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how would jesus fail?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6

I ate all three meals alone today.

Well, I was accompanied by the Schnauzers, so I suppose that’s not completely true. Ginger has gone to see her folks on the way to our adult mission trip to Biloxi and I had things to do around the house, so it was a fairly solitary day with the exception of my trip to Weight Watchers for the weekly meeting (I lost two and a half pounds!). As I have mentioned before, I’m close to being a serial weight watcher and my downfall the other times was deciding I didn’t need to go to the meetings to lose weight: I could do it on my own.

That has proven to be untrue over and over. I can’t lose weight alone.

On more than one occasion, I’ve thought the weekly communal weigh-ins are a pretty good metaphor for church: the accountability, the community, the shared purpose, the encouragement. Faith is not a solitary endeavor. The connection crossed my mind again today because Rita, our group leader, talked about dealing with failure, a familiar word for anyone who struggles with his or her weight. Hell, for anyone who is alive.

Part of what the pups and I did this evening was watch the Red Sox, who are playing incredibly well right now. I’ve been a Sox fan for as long as I can remember and they have taught me a great deal about failure, from waiting eighty-six years between World Series wins to just playing the game on a daily basis. Kevin Youkilis, one of my favorite players, is on a roll right now. He has hit safely in twenty-one games and had more than one hit in nine straight games. He is second in the league in batting average, hitting .358. Yet, even as well as he is hitting right now, he doesn’t get a hit almost two out of every three times he comes to bat. Most players are lucky to get a hit one out of four times at the plate. That’s not the way baseball teaches us to interpret the stats, however. They talk about what he’s accomplished, not how often he fails. There’s a metaphor the church could use more often.

Paul understood what baseball knows when he wrote in Romans, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Not hope in the sense of “I hope I do better next time,” but hope as informed confidence in our Creator for whom failure is never the last word. God is personally acquainted with failure, I think – as strange as that may sound – because of God’s relationship with us. From wondering why Adam and Eve didn’t show up for their evening walk in the garden, to see Abel’s blood in the dirt, to telling Noah to build the Ark, to the people wandering in the wilderness, to Peter’s denials and Judas’ betrayal, all the way down to some things I’d prefer not to share, I don’t think the world has gone quite the way God imagined it when God looked at things and said, “That’s good.”

God is acquainted with grief, with failure. If that were not true, the hope we’ve been promised could not hold the weight of the world. Redemption requires a Redeemer who abides on both sides of the equation.

To know God knows what failure feels like strengthens my faith because I’m reminded that what lies beyond failure is love rather than success. I’m always going to strike out more times than I hit it out of the yard. What will keep me swinging for the fences are the folks in the dugout who go out for beers after the game regardless of the score or my batting average. The meetings matter at Weight Watchers not because we all lose weight every week but because we keep showing up and pulling for each other. When you gain weight (like I did last week), the primary message is keep trying and come back next time.

Jan pointed me to this song by The Gena Rowlands Band that says what I’m chasing in both clearer and coarser terms (parental discretion advised). To live as Jesus calls doesn’t mean to live perfectly but to fail brilliantly – “lose your life to find it” is the way he said it. Then get up and go again.

No one is keeping score.

Peace,
Milton

PS — there’s a new recipe.

snap shot

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

How I remember it is not how it happened,
I’m sure. Every time I go back to a memory
the light in the room is a bit different,
or people have changed clothes.
Most of us can’t remember our lines.
We’re like a junior high drama class
trying to fake our way through the scene
so we can go to lunch.

Memories are not photographs.
I can recall standing under the lightpost
wrapped in Christmas garland
(the lightpost, that is),
you in your big purple coat
and I with long dark hair –
even on top. It was a long time ago,
but I can still see the flash.

Yet, once my memory begins
to animate the scene, and we are
walking and talking on the streets
of Charlestown in the Christmas cold,
all the years of open invitations
I have seen in your eyes,
all the tears and conversations
and laughter add texture and tone.

