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splendid savings

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

When I leave church on Sunday, The Splendid Table is playing on our local NPR station. The show is sometimes a little too don’t-we-all-love-our-villas-in-Tuscany for me to take, but most of the time they offer interesting conversations and recipes. It’s great for a Sunday afternoon.

Today the host, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, gave a brief excursus on “how to eat like a gourmet for less money” that I found interesting. It seemed worth passing along.

  • Look for the sell by date and if it’s today barter; ask for 50 % off – they have to sell it. Then either use it that day or freeze it.
  • If you don’t cook, learn to do three simple easy things: make a simple salad with a homemade dressing; learn to boil up some grains; or learn to grill vegetables. If you can do those three things you can put together a meal that is low on the food chain, super cheap, and super healthy.
  • Every steak or chop starts out as a roast; buy the roast and cut your own steaks or chops and you can save some money.
  • If you want ethnic ingredients, go to the neighborhoods where these cultures shop. You’ll save money and get a good lunch out of the deal.
  • Buy imported food and wines where the dollar still has some strength and real estate is still inexpensive like Chile or Argentina.

I know we don’t all want to eat like gourmets and I like the idea of thinking creatively about how good food and affordable food don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Again, not terribly profound, but worth passing along.

GIve me a couple of days and I’ll t ry to come up with some accompanying recipes.

Peace,
Milton

grade and grace

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

Two things have spoken to me this week: music and muffins.

As I’ve mentioned before, part of my daily ritual at the restaurant is to make the English muffins that serve as the buns for our hamburgers and shrimp burgers. The recipe takes time, so as I’m walking in at eight each morning I start picking up bowls and whisks and measuring cups so I can get the dough going immediately. The recipe breaks into five periods of activity, with corresponding periods of waiting:

I mix warm water, yeast, and honey; then mix in four cups of flour and then two more; then I mix together the eggs, salt, and oil and add that to the flour mixture; then I mix in another cup and a half of flour.

Then I wait for about thirty minutes until it gets bubbly.

The second period of activity involves adding five more cups of flour and stirring for about three minutes (to activate the glutens).

Then I wait until the dough doubles – also about a half an hour.

Stage three involves kneading the dough, which includes probably adding another four to six cups of flour and working the dough for five or six minutes.

Then I wait until the dough doubles again, also about thirty minutes.

The next step is to roll and cut the muffins and put them on baking sheets.

Then I wait about fifteen minutes to let them rise again.

Finally, I toast the tops and bottoms of the muffins on the flat top (with a bit of butter) and put them in the oven for about eight minutes. If all goes well, the muffins are ready when the kitchen opens at eleven for lunch. Though the recipe is clear, each stage calls for choices. I have to decide when the dough looks and feels right; when I stop mixing or kneading has an effect on the final product. This week I have paid particular attention, trying to make the muffins better. Yesterday and today I achieved a muffonic convergence, as I like to call it: pretty damn perfect muffins.

“This is why I love this job,” I said to my cooking partner, Cort. “You get to feel like you’ve done something well and then move on to what you need to do next.”

Even though the art I create is incredibly temporary – I put the plate together and you eat it, all in the span of minutes – it is also incredibly gratifying because it is quantifiable: I know what a great plate of fish tacos ought to taste and look like (in that order) and, even though I make about twenty taco plates everyday at lunch, each one requires attention as its own unique creation.

I work in a kitchen, not on an assembly line.

As I’ve also mentioned before, much of our non-culinary conversation during the day swirls around music, either bouncing off the songs playing on the boom box, or rising up out of our past experiences. Somewhere in the course of the day, Billy Joel took his turn as our topic and about the time I was going to say that my brother, who is a musician, said way back in the early eighties that he thought Joel’s music would be enduring, Dave said, “You know the reason he keeps touring and trying so hard is he’s pissed he’s never gotten the recognition as one of the great guys of rock and roll.” (Which makes this clip interesting.)

I never told the story about my brother. I spent the rest of the shift thinking about Billy Joel feeling as though he has somehow come up short. I thought about his song, “Angry Young Man”:

I believe I’ve passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too
I had my pointless point of view
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right

And there’s always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks
And his honor is pure and his courage is well
And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man

OK, one more thing I’ve mentioned before in this blog: I live with my own sense of worthlessness, with not feeling as though I’m enough. One of the big reasons I’m no longer a high school teacher is I hated giving grades. The essential element of teaching, for me, was the relational connection I made in the classroom. I asked the kids to take risks, to be themselves, to trust me.

