home, he said, “I’m taking home some of that damn good chili, Milt. That’s it: a grilled cheese and this damn chili. And then I’m gonna take a nap.”

As he was ladling it into a container he said, “What’s your wife’s name? Ginger?” answering his own question. “I’ll bet that’s why she married you, Milt. You made chili and she said, ‘Damn, I can’t let this guy go.’” And then he laughed his laugh that must have improved all the soups in a ten-mile radius.

I came home tonight to a request from the one who digs my chili for a tuna sandwich. The Ginger version is a grilled tuna and cheese sandwich. Though I cook for a living and am known professionally as a chef, I remember who I am when I’m cooking for Ginger. Those that walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus sat down with him at supper and recognized him when he broke the bread. Here in our house, it’s a reverse experience: I recognize myself when I cook for the woman I love.

And she says to tell Billy he’s right.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: this world is my home

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

When I walk into work everyday, I do so to the soundtrack of Spanish radio. And part of that soundtrack, which appears to be in heavy rotation, is this percussive-techno-yodeling thing that is infectious in that certain way only a percussive-techno-yodeling thing can be. Long after evening service has started and we’ve turned off the radio, I can hear Abel start laughing when I realize I’m still singing the damn song.

“What is that song?” I asked him today.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Some Mexican thing.”

I’m haunted by a percussive-techno-Mexican yodeling-thing. And I’m haunted by two things I read by Stanley Hauerwas yesterday as he reflected on the L’Arche community.

I believe L’Arche is the place where God has made it possible for Christians to be hope in a world where there is no solution. (55)

and

I have said that Christians are called to nonviolence not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war – though we certainly want to rid the world of war. Rather, as faithful followers of Christ in a world at war, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent. Of course we want to make war less likely. But nonviolence is a sign of hope that there is an alternative to war. And that alternative is called church. (55)

I love to sing harmony. As a result, I love gospel music. On Sundays after church, when I lived in Houston, my brother and I would race home from church so we could watch Gospel Jubillee. Those of you who follow this blog know how easily I can get caught up chasing Gaither Family Gathering video clips on YouTube. And it’s why I love bluegrass music: gospel music that needs a guitar.

So many of those old songs talk about heaven and they talk about how we belong there more than here.

this world is not my home I’m just a passing through
my treasure’s all laid up somewhere beyond the blue
the angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

I know these old songs grew out of times of hardship. And, as much as I love the harmonies, I have to wonder, in a world where there is no solution, why escape felt like the most hopeful choice. (I’ve worked on that last sentence for a good while now, trying not to sound harsh. I don’t feel harsh, I just don’t know another way to say it.) Whatever eternity looks like, I trust being in the unfiltered presence of God will be worth the trip and – not but – this world is my home and I think God expects more of me than to wish I were somewhere else, even if I sound good wishing it.

Wishing and hoping aren’t the same thing.

A world with no solution is a seedbed for violence. The reason I know that to be true is evidenced every time I have to call a customer service number and fight my way through all the “convenient” computer options until I finally get an actual human being on the phone who can’t actually help me. Violence is an easy choice for me in those situations because the voice on the other end is dismembered from any semblance of humanity and they can’t see me and I feel powerless so striking back, futile as it may be, is my all too familiar move.

Humaninzing the enemy is a lousy military strategy.

For all the resonance I found with Hauerwas’ statements, I shook my head and smiled when I read the last two sentences of the paragraph:

But nonviolence is a sign of hope that there is an alternative to war. And that alternative is called church.

“Stanley,” I thought, “you are one hell of a straight man. Don’t you realize the punch line (violent pun intended) you’re setting up?”

Yesterday at church I got to sing harmony with my friend, Donna May. Our song choice was also one written in difficult times, and one we felt had something to offer to our worship on the first Sunday in Lent and one where we were sharing Communion together.

let us pause in life’s pleasure and count its many tears
as we all sup sorrow with the poor
there’s a song that will linger forever in our ears
oh, hard times come again no more

it’s a song the cry of the weary
hard times hard times come again no more
many days you have lingered around our cabin door
oh, hard times come again no more

On this Sunday, we celebrated Communion by intinction, meaning folks came forward, took a piece of the bread, dipped it in the cup, and then ate both elements together. The practice took hold in American churches during the tuberculosis scare at the beginning of the last century. Churches didn’t want their members to be frightened to take Communion, so they found a way to allay their fears.