We’re standing on both sides of my eyes,
but not as mirror image or still life
(life has never been still for us).
We stood there in the cold for that moment,
long enough for the camera to catch
and then release us to all the other
afternoons where we walked hand in hand,
even when no one had a camera.

Peace,
Milton

scene work

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7

One of my quirks is I don’t like to be late to a movie, and by not being late I mean I want to be there when the previews start. I want to see the thing that tells me to turn off my cell phone and put my trash in the provided receptacles. When I have a chance to see a ball game, I want to be there not just for the first pitch but also the national anthem and the team introductions. I want to see the whole story.

Friday morning Ginger and I decided to go out for breakfast and ended up at The Mug, a Marshfield institution and a place I had never been. We were up early and walked in about 6:45. There were two other people in the place besides the cook and one waitress who looked like she was working on a goodbye poster for someone. We seated ourselves and soon she showed up with coffee and menus. She was the kind of person who made me feel like I was a part of things even though I had never been in the place. I said, “I t looks like you’re getting ready for a party.”

“Oh the party’s for me,” she said. “I’m retiring after twenty-six years. Today is my last day. My birthday is coming up and I’m turning sixty and I decided I didn’t want to wake up sixty and still a waitress.”

She was about five three and looked much younger than sixty. She had a bounce in her step – even at seven in the morning – and an infectious smile that carried a touch of mischief. As the café began to fill up, it soon became apparent that we were the only ones in the place who didn’t know her. As people trickled in they would call her name and she would name them in return saying the kind of stuff you’d expect in a small town diner: “The usual this morning, Tim?”

I graduated from seminary in Fort Worth the year she stared waiting tables at The Mug. While she was writing her story on order pads and memorizing the favorites of her regulars, I went from hospital chaplain to youth minister to church planter to video store clerk to high school teacher to concert security guard to assistant pastor to chef. While she probably parked in the same place every morning as she came to work, I moved from Fort Worth to Dallas back to Fort Worth to Boston to Marshfield. And in the six years and change I have driven by The Mug everyday on my way to breakfast somewhere else, she has measured out her life and many others in coffee spoons, French toast, and home fries.

That’s all I know about her. She has been telling the story of a lifetime and I showed up just before the credits started to roll. All I got to see was the final scene where she poured her last cup and drove off to be with her grandchildren.

Yesterday morning, I drove down to Brant Rock where our favorite breakfast place is – Cosmo’s – to find it was no longer there. It was this great little spot run by a couple: he was the cook and she waited tables. Ginger’s favorite part was they had clouds painted on the ceiling. It was the kind of place where the food was great and you had to work to spend more than five bucks. We didn’t go in everyday, but we were there enough to be recognized and for it to feel familiar. I looked through the new window, standing next to the building permit taped to the glass, to see everything was gone – including the stars. I couldn’t find any hint of what was going to take it’s place.

This time, I missed the end of the story. The last chapter is gone.

Tonight I went to a goodbye party for some folks from church who are moving to Austin. They are a really cool couple I’ve gotten to know this year and I will miss them. I had a chance to spend more time with them on this their last weekend than I ever have in the past, so we got to fill in our stories for each other a little more before they left. They’ve asked Ginger to perform their wedding in October, so we will get to see them again and they are moving on to a new chapter in their lives. This time I got to say goodbye. Even though I have no idea how much more of their story I will get to know, that we got to intentionally write the end to this chapter makes a difference somehow.

One of the staples of high school English for who knows how many years is this diagram of a short story, showing how the action moves from beginning to middle to end, from rising action to falling action, from exposition to resolution.


Stories work out that way if you’re O. Henry, Hawthorne, or Hemmingway, but the stories of our lives are not so easily categorized and are certainly not told at one sitting. Sometimes we get to share the long version of our lives with one another and other times we only get a glimpse of a scene in which we are nothing but extras.