And then I gave them a grade: “Thanks for trying; you get a C.”

I couldn’t do it because of the way I internalized the grades I received along the way – and I do mean I received: they weren’t grading the paper; they were grading me. Cooking is different for me. I realize those for whom I cook may not like everything, but they aren’t grading me. The payoff, for me, is in the creation and presentation of the dishes (when I’m at work) and in the sharing of the meal as we sit together around the table when I’m at home.

The difference is as subtle and as profound as my typing grace when I meant to type grade in the previous paragraph. One letter changes everything.

Everything.

The grace is find in my job comes from being able to claim my competence, to to grow and learn, and to both flourish and fail with abandon. It not that failure is without consequence it’s that I’m doing what I love, so I can weather the storm. And so I heard Dave’s words about Billy Joel with sadness because he’s doing what he loves and lives with grades more than grace. In his biggest hit, Joel wrote:

Don’t go changing to try and please me
You never let me down before . . .
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I love you just the way you are

Billy, if you’re listening, you’ve given some of the best words and music to the soundtrack of our lives. Your songs are alive at our house in ways I can’t even begin to tell you. I hope you can get from grades to grace.

Me, too.

Peace,
Milton

they’re playing our song

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

Where there’s a restaurant kitchen, there’s a radio that, for whatever reason, tends to end up on the “Classis Rock” station, if not one that plays “the Oldies.” Having graduated from high school and college in the Seventies, much of what passes for “classic” was the soundtrack of my adolescence (this was the number one song my senior year in high school) and, though some of it is worth repeating, I had not planned to ever again have to hear

because love grows
where my rosemary goes
and nobody knows like me

(Quick – name that band.)

My current kitchen is filled with cooks who know and play music, so the old songs provide us with conversation starters, comic relief, trivia questions, and the chance to both critique and sing along. We’ve had a couple of good laughs listening to lyrics that, well, sound kind of creepy in today’s world:

I’m the friendly stranger in the black sedan
won’t you hop inside my car

(“Vehicle” – name that band.)

It sounds destined to become the Amber Alert theme song. And then there’s these lines from “In the Summertime”:

have a drink have a drive
go out and see what you can find

(Once more – the band?)

My favorite unexpected use of a word in a rock and roll song goes to Rick Springfield for “Jesse’s Girl”:

I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
Want to tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot

I know it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.

One of my favorite things about our conversations is how we each have had to own up to some guilty pleasures. For all the superiority we can so easily muster, we’ve all had to come clean about the songs we love to hear, even when they aren’t necessarily cool to own up to. After all, pop music is about infecting our brains and hearts with melodies (sometimes cheesy) that won’t let go. I have to own up to this one and this one, at least. Oh – and this one. OK, one more.

One of the things that has struck me is how often I can sing along with the songs – even the ones I don’t like. Maybe it’s the power of radio and repetition, maybe there’s some deeper reason, but my mind is full of the words and music that have filled my days from then until now. I’m also struck with how hard it is to say I like these old songs in a room full of guys who need to make sure we all know we’re above that sort of thing. It’s easier to be a snob than it is to be one of the general public. I want to feel cool, not common.

The truth is while the Beatles were coming apart the Carpenters were only just beginning and I owned both records. I bought Joni Mitchell and Neil Diamond and stayed up late in the dorm room playing America songs with friends, even though we had no idea what it meant that “there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.” But in the hierarchy of hipness, it’s cooler to talk about Tommy, or to know the deep cuts on albums by the Kinks, or to be able to dive off and talk about the Plimsoles and the Pogues. I can keep up for awhile, but I’m just not that cool.

One of the dangers of life on the liberal end of the theological spectrum is falling prey to thinking that our end is where the cool, enlightened people are. That sentence carries a stronger air of superiority than I intend to convey, but I can’t come up with another way to say it. And it may feel the same way at the other end of the continuum. I don’t know because I don’t live there.

The guys in the kitchen aren’t trying to belittle anyone, in fact, our combined musical tastes run the gamut, yet there’s a certain level of musical acumen expected if you want to be taken seriously as a part of the conversation and that, ultimately becomes at least somewhat exclusive. When it comes to what I sing while I’m slicing onions, the ramifications of rock don’t really matter; they’re going to play the same ten songs again tomorrow. When it comes to life in the larger context, how easily I make it to sing along with me or how willing I am to join in with someone else becomes more critical. Harmony and humility, it seems, are essential partners.