I couldn’t help but think , as I watched our little band of Pilgrims (that’s what we call ourselves at Pilgrim United Church of Christ) lined up for our meal together, how much we looked like one of those soup lines from the Depression Era photographs of people waiting for bread. In our sacred soup line stood some racked with grief so fresh they have a hard time sitting in worship, some with chronic pain, some with physical ailments, and a host of others whose injuries and heartache was not quite as apparent. And we stood in line with all the walking wounded of the faith who have come before us, and all those who will follow us, not because the Bread and the Cup offered a solution to the things we carry with us, but because we are not alone.

We are not alone.
We belong here.
We are in this together.

Humanizing one another is how peace is waged.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — I couldn’t resist this find: Mavis Staples singing “Hard Times.”

lenten journal: all I have to do

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

I heard a sermon on the wilderness this morning, as I’m sure many of you in churches that follow the Common Lectionary did as well. As Betty, one of our in care students preached, I began to hear a chorus in my mind that I learned as a child:

My Lord knows the way through the wilderness
All I have to do is follow . . .

I smiled at the memory, and then at the lyric: all I have to do. As though following comes easily, or without consequence.

While the other three gospels let their accounts of Jesus’ life unfold, Mark moves expeditiously. By the fifteenth verse of the first chapter, Jesus has been born, grown up, been baptized by John, and gone out into the wilderness. Read on a couple more verses and he’s called his disciples. By the end of the chapter, he’s already performed several healing miracles. So all Mark has to say about Jesus’ forty days in the desert is:

At once, this same Spirit pushed Jesus out into the wild. For forty wilderness days and nights he was tested by Satan. Wild animals were his companions, and angels took care of him. (The Message)

If his were the only gospel, we would have to lean heavily on our imagination. What made the Holy Spirit “push” Jesus into the desert? How did things change from a spiritual shove to temptation? What was it like for him to be attended to by angels and animals?

For me, the word wilderness – in church context – is connected to two big stories in Scripture. The first concerns the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for forty years after the Exodus; the second is the one we’re considering here. Though the latter telling leans into some of the symbolism of the first, it struck me this afternoon that we are talking about two very different things. Those fleeing Egypt were chasing a promise, but allowed themselves to get derailed because they became, as the King James called them, a “stiff-necked people.” The wilderness had not been on the itinerary in the initial planning. They were so blinded by their self-focus that they wandered around for forty years in Gaza.

In American terms, they spent four decades wandering around Rhode Island. When they finally got to Canaan, they were still whiny.

By Mark’s account, Jesus was in the wilderness almost from the start. He had to go out there to be baptized because that’s where John was. From there, he went farther out into the desert – pushed, impelled, sent, driven by the Spirit of God — to a place we don’t know and he stayed. I wonder if he reflected back on these days when he told Nicodemus we don’t know where the Spirit is coming from or where it is going. Though Satan gets most of the press, Jesus was surrounded mostly by those who cared for him – the angels and animals. When he came back to town, he was truly on a mission from God.

The wilderness is an enduring theme in literature. Time and again, characters go out into nature to try and make sense of what is going on. It happens in almost every Shakespeare play. In The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale had to meet Hester and Pearl in the forest before he could come to terms with them and himself. The conflict builds in the city, moves out into the country to find some sort of resolution, and then comes back to town. But I see something different with Jesus. He was not merely tracing the path of his ancestors, or even reframing their experience. Neither is his time in the desert another example of a literary device. It happens at the beginning of the story. Not much has happened. For Jesus, the wilderness was not something to be escaped, as it was for the Israelites, nor was it simply a place to get a little “me” time. Even in Mark’s brief account, Jesus’ time in the wilderness doesn’t seem to be all that relaxing. He went there on purpose and he embraced the wilderness. And, it seems to me, he never let go.

Something I read yesterday came back as I thought about the wilderness this afternoon. Stanley Hauerwas quoted from the L’Arche charter:

L’Arche knows that it cannot welcome everyone who has a mental handicap. It seeks to offer not a solution, but a sign that a society to be fully human must be founded on welcoming the weak and the downtrodden.

Hauerwas then emphasizes:

Notice that L’Arche doesn’t pretend to be a solution. It is a sign of hope. And hope, of course, is the way time is shaped.

Hope doesn’t just take time; hope shapes time. I like that image.

One dictionary I found defined wilderness as, “Something characterized by bewildering vastness, perilousness, or unchecked profusion.” I read that sentence and I think all of life is wilderness: a bewildering vastness.

