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theological esperanto

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I’m not sure when I first heard of Esperanto – high school, I think.

Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof invented the language in the late nineteenth century to foster international harmony. Rather than pick one language for everyone to learn, which might leave the native speakers of that language with an advantage or an attitude, everyone would learn a new one. Though it is still around and in use, Esperanto has never really caught on.

And it hasn’t really crossed my mind until Monday.

As I was driving to work, I called my blog friend, Jimmy, who is in New Orleans building houses. Jimmy lives in Oxford, North Carolina, where he is both a carpenter and a pastor – and a beekeeper. We got to know each other as Ginger and I were moving here and he has been both a source of information and honey over the past year. He has been deeply moved by the plight of those who are still homeless and hurting because of Hurricane Katrina, so much so that he decided to see if he could raise enough money to support his family so he could go to NOLA and work for a month building houses.

When he answered the phone Monday he was already on the job, and helping to manage three or four mission groups and Christian organizations who had building teams there. It has been a month; he is not ready to come home.

“I’ve talked with my family,” he said, “and we’ve decided that as long as I can raise the money, I’ll stay here.”

Now, he does come home from time to time – such as this week for his daughter’s playoff game. Still, his heart is in the Crescent City. As we talked, he told me about the different groups there and how some of the politics and theology have gotten in the way of their cooperation. Jimmy sees part of his calling there as building bridges between groups to maximize resources and help the most people. He is working to help people see the painfully obvious: love, or should I say, Love is not limited by doctrine.

Love, I suppose, is theological Esperanto.

And though it is our Mother Tongue, that which gave birth to us, it seems it is a language we have to learn how to speak, or at least open our hearts to hear. Thank God, Jimmy is shouting it from the yet unfinished rooftops of New Orleans.

We that have ears to hear, let us hear.

You can read the stories of Jimmy’s last month at his blog, Woodshavings. The link he put up some time ago where one can send donations is broken. I encourage you to leave a comment on one of the posts and ask him how you can be a part of rebuilding New Orleans and relearning the language we all know by heart.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — Jimmy, the song is for you.

finding my roots

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

It’s been a long time since I was an English teacher, but I am still capable of correcting mistakes, being bothered more than most by ones we, as a society, have chosen to let slide. “First Annual . . . ,” for example; it can be the first, but it can’t be annual until there is a second one. One-time happenings do not a tradition make. They may make us hopeful that we’ve started something, but the roots of tradition take time to grow.

That said, I’m hopeful I’ve begun a new tradition. Actually, the tradition already exists, I’m just hopeful I can become a part of it. Fishmongers, a local seafood institution, has a tradition of an oyster special on Friday afternoons: seven bucks a dozen. My invitation to join came when my friend Terry called yesterday afternoon.

“What are you doing?” he asked, which was an introduction to the more important question: “Would you like to go to eat some oysters?”

The answer to the second question was an unequivocal YES.

He picked me up a few minutes later, and before long I was digging into my first dozen, accompanied by a Newcastle Brown Ale. As luck would have it, Ginger was out walking with Lori, Terry’s wife, so I called them to inform them of our plans and they changed their walking route to meet us at the restaurant. The four of us had a great time together, and then the women headed off to finish their walk and Terry and I stayed to finish our beverages and continue our conversation. I came home happy and hopeful that it was only the first of many of my Fridays at Fishmongers.

I can feel my roots beginning to grow.

Two or three songs into the show last night, Joseph Shabalala, the founder and leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, spoke to the sold out auditorium about music and tradition. Ladysmith has been singing for forty-eight years, taking the harmonies that grew out of the suffering and hardship of the mineworkers and giving it life as a healing force.

“Tradition is like a tree,” he said; “the deeper the roots grow, the stronger the tree becomes, and the wider the branches.”

They sang songs with roots that grew deep, going back beyond the destructive violence of apartheid, back beyond the mines, back to Shaka Zulu, to what it means to be African, to what it means to be human. I thought about the tree that fills our front yard, which must be eighty or ninety years old and is the same tree that was planted even though it’s own existence is testament to all its changes. Whoever planted it all those years ago hardly could have imagined how it would tower over our little house any more than Shabalala could have imagined his singing group would grow to sing at Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Prize ceremony, or tour the world, or end up singing with Paul Simon. When they sang “Homeless” last night, they talked a bit about the collaboration, now over two decades ago, and then introduced the song by saying, “We are all homeless.”

And yet their songs called me home.