I’ve ended up getting a little heavier than perhaps the story of our kitchen singing can hold. Somewhere during the day today, we moved from snarping on the songs to singing along. It just seemed like something worth noting and carrying home.

Peace,
Milton

of cupcakes and communion

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

Our house sits on the border between two neighborhoods, Old West Durham and Watts-Hillandale. The latter has a Fourth of July parade that goes back about sixty years. We even made the news:

The line that stuck with me from the piece was the parade is “an unintentional tradition.” The couple that started it were looking for a way to keep their kids from getting bored during the summer and read an article in a parenting magazine that suggested a parade. Sixty some years ago, they were trying to do something fun with the kids and this year over eight hundred people showed up to march and watch and hang out and eat cupcakes. Though we were closed this week for vacation and general maintenance, our restaurant handed out almost seven hundred cupcakes (we made them at the catering shop) to help celebrate the day and the neighborhood. Here we are in action:

(The Chef-Owner of the restaurant is handing out the vanilla ones, her daughter is in the middle, and I’m in charge of the chocolate.)


We had Communion today, as we do the first Sunday of every month, which is, perhaps, my favorite part of worship. I did wonder as I ate and drank today if Jesus might have instigated an unintentional tradition as he served the bread and wine to those with whom he had shared most intimately. The question is valuable to me because the meal is all the more meaningful if it grew out of the power of the present tense — those disciples eating together to remember and passing on the memory — rather than as planned repetition: The First Annual Communion Celebration.

I just finished reading The Shack (which I will talk about more along the way). One of the things God says to Mack, the protagonist, at the end of the book is, “It’s not about rituals.” The comment caught me because I’ve often spoken of the value of ritual (“meaningful repetition”) over tradition (“meaningless repetition”). What comes to me in all of this is unless what we share in the present, whether cupcakes or Communion, is resonant and relational in the present, all the ritual and repetition in the world won’t breathe any life into it. Last year’s loaves are stale, any way you look at it.

I’m not much of a Fourth flag waver; handing out cupcakes to little kids and watching them dive into the icing was what made the day for me. I even saw some of them at the Farmers’ Market yesterday and somehow felt connected. What grabs me most about Communion is it is a table where all Christians have eaten, eat now, and will eat the meals to come. More than ritual, it is about connection. A place for everyone, and food, too.

Many years ago, my friend Ken Hugghins talked about reading the gospel accounts and, after reading Jesus saying, “I will not drink of this cup until I drink it with you in the kingdom of God,” thinking we should all raise our glasses and say, “Here’s to the day.” That phrase led my friend Billy and I to write a song with that title. It comes close to being one of my favorites of what I have written.

pieces of life laid on the table
here is the blood poured out in love
fill this cup raise it up
here’s to the day my friend

time draws a line down innocent faces
tears mark the dreams that never came home
so you’ll say goodbye say goodnight
here’s to the day remember

can you say it for the ones whose voices are silenced
can you say it for the ones who’ve never been free
can pray for peace ache for peace
here’s to the day that’s coming
God speed the day

gather in close now cling to each other
sing to the night you don’t sing alone
fill this cup raise it up
here’s to the day remember

The intention of ritual that matters most is not in the ones at the beginning, but in those of us who keep handing down what we were given, as Paul says, “I will tell it to you as it was told to me . . . .” Would that we could eat and drink around the Table with the abandon and joy of those kids with icing from ear to ear.

Peace,
Milton

faith-talking people

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

When we moved to Durham, we didn’t buy a house right away, mostly because we still owned in the free-falling New England housing market that we had to sell. We rented a place for the first three months that, in hindsight, ended up letting us get to know our new hometown before we decided where we wanted to live. We spent many afternoons driving up and down streets, trying to get a sense of what was available, what connected to what, and what felt like it could be home. We ended up in the perfect place for us: an urban neighborhood within walking distance from almost everything with a variety of people, a house that didn’t require too much work, and room for the pooch to run in the back yard. I thought about our process last week when I read an article in The Economist called “The Big Sort” that talks about how many of us Americans – at least the ones with means – are segregating ourselves into like-minded communities:

Americans move house often, usually for practical reasons. Before choosing a new neighbourhood, they drive around it. They notice whether it has gun shops, evangelical churches and “W” bumper stickers, or yoga classes and organic fruit shops. Perhaps unconsciously, they are drawn to places where they expect to fit in.