All I have to do is figure out how to do my job and be the husband I want to be and figure out how to cook for homeless people and go to deacons’ meeting and write letters for Amnesty and keep up with our Kiva loans and write my blog posts and maintain lifelong friendships over too many miles and walk our Schnauzers at night and pray for Darfur and Congo and Iraq and Afghanistan and try to keep up on the news and practice my guitar and read and sleep and lose weight and exercise take out the trash and love kindness and do justice and walk humbly with my God.

John, who gave us the account of Jesus telling Nicodemus that we could not know how the Spirit came and went, says of Jesus, as he prepared to wash the feet of his friends, “Knowing that he had come from God and was going to God,” he began to wash their feet. The trajectory of our journey is circular; we’re not going through the wilderness, we’re going from and to God, even as we live here in the bewildering vastness of both our world and our Creator.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: edible art

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Some years ago, Ginger and I were in Paris and we attached ourselves to edge of a tour group walking through Notre Dame Cathedral, mostly because I wanted to pick up a few more pieces of useless facts and information to store in my brain. The guide was talking about the stained glass windows when we walked up, pointing first to the North Rose window that dated back to the original construction in the thirteenth century. She then pointed to the South Rose window and said. “This, however, is the new window,” she said, “which were installed in the fifteen hundreds.”

The new window was older than most anything of historical significance — even in Boston, where we lived at the time. Good art has staying power.

For Christmas, my chef gave me an absolutely gorgeous cookbook – a work of art on its own terms – called Pork and Sons. Besides offering some amazing recipes, the book is beautiful because it is the story of a family’s relationship to food – pork, in particular – and because of the incredible images of the dishes described.

In my business, we think about how the food looks almost as much as how it tastes. Presentation is a big part of the picture, which is why (I have to keep telling Ginger) that we sprinkle “all that green stuff” on top of the dish before we serve it. I want the plate to offer a visual invitation even before you bite into it. Even in the heat of the dinner rush, we work hard to make sure the plates look good, to create edible art, which is intended not to last. The whole point of our preparation is for the customer to deconstruct and devour the dish. If we do our work well, when the evening ends the room is empty, as are our pans, and we have nothing to show for our work except the knowledge that we sent folks home full.

Of course, they will wake up hungry again tomorrow.

As much as I like making beautiful food, the memories of meals that hang like portraits in the gallery of my mind don’t revolve around what was on the plate as much as who was around the table. As Vanier says, “Food and love are linked closely” (35).

The hardest thing about restaurant work for me is I don’t get to talk to most of the people who eat my food. I do make a point of getting out in the dining room several times during the course of service, but I don’t get to meet most folks. One student comes in a couple of times a week with her boyfriend and orders the same thing. She gets the Roasted Chicken Marsala, but asks for only the sides of mashed potatoes and vegetables, and butternut squash on top. I have the squash on hand to sauté and serve, so I make the dish. After about the third time, I took the plate to the table myself and said, “I need to put a face with this food.” We had a nice chat and got acquainted a bit. Now when she comes in, the server simply comes into the kitchen and says, “Megna’s here,” and I know what to cook.

For now, the incidental contact will have to do; I pray it will not always be so.

I think I have spent a lot of my life praying it will not always be so – related to any number of things; I feel as though I’ve lived on the cusp of things, mostly moving and rarely feeling settled. That’s why, I suppose, these words of Henri Nouwen tucked away in my readings found me tonight:

When you pray, you profess that you are not God and that you wouldn’t want to be, that you haven’t reached your goal yet, and that you never will reach it in this life, that you constantly stretch our your hands and wait for the gift which gives new life. This attitude is difficult because it makes you vulnerable. (118)

When the artisans set the glass in the windows at Notre Dame, they knew they were building a house of worship. The building took so long to complete that the ones who started the construction were not the ones who completed the cathedral; it took almost two centuries. Whether working on the intricacies of the Rose windows, or stacking the stones for the walls, I can’t imagine any of them found it easy to grasp an image of what they were building together other than some abstract idea of a church. Once finished, it has continued to be a work in progress, requiring restoration and rebuilding due to the damage done by the wear and tear of the following centuries. Though the edifice stands as one of the most recognizable building in Paris, its art is not so much different than my nightly offerings: neither is ever completed.