I’ll remember being at The Mug and watching our waitress serve her friends for a long time; she probably doesn’t remember I was there even now. The folks at Cosmo’s didn’t think to call me when they closed down. I was the newest acquaintance at the party tonight. Saying goodbye to me was far from the point of the evening.

At least five days a week I try to sit down and tell my story. Tonight I’m reminded that most of the life that gets lived is not my story at all. When the credits roll, my name will show up with all the names rolling by in the small print that moves quickly up the screen as “best boy” or “key grip.” Maybe “gaffer.” Better yet: “man with food and laptop.”

I won’t need a stunt double.

Peace,
Milton

song and dance man

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday; he’s sixty-six. Though I’m not one of those who owns every Dylan record, I am one who has been marked by his words and music. He is someone who has articulated life both personally and prophetically. I thought I would take some time to say thanks.

I got my first guitar for Christmas of my ninth grade year, which was 1970 to the rest of the world. I was lucky because I had friends who already played and so I had a chance to learn quickly. One of the first songs I learned to play was

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

I don’t remember the last time I actually played “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but I thought about one of the verses as I wrote my congressman and senators to decry the way the Democrats have capitulated on the Iraq war funding. I realize the issue is complicated and what bothers me most is I don’t see anyone in Washington who speaks and acts like a real leader. Dylan was way ahead of me. Over forty years ago he wrote:

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

There were eight or ten of us who would sit in a circle in the grass at Nairobi International School most everyday and play and sing. Even in Africa we felt the wind blowing, though the answers Dylan said were there felt elusive. I realize one of the things I learned from those days was life was fundamentally about searching for better questions. Though many of his lyrics roll out like emphatic prophetic hammers, their power is in the profound interrogative at the heart of it all. He wrote lines as full of symbolism as they were of syllables, lines that still stick in my heart and mind:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog a soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

His was music that made me angry and hopeful at the same time. His songs were some of what fertilized my life to help me become who I am now. Sometimes they made me scratch my head as I tried to figure out what he was saying, sometimes they connected me with those around me as we sang together, sometimes they burrowed deep into my memory and took up permanent residence.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.

Alongside of the politics, Dylan’s songs were some of those that taught me about the complex continuum of personal feelings. His lyrics were both simple and impressionistic, telling a story and leaving room for us as listeners to fill in the details.

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

How could he write a song where the characters were both unknown and achingly familiar? And who says, “Fare thee well,” anyway?

When I was discovering his music, Dylan was thirty. Today, I’m fifty and he’s old enough to collect Social Security. Daniel Pinkwater had a piece on All Things Considered this afternoon talking about the current resurgence (insurgence?) of folk songs. His lament was the young singers covering the songs weren’t connected to the original feelings behind the songs. “They don’t know who the original singers even were and are young enough for their parents to not know either,” he said. I hear his point and I want to give the current ninth graders with guitars room “for meditations in cathedrals of [their] own,” to borrow a phrase from Billy Joel. Dylan has had the stage for a long time and, one of these days, will be as forgotten as the rest of us. Permanence is not the point. Dylan appears to know that, as evidenced in this quote from The Writer’s Almanac:

Bob Dylan was once asked if he thought of himself more as a singer or a poet. He said, “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man.”

The best way I know to finish my tribute is to borrow a few more words:

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.
But I’ll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

Happy birthday, Bob.

Peace,
Milton

you had to be there

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

My day started with preparing breakfast for some of our church members. Ginger put out the word last week and invited anyone in the congregation born in or before 1932 to come over to our house. Five folks came and we had a great time. (I also tried a new dish that turned out to be quite good.) We ate and talked for over two hours, and most of it wasn’t about church. Between the seven of us, we can account for almost five hundred years of living – an awesome thought. As many times as we have all seen each other at church and around town, this was the first time I remember that this particular combination of people has been together.