My deepest memories of Africa are musical ones. Sundays, as a boy, meant meeting at Matero Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. The harmonies the guys brought to the stage last night were the same ones that sprang from our congregation each Sunday: rich, rhythmic, and relational. As they sang, I found roots I didn’t know I had, roots that run deeper than all the moves I’ve made, all the disconnects, all the rootlessness and homelessness I feel. As they sang, I could see faces – Wynnegood, Norman, Rebecca, Lazarus — and smell the dust that swirled around the church, feel the breezes that blew through the open windows, even hear the rain on the corrugated tin roof that made it almost impossible to hear on stormy Sundays.

After all of these years, Africa has not let go of me. My roots, withered as they seem, remember with resilience and I find myself feeling like a prodigal reclaimed. In the same evening, strangers with songs and a new friend offering oysters both came to say I belong, which is a message I crave, over and over again.

The climatic scene in the movie Ratatouille comes when the grizzled old food critic tastes the little mouse’s signature dish and is pulled from his cynical self all the way back to the hungry hope he knew as a child that was satisfied by the same dish at his mother’s table. In a similar way, the harmonies took hold of my heart and pulled it across oceans and continents to a place in my childhood full of meaning and emotion. Though Zambia is not my home, I was reminded that I felt at home there and it has not let me go. It was less about remembering a place than it was remembering who I was. Who I am. My roots are deeper than I ever imagined; my branches wider.

William Cowper wrote

sometimes a light surprises the Christian when he sings
it is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings
when comforts are declining he grants the soul again
a season of clear shining to cheer it after rain

“I had a farm in Africa,” Isak Denisen began Out of Africa. I had several houses there myself, which I left long ago. But last night, Africa came and found me with melodies that broke my heart and healed it again, even as I walked out of the room resonating with memories and into the cool night of my new town.

Terry says Ladysmith comes around almost every year. Whether last night was a first annual event, I don’t know; I can tell you by the next time they come I will have eaten an awful lot of oysters.

Peace,
Milton

joy in mudville

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Today is the day, baseball fans, when we hear the words we want to hear:

“Pitchers and catchers, report.”

And if you want to know one of the reasons I’m a Red Sox fan, I give you Kevin Youkilis, who just signed a multi-year deal and still showed up early to spring training.

Go Sox.

Peace,
Milton

goutez, goutez, goutez

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

I have a growing shelf of books about the experience of being a chef, thanks to my friend Mia who is kind to send one at every birthday and Christmas, and sometimes in between. This Christmas’ offering was The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. The book has both interested and encouraged me.

I had to run an errand on the way to work one day last week and ended up with a few minutes in the parking lot before I had to be in the kitchen, so I pulled the book out to read for a bit. In the middle of the chapter I was reading, Flinn described the Chef making a consommé:

Chef carefully removes the clarifying ingredients and pours the consommé through a passoire. He tastes again with his spoon. Satisfied, he adds perfectly diced vegetables.

“Goutez, goutez, goutez,” Chef begins. “C’est tres important . . .”

Anne translates. “Always taste, taste, taste, as you cook. Chef Guillard believes this is very important. If you wait until a dish is done, then it is too late to fix the seasonings. You must taste everything as you go along, every ingredient.”

Thursday night it was Chef #2 and me in the kitchen again. Tuesday night I had made a concerted effort to approach things differently. I had a much shorter prep list for him and worked hard to frame things so I didn’t play into an adversarial relationship. He seemed more accommodating as well, and the evening went OK. Part of the change I made was to take the lead in calling the tickets as they came in and give him a more limited responsibility, and he responded well, leading me to rethink my assumption that the problem was his lack of passion; perhaps he was just struggling to keep up. Thursday night, we saw our first customer a little before six (we open at five) and our last just after eight – in between there were sixty-seven others who came, unannounced, for dinner. In that time frame, also, the printer in the kitchen became temperamental after we changed the paper and a couple of tickets got lost. One of our servers, in particular, became discombobulated.

Duke Dining Services sends anonymous students in from time to time to evaluate all the eating establishments on campus. (You can see this coming, can’t you?)

The server came back first to ask if a customer could get an appetizer portion of the Butternut Squash Ravioli. My answer was yes. Several minutes later, she came back with a ticket for said ravioli to be served with a medium steak. A crucial detail is I make the ravioli myself, but I can’t make them to order, so I freeze them. They have to be in the pasta water for a good four minutes to thaw and cook; when I pull them out of the water, I always press them to see if they are cooked before I drop them in the sauce to finish the dish. About the time we started the ravioli, six dessert orders came in, so I asked Chef #2 to finish the dish. He timed it with the steak, which had already been cooking, and sent them out together.

The ravioli came back. It was still frozen.