Where you live is partly determined by where you can afford to live, of course. But the “Big Sort” does not seem to be driven by economic factors. Income is a poor predictor of party preference in America; cultural factors matter more. For Americans who move to a new city, the choice is often not between a posh neighbourhood and a run-down one, but between several different neighbourhoods that are economically similar but culturally distinct.

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you’ve heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

The article goes on to describe some of the consequences of our grouping:

Because Americans are so mobile, even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbours leads over time to severe segregation. An accountant in Texas, for example, can live anywhere she wants, so the liberal ones move to the funky bits of Austin while the more conservative ones prefer the exurbs of Dallas. Conservative Californians can find refuge in Orange County or the Central Valley.

Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called “Hearing the Other Side”, Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them.

I can’t help but think talking about faith with those who disagree with us can’t be far behind. With the notable and wonderful exception of Borg and Wright’s book, The Meaning of Jesus, which grew out of both their faith and their friendship, I don’t know of many models of mutuality and maturity when it comes to talking across fences to one another. We know how to yell. We know how to cast stones and aspersions. We even know how to blog. And we struggle to embrace each other as disciples of Jesus together. It’s easier to stay within our smaller circle, though I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.

Here’s what I know about me. I grew up Southern Baptist and have found my way to the United Church of Christ, which comes pretty close to running the gamut of the American Christian continuum. I haven’t been a member of a Baptist church in almost twenty years. This summer, thanks to relational connections that have weathered well over time, Ginger and I are going back to Texas to lead the Baptist Laity Institute with Gordon and Jeanene Atkinson. Though I’m moving back into circles of my past, I’m also moving into unfamiliar territory in many ways. I’m a bit scared, actually.

How odd to think about entering into Christian community and wondering how I will welcome and be welcomed. I should not be so out of practice.

Many years ago, I was leading a small group on a youth retreat and asked the kids to write down the names of those they knew who were not Christians. One girl – a senior in high school – looked perplexed and said, “I live in a Christian family, I go to a Christian school, and I go to church; I don’t know anyone who isn’t a Christian.”

I felt sad because she was missing so much of life.

I live in a Christian home, go to work in (how shall I say?) an environment that doesn’t particularly fosters more profanity than prophecy, and I go to church – my church. I try to catch up with the vocabulary that blows around on the blogs – missional, emergent, incarnational – and I recognize some of it, wrestle with some of it, resonate at times, and wonder how reading and listening to people who profess the same faith as I feels like working with a foreign language?

Each Sunday in our worship, as we move from, as we say, “having gathered to preparing our hearts for worship,” Ginger says, “Take a deep breath – now let it out; breathe in the breath of God, breathe out the love of God.” There’s a place to start. The next step, it seems to me, is to listen before I begin staking my claim. If we are one in the Spirit, I must trust I am, like everyone else in the room, coming from God and going to God. I am not God’s defender or chief spokesperson; I am called to welcome everyone with the same open arms Jesus held out to all comers.

Now, I need to get out of my neighborhood and live out my words.

Peace,
Milton

one more time

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

I’ve been trying to think about what to write off and on all day. Tonight, after the Durham Bulls game, they had fireworks to “patriotic” music — Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to be an American,” Ray Charles singing “America,” Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and Toby Keith’s “I am a Soldier — played sequentially without any hint of irony. The songs made me think of my post last year at this time and, at the risk of being either redundant or self-indulgent, I’m re-posting it tonight, mostly because not a whole lot feels different between then and now.

________________________________

I do a fair amount of listening to country music, but I’m always a little gun shy of my radio this time of year (no pun intended) because the closer we get to the fireworks the more often they play Toby Keith singing about putting a boot up anyone’s ass who disagrees with our government, or – inevitably – I’ll hear Lee Greenwood sing about being proud to be an American.

I’m not proud to be an American.

I can’t be since I had nothing to do with my being an American. I can take pride in things I’ve cooked or written because I did those things, but I’m an American by circumstance, by geography, by fortune. I feel grateful. I feel responsible. But I’m not proud.

Another way to think about pride is to define it as arrogance: rather than it being a sense of accomplishment, it is a sense of entitlement. I’m concerned for our country because I think the latter is the image we project to much of the world, whether we intend to or not. We come across as though we see ourselves as The One Who Know Everything or The Ones Who Are Convinced Everyone Wants To Be Just Like Us.