We share one other thing in common (at least I hope we do): for all our effort to create something beautiful, the art itself is not the point. A restaurant is not a bad metaphor for church because the idea is to incarnate two of Jesus’ invitations: “Come and see,” and “Take and eat.” We spend a lot of energy in church making sure things are “right,” which is not all wrong, yet we have to check ourselves to make sure we have not lost sight of our calling to make a place for everyone – particularly for those who live at the margins of life.

In every kitchen where I have worked, the only person who has a meal prepared for them everyday is the dishwasher, the one at the bottom of the ladder. Regardless of how busy we are or whatever else is going on, we take time to feed the guy stuck at the dish machine. It doesn’t make his job any easier, I suppose, but it lets him know he is regarded and cared for. He’s one of us.

And it’s my favorite meal to make everyday.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a friend of time

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

We run a two-person line in the kitchen at Duke, which means I have one other guy cooking with me at dinnertime. As the year has gone by and we have developed more of a customer base, the two of us stay quite busy; Wednesday night we served 104 dinners. One of the ways we are dealing with our growing business is to teach Tony, our dishwasher, how to cook with us on the line, which falls into the time honored tradition of how one works his or her way up in the kitchen. The cooking lessons happen on the nights when Abel is working because Tony is newly arrived from Honduras and speaks less English than I do Spanish. Both my and Tony’s vocabularies are growing because two of the four nights Abel is not there and we have to communicate with one another.

One of the words I learned first was espera: wait.

Our roasted chicken Marsala requires us to wait until the pan is smoking hot on the stove before adding the oil (and waiting for it to get hot) and then the chicken. When the dish is made with patience, the skin browns and crisps beautifully, but if we don’t wait, it sticks and tears.

Espera. Wait.

When the tickets are stacking up and we are trying to get the food out, it is tempting to push a bit, but then we are left with offering less than our best work, mostly because we failed to add enough patience.

One of my traveling companions for this Lenten journey is a new little book by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier called Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness. The title alone led me to believe it was a voice I needed to hear for these days. I’ve not been disappointed. In the introduction, John Swinton describes Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, as a gentle man and goes on to say,

Gentleness is a vital dimension of the kingdom of God (Matthew 11:28-30), but it is a learned skill that requires work and demands patience, slowness and timefulness. Such work means that we have to become “friends of time,” a patient people who recognize that “we have all the time we need to do what needs to be done.”

I am fascinated by time. I make time, take time, have time, lose time, waste time, save time, and spend time, but I’ve never thought of befriending time, or living with timefulness. What a great word. I couldn’t find the word in the dictionary, but I did find a reference to it in an online article that spoke of “yoking our awareness to the present moment.”

If I can go back to the kitchen for a minute, when the ticket prints, telling me someone wants the chicken for dinner, I make a choice. I can choose to let my sense of time be controlled by the little piece of paper saying they want dinner NOW, which leads me to rush the dish; or I can see the ticket as an invitation to take the time I need to prepare the dish well: taking a minute or two to get the pan hot, and more time for the oil to warm, and more time for the chicken to brown, and the sauce to reduce, until the dish that goes to the table does so with, well, timefulness.

As much as the latter choice seems the obvious one, I’m well aware of how hard it is for me to live timefully. Espera doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s the dinner rush or some other self-imposed deadline, I can quickly become consumed with The Task at Hand, and push time and everyone else around with the pugnacious impatience of a conductor determined for the train to leave on time at all costs. I know what needs to happen and I want it to happen now.

Time too easily becomes a force, rather than a friend.

As Vanier begins to tell his story, he invokes Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, focusing on Jesus’ words,

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

And then he says,

My life has been privileged enough that I never quite knew where I was going.

I laughed out loud when I read the sentence because it took me back to the parking lot of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas many years ago. Ginger and I drove there after a family gathering in California because neither of us had ever seen the city. I was taking our bags to the car about nine in the morning and followed two people out for whom it was still the night before.

One said, “I tell you one thing: you gotta know who you are and where you’re going.”

“Well, hell,” the other replied, “I’ve always knowed where I was, but I ain’t never knowed where I was going.”

I was still thinking about them when I read this paragraph:

What makes transformation possible? Jesus says that when we’re born of the Spirit, we don’t know where that Spirit is coming from or where it’s going – there is a reason for not knowing. Transformation gives us the audacity to advance along a road of unknowing. At the same time we can’t be totally unknowing. There must be points of reference . . . .” (27)

I wrote in the margins, “I may not know where I’m going, but I know who I’m going with.” Grammar aside, I can see the transformational possibilities when I can remember the who more than the where. To be friends with time is to choose people over tasks, shared moments over schedules, passion over punctuality. When I have the wherewithal to live with patience and intention – to let the pans get hot, if you will – much less of life is left stuck and torn.