When the server returned, she said she had forgotten to write a Roasted Chicken Marsala on the ticket and needed one, as we say, on the fly. Once again, I needed Chef #2 to get it done. I was finishing the desserts as the dish went out. A few minutes later, one of our other servers came to tell me one of his friends was eating dinner with us and was doing an evaluation. I went out to see how their dinner had been and, yes, they were on the receiving end of all that I have just described.

Needless to say, we got a poor evaluation, which listed, among other things, that the ravioli was still cold and the Marsala was bland. I could hear the French Chef saying, “Goutez, goutez, goutez.”

My mind was full of woulda-coulda-shouldas. I should have gone out when the ravioli was sent back. I should have double-checked his dish before it went out. Then I moved on to the reality of our needing to send an order out every two minutes for two hours. Those things crossed my mind before I even got back to the kitchen. As I opened the kitchen door, I made a decision not to say anything to him about what had happened. Part of my choice was driven by my need to finish the inventory before I went home; part of it was I wasn’t up for a confrontation; part of it was I’d been in his shoes. I picked up my clipboard and finished my tasks.

We had had a good night. One table – a table with an evaluator – had gone bad. Next Tuesday, I thought, as we are getting ready for service, I will go over the evaluation and remind him to taste, taste, taste.

About that time, one of the other servers came in to tell me there was someone else in the dining room who wanted to speak with me. I went over to a customer seated close enough to the evaluator for him to have heard what had happened.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “I had the ravioli and it was amazing. The cinnamon pasta. The filling. I’ve never had anything like it.”

His order went out after the frozen one. While I was still doing desserts. And Chef #2 cooked it. I was grateful I had chosen not to speak to soon.

On Friday, I stopped by the used bookstore in our neighborhood because of a comment on my “Redemption Center” post that mentioned Flannery O’Connor. I got two of her books for about five bucks and came home to read the story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which tells the story of Julian and his mother, whom he despises for her unwillingness to change with the times. The story is set in the South, in the thick of the Civil Rights struggle. Julian and his mother are white, and they are riding on public transportation, which means blacks are on the bus as well. When she embarrasses him by her actions, he comes down both angrily and condescendingly. When the story ends, he is on the precipice of what O’Connor describes as “his entry into the world of guilt and shame.”

Perhaps the parallel is a bit overstated for what happened Thursday night, still it strikes me that the entry into the world of hurt presents itself, sometimes, as a clear gateway and other times as a trap door. I had decided Chef #2 was low on passion and high on attitude; I watched and listened a bit longer and found he’s trying to adjust to an environment that may not match his skill set. He does have some of the attitude, but not for the reasons I assumed.

We are often offered opportunity to enter the world of grace, and take those around us along. As I learned again Thursday night, most of the time I find that door by stumbling in.Like the chef tasting and tasting along the way as he prepared the soup, I had managed to find some redemption in the evening by moving slowly and not over-seasoning my responses.

At least I can see that looking back.

Peace,
Milton

dig

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I spent yesterday sorting through
the stacks of papers – bills, mailers,
magazines, notes, bills accumulated
on the dining room table; some
required a decision of me; others
needed nothing more than to be
thrown away. I had to pay attention.

I understand more why archaeologists
have to dig through layers and layers
to find those who came before us.

Peace,
Milton

redemption center

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

About a month ago, as I was sitting in church, my mind bounced from one hymnal to another as we sang something familiar from our song book and the next thing I knew the song playing in my head was an old Sunday night favorite from my Baptist days:

Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it
Redeemed by the blood of the lamb
Redeemed by his infinite mercy
His child and forever I am

(The tune most people know is this one, but my favorite is Aubrey Butler’s version.)

I spent about a week working through a blog post on what the word redeemed means to me, starting with licking S&H Green Stamps for my grandmother so we could go together to the Redemption Center and turn them in for stuff. When I was in seminary, I used to drive by the an S& H Redemption Center and imagine lines of people waiting to be changed, in much the same way I wish, when I hand my parking ticket to someone and ask to be validated that they would say, “You’re awesome.”

Every time I have tried to write about all of this over the last few weeks, I get here and I don’t know where to go. Though I love the melodies, I have always struggled with the sacrificial atonement as it was taught to me because I never understood who needed to be satisfied. (A discussion for another post or seven.) Somewhere along the way in my life, the word took on real meaning for me because of a phrase in the King James Bible that occurs twice (Ephesians 5:16 and Colossians 4:5):

redeeming the time.

I always read the phrase to mean making meaning out of what was happening. I came back to the phrase and my vain attempts at writing about redemption after reading the article on Bruce Springsteen in the new Rolling Stone that called out at me in the supermarket line this morning as I stopped to buy cereal and applesauce on the way to work. As he talked about how he grew into his life as a rock singer, he said,

But if you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just being you, you start to communicate. I wanted to be a part of the world around me.