My day ended with packaging fair trade coffee from Kiskadee Coffee Company, a local roaster, to sell to raise money at the North River Art Society Festival of the Arts this weekend as a fundraiser for our two mission trips this summer. We put a hundred pounds of coffee into twelve ounce packages – one hundred and forty of them. I think I got a caffeine rush just smelling the stuff. Derek, our coffee roaster, created a blend of Rwandan and Guatemalan coffees just for the fair so that once we’ve sold the batch that’s all there is. We’ll order more for other purposes, but this will be the one weekend and the one place where anyone can ever buy our Artist’s Blend.

In between the bookends of my day, I sat down to begin Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s choice to eat locally for a year. What they couldn’t grow or find in their area, they did without for the most part. In one of her early chapters (I’m not that far along yet), she describes “waiting for asparagus.” What we see everyday in the supermarket actually has a very short two or three week growing season in April and May (where she lives). It shows up early and disappears fast. You have to be there.

The wonder of a passing moment is one of the reasons I love hearing live music: either you were there or you weren’t. A couple of summers ago, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings toured as The Sweet Harmony Revue. Each artist took his or her turn singing their songs and the others joined in and, as the evening drew to a close, they joined together to sing “The Weight” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” No one recorded it. There is no live album. I heard it; I was there.

Which means, of course, I was not somewhere else.

Food & Wine last month had an interesting article on “The Insidious Rise of Cosmo-Cuisine” lamenting that “the cuisines of the world are merging into one giant, amorphous mass . . . [T]oo many chefs worldwide are creating menus that flit across so many borders and reference so many traditions that they – and we – lose any sense of place” (58). We can’t be everywhere at once, nor can we experience everything at once.

When we were in Turkey, one of the dishes I loved was called Imam Bayildi, which means “the Imam cried” (because the food was so good). The dish was made up of eggplant, tomatoes, onions, flat-leafed parsley, and olive oil. At the restaurant in our hotel, they used organic produce from their own garden and our server owned the olive trees and pressed them to make our olive oil. The simplicity and the sense of place gave the dish its flavor. They didn’t need Thai chilies or truffle oil.

I also read today about a Fair Harvest Exchange Program in Nicaragua, thanks to the folks at Global Exchange. Rather than a tourist trip, the eight-day excursion is to go and work along side of a family at a coffee coop during harvest season. You stay with them, eat with them, and work with them. They want you to be there.

Sometimes I go walking down the beach near our house looking for sea glass. At low tide, the beach is fairly wide: there’s no way to walk it all. I have to pick a line to follow and let the rest go unsearched if I’m going to be able to pay attention to the stretch of sand and stones in front of me. On the way back, I can pick another line, but I never get to see it all. For every piece of glass I find, I suppose, there’s at least one that I never see. If I’m at breakfast in Green Harbor, I’m not in Green Bay. If I’m listening to Emmylou, I’m missing a lot of other songs. If I’m eating from my garden, I’m not tasting other very good things. If I go to Nicaragua, I won’t be in Nepal or Nebraska.

The choice is not between having a little or having it all; the choice is between living in the savoring the sacredness of the particular or stressing over all that I’m missing. I was at breakfast with friends this morning. Whatever else I happened, I’m thankful I didn’t miss it.

Peace,
Milton

hymn in search of a tune

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

Let God Be Named

Let God be named by our farthest reach,
Not by our fears, or the rules we preach,
By what unites, not what tears a breach,
Let God by named by love.

Let God be named by our deepest dream,
Our hearts’ desire, our brightest beam,
Pushing past doubts that around us teem,
Let God be named by love.

Let God be named by a faith that’s strong,
Faith that will stand in the face of wrong,
Faith bound for home though the road is long,
Let God be named by love.

So call the Name who has giv’n us light,
Who leads us on through the darkest night,
Who pours out grace and who gives us sight,
Our God, whose name is Love.