Espera. Wait.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: mirepoix

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

The word for the day is mirepoix.

Relax. I don’t have forty-odd French cooking terms to bend into Lenten metaphors. But I do have two. Mirepoix is the French name for the “trinity” of ingredients that serve as the foundation for most soups: onions, carrots, and celery. In Cajun cooking, you substitute bell peppers for the carrots. You can also add bacon or ham for some soups. The point is to create a layer of flavors on which to build the rest of the recipe.

I love making soups. For me, the idea behind the mirepoix has been inspiration to learn to think about layers of flavor, building from the foundation on up, that create something that is both familiar and intriguing. I was talking to another chef last week about this very thing and he said, “Do you make marinara sauce?” He then went on to say, “The next time you do it, roast a couple of poblano peppers, peel them, and then puree them into the sauce along with the tomatoes and garlic and basil. It adds something special.”

I have a chili recipe that relies on a can of Guinness and a square of dark chocolate to create layers of flavor that make the chili taste even more like it should. When I make mushroom soup at work, I throw in the rinds from the parmesan cheese (we save them) and let them stay in the soup the whole time it is cooking. The soup doesn’t taste like cheese and yet the hint of parmesan makes it more intensely and intriguingly mushroom, even as you try to figure out what else is going on as you taste it.

I had coffee yesterday with my friend Claudia who told me about her experience at a Japanese tea ceremony. I have never seen or participated in one of the ceremonies, so I may be taking things out of context, but what stuck with me was the phrase she took away from the event: one moment, one meaning.

We had a good talk about the power of being present in the moment and letting it mean what it means right then and I left thinking about the paradox of existence that affirms the truth of the present tense alongside of the layers of truth that make up our lives. A number of years ago, I wrote a short story about a man waiting to hear the results of some medical tests called “Waiting Room.” One of the paragraphs said,

Time stands on its head like a circus clown. We do not move forward, only up and down. We are every age we have ever been or will be in any and every moment, as if the moments of our lives happen simultaneously, though we experience them one by one.

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 lying 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.

The meaning of the moment is magnified by the mirepoix of life, the foundation of experience that has simmered and shaped us with all that has come before and, in some mysterious way, all that we have yet to become. Whatever taste the moment leaves in our mouths is colored, at least in part, by how well the foundation was laid. In the short expanse of time in the doctor’s waiting room, I imagined the man suspended in the moment, with time stacked on top of itself, rather than stretching out in a line, each moment feeding the present where he hung between desperation and relief.

In his poem, “Live in the Layers,” Stanley Kunitz wrote:

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”

Live in the layers and one moment, one meaning are not so far apart. If I sink myself into the present tense, into the layers of the moment and ask, “What’s here?” rather than, “What’s next?”, I can begin to taste the flavors set down at the foundation of the world: life tastes like Love.

There is a recipe for mirepoix: fifty percent onions, twenty five percent each of carrots and celery. Peel the carrots and the onion. Pull the leaves off the celery. Dice everything small and as uniform as possible. Get the pot hot, add butter or oil, then the vegetables, and cook them slowly. I like to cover the pot to keep in the moisture that develops because I think it adds to the flavor. Though the best soups, I think, are made more from leftovers than recipes, I still begin with laying a good foundation, making sure that underneath it all is what I know is true.

“And so these three things remain,” Paul said: “faith, hope, and love.” The mirepoix of existence, if you will. (I suppose in this analogy, faith and hope would be the carrots and celery.) If I speak with the tongues of angels and have not love . . . .

For these days, I’m going back to a foundational flavor and reading again A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People, a wonderful devotional book that has left its mark on me. One of this week’s readings seems to fit here, from Why, O Lord by Carlo Carretto.

No, it is not easy to grasp that the only way to suffer less is to love more, especially in politics. At the risk of seeming weaker. Yes, at the risk of seeming weaker I shall not build an atomic bomb, I shall not give my enemy a whack in the eye to show that I am stronger, I shall not make war, I shall not squash my tomatoes and apples with a tractor to keep the price up, I shall not destroy forests to build factories, I shall not poison the sea.