Wait – there’s more.

All you want is for your voice to be part of the record, at a particular time and place. You try to be on the right side of history. And maybe some other kid will hear that and go, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like the place I live.”

At the risk of being overly quoteful, one more:

And the fire I feel in myself and the band – it’s a very enjoyable thing. It carries an element of desperateness. It also carries an element of thankfulness. We are perched at a place where we want to continue on – with excellence. That’s our goal. And all the rest of the stuff – we’re gonna figure it out.

Though I wonder if Fanny Crosby and Bruce have ever been mentioned together in a blog post before, I have no doubt she knew of the creative tension between desperation and gratitude that Springsteen so beautifully names. If the two were street names, we would know the address of the redemption center: that place where we continue on with excellence, figuring the rest of the stuff out.

Peace,
Milton

lots to learn

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

I love watching Top Chef.

I’m particularly intrigued by the scenarios the contestants are forced to face, which often call forth skills beyond cooking that they may or may not have. A couple of weeks ago, the episode was called “Restaurant Wars” and the eight remaining contestants were divided into two teams and given the challenge to open their own restaurant for one evening. The two chefs who won the opening “Quick fire Challenge” became the leaders, though neither of them were actually leaders. Both restaurants suffered as a result. Ultimately, the reason one chef who was asked “to pack her knives and go” was not because of her cooking but because she didn’t lead her crew.

“If you’re the chef, you have to act as though no one else is going to do their job,” one of the judges said to her.

I understood exactly what he meant. In a job that depends on everyone doing their part, you have to be prepared in case someone doesn’t come through. At the same time, however, you have to trust each other – even depend on each other as though everyone is going to do excellent work. When both things are held in creative tension, good food happens.

One of the reasons I’ve never made a good Calvinist is I believe people will rise to the level of trust you put in them. When I took kids to youth camp as a youth minister, our “rules” consisted of, “Live, act, and speak like the children of God that you are.” And they did. I took the same basic approach as a high school teacher and now as a chef it’s the way I choose to relate to the folks on the line with me.

I have two guys who alternate nights working with me at the Duke restaurant. One, Abel, I have written about before. The best way I can communicate his approach to his job is to recount what happened the other night. We had some fresh trout to sell that evening, which we were going to dip in an almond crust and fry. As he was getting ready for the dinner service, he said, “I’m going to cook the best trout they have ever tasted.”

And he did.

The other cook who works with me is capable, diligent, yet he lacks the passion Abel articulated. I don’t know his story. I don’t know what has hardened him. I do know it feels to me like he comes to work on an assembly line. I don’t think he gets much joy out of his work. He is filling orders more than he is feeding people. I don’t know how to help him. You can teach technique but you can’t teach passion.

That last realization calls me to live in yet another creative tension, between the poles of my own passion for excellence in what we are doing and my responsibility as both his supervisor and a human being to find a way to look at him that is something more constructive than judgmental. I may not be able to teach passion, but I can learn not to write him off.

Right?

I’m reminded of something my first therapist said to me: “The two things you can change in a situation are what you do and what you say.” I can’t make Cook #2 be different than he is; I can choose to be more creative in the way I deal with him, which means acting my way feeling something other than frustrated. Perhaps I can act and speak in a way that offers him the opportunity to feel something other than frustrated, as well.

The contrast from night to night for me is palpable. Abel comes to work and he is full of energy and intentionality. He and I like each other and we work well together. We have done so long enough now that we know how to help one another, even anticipate one another, when we are on the line together. Abel has risen to the trust I put in him from the beginning. On the alternate nights, I’m working with someone I don’t know as well, with whom I have not worked as much, and who doesn’t exude the same energy and intentionality. He is more dutiful than creative. He doesn’t appear to be interested in more of a relationship than is required to get through the evening.

I’m the chef. It’s my job is to work with both of them to create consistency both in our kitchen and in the food that comes out of it, which means, as much as anything, I have to go to work everyday looking to learn and seeking to rise to the level of trust that has been put in me.

And I still have a lot to learn.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe (finally).

day off

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

were you to ask what I did today
I might be tempted to say nothing
because I had the day off from work
but that answer would be lazy
I went to the grocery store
and the bank, baked bread,
made a couple of soups,
ate lunch with my wife
played with the pups
and took a nice long nap,
which may have been my
greatest accomplishment

Peace,
Milton

what love can do

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

I’m tired. Things are going well at the Duke restaurant, and well means thirty more customers a night without any more help in the kitchen. I’m going early and staying late – and having fun as well. I’ve worked hard to put a new menu together for our newly renovated space and some of the new dishes are really fun to make (butternut squash and pear ravioli in cinnamon pasta, for instance).