Peace,
Milton

work and wait

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

Our garden is almost planted. The rain finally stopped some time last night so I got out this morning and put in the rest of the tomatoes and a few other things. Instead of annuals, I’ve filled most all of our containers and with various kinds of herbs. Here is the complete list (I think):

  • three kinds of lettuce
  • six kinds of tomatoes
  • white eggplant
  • four kinds of peppers
  • rainbow Swiss chard
  • Brussels sprouts
  • broccoli
  • fennel
  • green beans
  • butternut squash
  • zucchini
  • summer squash
  • garlic
  • sweet, purple, Thai, lemon, and cinnamon basil
  • chocolate, orange, and lemon mint
  • Greek oregano
  • sweet marjoram
  • arugula
  • cilantro
  • strawberries

Wow! That’s the first time I’ve written down an inventory of what is growing in our yard. Pretty cool. Now comes the hard part: waiting both to see what makes it to the bearing stage and to eat what we grow – as well as give a bunch of it away.

After I finished planting, I came in and showered and drove to Plymouth to file for unemployment compensation. The last time I was there was when The Owner laid me off in January. Since the players were still the same in today’s scene, the script, as it were, was still in the computer so my trip didn’t take long. When I was first substitute teaching in Boston I got laid off and had to file as well. They’ve done a lot of work on the “career centers” since then. The office in Plymouth is spacious and clean and the people behind the counter are friendly, at least by New England customer service standards. One side of the office is lined with cubicles where the folks who work there help you get in the system. The other side of the room has a few cubicles with computer terminals where you can go online to look for jobs or take a tutorial. There’s also a long table with newspapers and other employment circulars. There were a couple of folks ahead of me to see a counselor, so I browsed both the print and online versions of the classifieds to see what I could find. The guy who processed my form was nice and efficient and we finished quickly. As I was walking out, I saw the guy who processed me the last time with whom I made a pretty good connection. I stopped at his cubicle to say hello and was surprised at how much of my case he remembered. Then he said, “Hey, I looked at your blog and go back there from time to time.”

I needed that.

I took a back road home so I could stop and see if there were any other interesting vegetables or herbs at some of the small nurseries on Route 53 with a mind to ending up at the gym. I was determined to get there, even though I’m still learning to like it, because it helps with my depression. And it gives Ginger and I a chance to act out one of our favorite scenes from Designing Women when Mary Jo says she likes jogging because it releases endorphins and Suzanne says, “Endorphins – you mean like Flipper?” My body was ready for the exercise today and I got a good workout. Tomorrow is weigh in at Weight Watchers, so I will get to see another benefit from my time on the elliptical machine. (In related news, there’s a new recipe.)

What the three strands of my day have in common is both working and waiting: the now and the not yet, or (perhaps better) the what will be. I planted things that will take anywhere from five to ten weeks to produce what they were created to produce. I set things in motion in Plymouth that will give me some money coming in (starting in a couple of weeks) and create some possibilities for what comes next. I’m going to spend a lot more time watching Sports Center while I work the machine (let the machine work me?) to transform my image of myself both physically and mentally. It’s all good and it all takes time. When it comes to my depression, the same formula applies: work and wait.

Work and wait. The words remind me of William Carey’s words, “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” He is one of my father’s heroes because of his persistence. Carey went to India as a missionary and was there for three years before anyone he met chose to follow Christ. I’m not sure I’m dealing in the Great Things department in my life right now, but I like the combination of verbs: attempt and expect — work and wait.

What is true for great things, I trust, is true for small things.

Peace,
Milton

vive la resistance

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

Some days – perhaps most days – I write because I think I have something to say or I have a conversation I hope to begin. Some nights – like tonight – I write to show (myself) I can make the letters line up in words and sentences to make some sort of meaning. I write to prove to myself I can and to refuse myself the option of falling into the deep.

Today was a good day. In worship we celebrated our confirmands as they chose to become followers of Christ. I had coffee with a friend after church, a good nap in the afternoon, and Indian food with some other friends this evening. And I feel like I’m living under the weight of one of those lead blankets they put over you when you have your teeth xrayed.