The analogy that comes to mind is a scene from The Breakfast Club after all the kids (Brian the science nerd, Andrew the athlete, John the angry kid, Allison the outcast, and Claire the popular girl) have become vulnerable with one another:

BRIAN: Um, I was just thinking, I mean. I know it’s kind of a weird time, but I was just wondering, um, what is gonna happen to us on Monday? When we’re all together again? I mean I consider you guys my friends, I’m not wrong, am I?
ANDREW: No…
BRIAN: So, so on Monday…what happens?
CLAIRE: Are we still friends, you mean? If we’re friends now, that is?
BRIAN: Yeah…
CLAIRE: Do you want the truth?
BRIAN: Yeah, I want the truth…
CLAIRE: I don’t think so…
ALLISON: Well, do you mean all of us or just John?
CLAIRE: With all of you…
ANDREW: That’s a real nice attitude, Claire!

The scene continues:

BRIAN: I just wanna tell, each of you, that I wouldn’t do that…I wouldn’t and I will not! ‘Cause I think that’s real shitty…
CLAIRE: Your friends wouldn’t mind because they look up to us…

Brian laughs at her.

BRIAN: You’re so conceited, Claire. You’re so conceited. You’re so, like, full of yourself, why are you like that?

To turn the world into a high school detention hall may seem simplistic, but hear me out. We are a lot like Claire: she’s not mean or vindictive; she is uninformed and arrogant. She has been taught she’s better than others and has not heard voices telling her otherwise until that Saturday in detention. (Wouldn’t that make a great Security Council ice-breaker: OK, if your country was a character in The Breakfast Club, which one would it be?)

When we were in Greece and Turkey last year, almost every hotel had CNN International on the television. The same alleged news organization that fills our homes with endless teen drama queens and pontificating pundits has an international channel that is informative and articulate. I can only assume they don’t want us to see it lest we become informed and realize the world is not what we think it is. We are being taught not to question, not to act, even not to care.

Almost twenty five years ago Little Steven Van Zandt, of E Street Band and Sopranos fame, wrote a song called “I am a Patriot,” which I first heard on Jackson Browne’s wonderful 1989 record, World in Motion. In the video clip I found of Little Steven, he makes an impassioned and linguistically colorful introduction to the song, imploring his audience to question everything and then he sings:

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I was walking with my brother
And he wondered what was on my mind
I said what I believe in my soul
It ain’t what I see with my eyes
And we can’t turn our backs this time

I am a patriot and I love my country
Because my country is all I know
I want to be with my family
With people who understand me
I got nowhere else to go
I am a patriot

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I was talking with my sister
She looked so fine
I said baby what’s on your mind
She said I want to run like the lion
Released from the cages
Released from the rages
Burning in my heart tonight

I am a patriot and I love my country
Because my country is all I know

And I ain’t no communist,
And I ain’t no capitalist
And I ain’t no socialist
and I sure ain’t no imperialist
And I ain’t no democrat
And I ain’t no republican either
And I only know one party
and its name is freedom
I am a patriot

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I love the honesty of the song: “I am a patriot and I love my country because my country is all I know.” Van Zandt names our love of family and want of security right along with our call to question what is going on and work for justice. My friend Gene pastors a church that talks about Life Mission Questions, which I find wonderfully resonant. The answers we find, my friends, are only as good as our questions. In that spirit, I have a few I think we need to ask more emphatically.

  • How can we hold people indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without telling them or anyone else why and then talk about human rights to other countries?
  • How can we complain about countries seeking nuclear power and/or weapons, even threatening war if they continue, when we have them and intend to keep them?
  • How can we continue to staff military bases in countries all over the world when we would never let anyone set up a base on our soil?
  • How can we spend a billion dollars a week on war and not have universal health care our citizens?
  • How can we work to end terrorism without working passionately and relentlessly to end poverty?
  • Why do our presidential candidates have to raise millions of dollars to get elected?
  • Why don’t we think of the other countries of the world as colleagues rather than subordinates?
  • Why aren’t the voices of healthy dissent louder in our country?
  • Why are all our issues described as polarities?
  • Why must everything be either red or blue?
  • Where are the courageous leaders who are willing to do something other than raise money, worry about being electable, and pander to multinational corporations?
  • Where are the real journalists?