If love is the rule of my politics and the thrust of my action, yes, I really shall suffer less and I shall cause less suffering in others, some I shall be loving more.

Yes. That’s how I want to flavor the world.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: mise en place

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6

I don’t come by organization easily.

I’ve never been one to know exactly where a particular piece of paper is, nor one who naturally finds a way to categorize life and collect things in an ordered fashion. I suppose I could compliment myself somehow by saying I’m a more organic organizer, but the truth is it takes me a long time to figure it out. We have lived in our house here in Durham for almost a year and the kitchen is just now beginning to make sense to me; I am just now beginning to figure out where things go. And I’ve chosen a profession that thrives on organization.

Go figure.

I’ve been working at the restaurant at Duke about a month and a half longer than we’ve owned our house, so I suppose it’s no surprise that I’m finally figuring out a system there as well. You see, when you go into a restaurant and order a dish, whatever time it takes them to prepare and serve it is dwarfed by the amount of time it took to prepare to be able to cook the dish to order. If we want to serve our Brown Sugar-Dijon glazed salmon to you in a reasonable time frame (and we do), long before you begin to make your way to our dining room, we have cleaned and portioned the salmon, prepared the glaze, cut and roasted the seasonal vegetables (tonight’s were roasted zucchini, carrots, yellow squash, and radishes), and made the sweet potato polenta far enough in advance for it to set and then cut it into sticks to fry. All of those things are in containers and cold drawers, waiting for the ticket to come through that will call them into service and us into action.

And we have a term for it all: mise en place, which translated means, “to put in place.”

My work day at the restaurant right now runs from eleven in the morning to nine at night. Of those ten hours, six of them are spent getting ready. Sometimes six and a half, when there is a lot to prepare. The prep list is driven by the menu, each dish requiring six or seven tasks to get them in place for cooking. If we prepare well, the evening generally goes well, regardless of how many customers come in. Our well stocked mise en place means we are ready for the unexpected. Then there are the nights when we let ourselves believe we are well stocked when we know better, leaving one or two things a little short and, of course, by some strange intuition the first ten customers come in and order the thing we have nine of, sending us into a spin, trying to do that which we are no longer prepared to do.

And we know what the menu is.

Mise en place struck me as an appropriate Lenten metaphor a week or two ago because Lent is a season of preparation. When I sat down to write tonight, I began to ask, “Preparing for what?”

Yes, I know we are walking to the Cross with Jesus. Yes, I know we are getting ready for those dark days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Yet, as moving as Maundy Thursday services are for me and as palpable as the grief can be, we live on the business side of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. If I’m getting ready for something is it not something more than acting out the obvious? Perhaps, then, Lent is mise en place without a menu: getting ready for what we do not know.

If I have done my prep work well at the restaurant, I don’t have to worry about the small stuff and can concentrate on the bigger picture, if you will: on making sure the plates are excellent, my communication with the staff is clear, and that I have time to go out into the dining room to meet some of our customers. I’m preparing to free myself to see more than slicing and dicing, to see the whole instead of the parts.

When I am at my most distracted or disorganized is when life descends into details. Though it alliterates nicely, it sucks to live out. During January and February of this year, I wrote fewer blog posts than I have any months in the three years I’ve been writing, other than a couple of months when my depression had the best of me. For the first winter in almost a decade, I have not been depressed; in fact, I have felt more hopeful. My struggle, I think, is related to organization: I’m trying to figure out how to put things in place to be who I want to be. Many of the nights I have chosen not to write because I wanted time with Ginger (which is at a premium on our current schedule), or I chose to sleep (which is a health issue). I have worked hard to see a bigger picture and not be legalistic. My goal when I started writing was to write two-hundred and fifty posts a year, mostly because I wanted to develop the discipline of a writer. I am still committed to that discipline and I want to see a larger grace that allows for time to lay fallow, to do something other than keep up production.

And I knew Lent was coming when I would keep my yearly promise to write a thousand words everyday. I knew I was getting ready to, well, get ready: to put things in place. The menu I’m working with includes doing a job I love that has grown to be larger and more demanding of my time, investing in my marriage in a way that offers Ginger more than the dregs of my existence, writing this blog and some other things I want to be on paper, cultivating friendships both old and new, and growing to be more faithful in my life. This is the season for me to make my prep lists and do what I need to do to get ready for life beyond the Resurrection, for living out those days we call Ordinary Time with flavor and intention.

I’m grateful for the time to prepare.

Peace,
Milton

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