In a week when I’ve watched my brother go back to working too much too soon after his back surgery, I’m aware, at 52, that working eleven and twelve hour days when I don’t sit down is not something I can do indefinitely, particularly if I want to grow old with the woman I love. And so I’m spending my nights driving home from work praying about what the years ahead will hold, even as I am grateful for what fills my days right now.

One of the things high on the present list is a new Bruce Springsteen album came out today. Thanks to an iTunes gift card from my boss, I got to preorder it and found it waiting for me when I got up this morning. And one of the gems I found was this song, “What Love Can Do.”

There’s a pillar in the temple where I carved your name
There’s a soul sitting sad and blue
Now the remedies you’ve taken are all in vain
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Darlin’, I can’t stop the rain
Or turn your black sky blue
But let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Well, now our truth lay shattered you stood at world’s end
As the dead sun rose in view
Well, if any of this matters, with a kiss my friend
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Darling, we can’t stop this train
When it comes crashing through
But let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

When the bed you lie on is nails and rust
And the love you’ve given’s turned to ashes and dust
When the hope you’ve gathered’s drifted to the wind
And it’s you and I my friend
You and I now friend

Here our memory lay corrupted and our city lay dry
Let me make this vow to you
Here where it’s blood for blood and an eye for an eye
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Here we bear the mark of Cain
We’ll let the light shine through
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

In the midst of my long days, which are dwarfed by what is happening around the world from Gaza to Sri Lanka to the Congo to Darfur to wherever else you want to name, I need to hear him keep singing,

Here where it’s blood for blood and an eye for an eye
Let me show you what love can do

Yes, yes. Please show me.

Peace,
Milton

in my heart, a dancer

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Twenty years ago this weekend I met Ginger.

Last night, as a way to celebrate, we went to see the Dance Theater of Harlem Ensemble at the Carolina Theatre, since the love of my life is a dancer. The evening was full of good things both because of the dances and because one of the directors of the DTH used the “interactive” evening to explain how dances came together and what the dancers were doing. We’ve even got to ask questions, one of which was, “How do the dancers remember what they are supposed to do on stage?”

“We practice he said and use what we call ‘muscular memory.’ Our minds and muscles work together all the bits of information we have repeated and practiced over and over to bring it all together in performance.”

As the evening went on, I found myself intrigued by his vocabulary, as he talked about lines and conversation and relationship, all in the context of dance. They were not simply going through motions on stage; they were incarnating their hard work, their collaboration, even the love they shared with one another in order that we might sit rapt in our seats, finding our own place in their conversation.

This afternoon, we got to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium to see the Duke men’s basketball team play the Maryland Terrapins (thanks to a church member with extra tickets). As it happened, on this afternoon, Duke is arguably the best team in the country – and they played like it, beating Maryland 85-44. In one amazing sequence, one of the players scrambled to save a ball from going out of bounds, throwing it across the court to another who made a touch pass to yet another who was running ahead of him, who passed it on to a fourth, who made the basket. The team made thirty-four field goals and had twenty-three assists. Like the dancers, the power of their performance was in lines and conversation and relationship, and muscular memory; they, too, were incarnating something that mattered to them.

Ginger and I met on a youth retreat. She was a sponsor with one of the churches attending and I was leading the music. I saw her across the room that first Friday night and struck up a conversation. The next day, as the kids went about whatever it was they were doing, we sat and talked – for several hours. On Sunday, as we were preparing to leave, I asked for her phone number, and her response looms large in Brasher-Cunningham lore:

“It’s in the phone book under ‘Reverend V. R. Brasher.”

I went home. I looked it up. I called her and asked her to go see Lyle Lovett with me the following weekend. Twenty years (and at least that many Lyle Lovett concerts), six Schnauzers, six residences, and four cities are just part of the dance of our lives that leans heavily on our muscular memory drawn from all the day to day words and rituals that remind us who we are together.

I’m neither a good basketball player nor a dancer. To use either to describe myself could only be done as metaphor. Still, I know the deep satisfaction that comes from an assist – the touch pass at the right moment that lets her shine, and I know the trust and confidence that comes from knowing I am not alone, even as I feel the beat of my heart bring up a rhythm from deep in my bones when she takes my hand for yet another turn in the dance we have done together for these twenty years.

In a lyric I wrote for our wedding, I said:

how I want to dance together
how I want to taste forever
how I want to spend life with you

The dance has been better than I ever imagined.

Peace,
Milton

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