Feel free to add your own.

I am a patriot and I do love my country, even though it’s not all I know. I do think the river will open for the righteous someday and, as Martin said, justice will roll down like water. Liberty and justice for all – all the world.

Peace,
Milton

cooking acoustics

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
10

I begin the lunch shift every morning by baking. We make English muffins everyday to serve as the buns for our hamburgers and shrimp burgers. If I don’t start as soon as I walk in at eight they aren’t ready when lunch begins at eleven.

Cooking and baking are two different things. Cooking is improvisational theater: you prepare, you gather all the ingredients around you, and then you wait for someone to call out the elements they want in the performance they’ve ordered. Good recipes are suggestions, relying on the cook to trust his or her senses to make sure the dish turns out as it should. Baking is science. The best bakers don’t just measure ingredients; they weigh them. If the dough is supposed to rise for thirty minutes that means you better have the timer set, or else the bread won’t be what you were hoping for.

My muffin making, therefore, calls me to hone skills that aren’t in my regular set. I’ve gotten pretty good at the muffins, but there is much more to learn. Take, for example, the conversation that took place a few days ago as I was kneading the dough. The delivery guy came with the sourdough bread we buy from a local baker, which led to a discussion about a bakery that had relocated. I asked it their bread was good.

“They do a good job, but the bread has never been the same since they left the old building,” our Chef de Cuisine replied, going on to explain that the bread is affected by the whole room, not just the baker and his recipe. “It’s the bricks in the walls, the size of the room, the way the room holds temperature, the ovens and other stuff. You have to learn how to make bread in that room; recipes don’t always travel well.”

“Sort of cooking acoustics,” I said. It’s not that it’s different bread, just that the room affects how the dough grows and develops.

The conversation has kept me thinking about context and what It means to be who we are where we are. I’m playing a new room these days with our move to Durham. The acoustics of life have changed; things don’t rise or fall the way they did in Marshfield, or in Charlestown before that. I’m still me and I’m trying to figure out how the recipe of my life plays out in these new surroundings, and how I will grow and develop in these days.

I’m mindful, in the rise and fall of my life, that six months after our move to Marshfield my depression got the best of me. In the years that followed, I’ve worked hard to understand the taste and texture of the darkness, if you will, and to prepare myself for the difficult improvisation needed to survive. Now, six months into our move to Durham, I’m struggling again. I’m not saying the cause and effect is quite so clear cut as I am saying I’m living through something that carries some resonance with where I have been before. I know this recipe. Even in a different room, I know what I need (knead?) to live through this.

One day, the baker in the bigger room will have baked there long enough for the aromas of yeast and flour to permeate the bricks that feel so new now. One day, he will know how the air circulates to let the dough proof in the perfect place to make loaves that are delicious and consistent. The only way from here to that day is to keep baking morning after morning, adjusting to the cooking acoustics and finding a resonance that runs deeper than change and circumstance.

Me, too.

Peace,
Milton

I have decided

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
20

I don’t think I’ve gone a week without posting since I started this blog.

This week I’ve felt tired. Exhausted. As I’ve commented to several folks, I’ve been running out of me before I run out of day. I have a couple of good ideas of things I want to write about – that aren’t about depression – and I can’t find the energy to give birth to them. This has been one of the few times in dealing with my depression that sleep has not offered some respite. I’m sleeping restlessly and not sleeping long enough. I’m not sure there is a long enough.

Besides being physically exhausted, I’m tired of being depressed. I’m tried of writing about depression. I can only imagine many are tired of reading about it. (Actually, I know some are because they have found kind ways to let me know.) I understand. It’s not that my days are all bad, in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve had some great times this week. Dear friends have been to see us; work is good. But somewhere late in the day, I feel like the cartoon character that runs off the cliff before he realizes there is no longer any ground beneath him and then he goes into free fall, except I just start falling asleep. I have nothing left.

Ginger pushed hard to get me to write tonight because she knows the defeat I feel when I stare at a blank page for an hour or so and then close the computer without making a mark. Something about having found a couple of hundred words tonight does help and I hate that all I seem to have to say is, “I’m depressed.” There’s more to me. There’s more to life. I can see it. I just can’t write it somehow.

Somewhere in the course of my day – I think it was reading something about Zimbabwe – I wondered out loud to myself, “I’m not sure God is in the business of relieving pain. Making meaning out of it, yes. But taking it away is not necessarily part of the deal.” Many years ago, I heard (or read) Mike Yaconelli talk about a sermon he preached on suffering and God. He said he closed the sermon by reading a passage from John Claypool’s Tracks of a Fellow Struggler in which Claypool describes his eleven-year-old daughter, whose body was wracked with cancer, crying out to her dad to ask God to take away the pain. He said he prayed as earnestly as he knew how. When he finished, his daughter asked why God hadn’t taken the pain away. Yaconelli said he looked up from the book and said, “That is the God we are called to serve. Amen.”

God is not going to take away my pain. I don’t expect my days will always be this dark and exhausting, or Ginger’s so difficult as she stays with me. I have hope that I will find some treatment that will help me manage my depression more effectively, and I don’t think it is going to disappear because I keep telling God I’m tired of this. Therefore, I have to decide what it means for my life that I live with depression. I have to decide whether my faith or my illness gets the last word. I have to decide to trust those who say they love me mean they love me even if all I can write about is my depression. I have to decide I’m going to fight with all I have to offer Ginger more than the dregs of my existence. I have to decide to accept that living life means playing hurt.

And I have to decide everyday, over and over.

The counter at the bottom of the page says I’ve written 632 words: this is me deciding.

Peace,
Milton

random notes

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

As I was driving to church yesterday, I heard that Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the runoff presidential election in Zimbabwe because he couldn’t deal with the violence being inflicted on his supporters by Robert Mugabe’s regime. All indications are that Tsvangirai won the first election and Mugabe doctored the results to cause the runoff. The history of Zimbabwe is a tragic story of the killing of a nation that had great promise and Mugabe is one of the key killers.

Pray for Zimbabwe.

________________________________________

I was out of the kitchen today and spent a good bit of time in the yard. I got a deal on daylilies last week and needed to get them planted. I also installed rain barrels under the drain spouts to have water to feed my plants and vegetables. My good friend and counselor, Ken, used to talk about gardening as a helpful response to depression. There are studies that show there’s something about playing in the dirt that makes life brighter. Ken’s take was it was an organic connection. We came from dust and will return to dust; to go out and dig around in the dirt makes a basic, essential, and healing connection. He’s on to something.

Thank God for gardening.

________________________________________

George Carlin died of heart failure over the weekend. He was 71. He was hitting his stride when I was in college and seminary and I still have several of his routines seared in my memory. As he grew older his cynicism sometimes got the best of him; he was at his best, however, when he played with the language. My favorite routine is a wonderful example of what happens when we really listen to our words. Here it is: Football vs. Baseball.

So long, George.

Peace,
Milton

song and dance

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

I can remember the night.

I had been the backup for my friend Billy as he sang a concert in the Dallas area, thanks to our friends David and Christy. I had flown in from Boston and Christy had been kind enough to give us a couple more days in the hotel to do some songwriting. Billy started playing around with a fun little melody that made us both want to bounce around the room and before long we were singing

rivers singing gladly as the trees clap hands
thunder keeping rhythm to the song and dance
wind across the waters like an angel band
here’s an invitation to the song and dance

put away your woes let ‘em go let ‘em go
they’re gonna be here tomorrow
tune your heart to the birds that fly
out on the edge of the deep blue sky
can you hear the music through the circumstance
listen to the laughter in the song and dance

Even out of both of our tendencies to see the darker shades of life far too easily, we had written a song of unadulterated joy, which is, I think, a harder song to write. I remember reading an interview after the record, Red Bird Blue Sky, came out in which Billy said, as he talked about the song, “Trouble is overrated.” Yes. And it’s ubiquitous.

My brother just returned from a trip to Israel. When I talked to him yesterday he said, “Man, I don’t see how anyone can fix that situation.” And it’s not the only one. My own particular view of the world runs from Darfur to depression, often fueled by my cynicism and despair (since gas prices are so high), and wishing desperately to find a view that offers something other than a view of a world intent on self-destruction.

Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of something – like that night when we sang and danced our way around the Hampton Inn and the few minutes it took to watch this video, sent to me by my friends Ann and Doug, who are among those who help paint a different picture of the world for me.

I don’t know who the hell Matt is, much less where the hell Matt is, but today I’m thankful for Matt, for dancing (he and I share similar styles), for friends, and for the melody of grace that permeates the circumstances of life.

Tonight, I can hear the laughter. And I’m listening as hard as I can.

Peace,
Milton

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