Another friend sent me the link to this article by David Grossman in the New York Times where he is writing about writing and says:

It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.”

Grossman is writing about the effect of living in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (at the risk of belittling his observations by connecting them to my personal state of being) I find resonance in his quoting of Kafka. The world is growing narrower everyday for me.

I also found resonance in this paragraph:

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

Again, he is speaking in more global terms than any individual’s psychological struggle, much less my depression, and I understand how the world can change when I put words on paper. Part of our UCC ritual at confirmation is to ask the young people if they promise, with God’s help, to resist evil and oppression in Jesus’ name. While we were getting ready for church this morning, there was a television preacher who promised a CD that would cure depression if I would just believe enough to send him some money. (His actual tone was less cynical.) Another made it sound as though it were just a matter of my strength of will: if I were sincere enough in my prayers and committed enough in my mind and heart, I would feel better.

Damn. If I’d only thought of that sooner life could’ve been so much easier.

The question to the kids did help me as I asked myself if I promised to resist.

Resist: express opposition through action or words; withstand the force of something; refuse to comply.

The image that came to mind was that of freedom fighters from World War II Europe to Mandela in South Africa looking for ways, both big and small, to keep the world from growing more narrow and to resist what was destroying their humanity. Every person that has refused to comply with whatever sought to narrow their world has gestured toward “some future prospect” that is not necessarily painless or perfect, but is something beyond the status quo. I’m not saying my personal pain is on a par with those is Gaza, Jerusalem, or Darfur. I am saying the act of resistance is a personal act regardless of the size of the oppressor.

One of the things Ginger said to the confirmands today was:

As you face the demons that accompany adolescence and adults adulthood, remember that practicing our faith and praying empowers us to live as Jesus taught refusing to nurture those inner demons who hinder us from being who God calls us to be, hinder us from wholeness, from being all that we can be, wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

As a congregation we repeated the words, “I am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.”

Though I feel as though I’m living a lead-plated life, I will move my hands to write and resist, looking for words to widen the way to wholeness and connectedness, harboring hope, and refusing to comply with the narrowing way. If I can write it, perhaps I can live it.

Peace,
Milton

no room at the inn

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
13

Today felt more like March than May.

I drove up to the Inn about three o’clock to find The Owner and see if I couldn’t get a clearer picture of what is going on. The first person I saw was one of the other chefs I work with who was coming out of the function kitchen rather than the restaurant where he usually works. He told me he had been told I was not coming back. With that information in hand, I went inside to wait for The Owner who had gone to run an errand. When he came in, I asked for a few minutes of his time and followed him up to his office. He sat down and looked at me as though he had no idea why I was there.

Ginger and I have been rehearsing what I might say (and how I might say it – often the larger issue for me) over the last couple of days. I’m not going to recall the whole conversation because I don’t feel the need to embarrass him, but I will say I felt good about what transpired in that little room. I said what I needed to say without resorting to a personal attack or falling into a power struggle. I stood up for myself and got the money he owed me, which was not a done deal when I went in. I also got to say goodbye to the people I enjoyed working with during my eighteen months at The Inn. Then I got in the car, drove to the bank and cashed the check, and went to meet Ginger so we could go to the gym.

He never knew about the nights I drove home and talking to Ginger on the phone and telling her how much I loved my job. He never knew how much fun I had with my Brazilian buddies plating up the steaks for the functions. He never knew because he only knew me as an appliance and not a human being. At one point in our conversation today, I called him on something he had done and he snapped, “I’m the owner; I can do anything I want.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” I answered. “You can’t treat me like I don’t matter and get away with it.” Soon after that, I gave him back his key and left. I drove away both unemployed and unburdened. Whatever is next, my time with him today confirmed that it is time for me to not be there: there is no room for me at The Inn.

As I remember another story, that’s not necessarily a bad thing . . . .

Peace,
Milton

advanced calculus

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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9

About a month ago, I checked in with the doctor who monitors my antidepressants feeling reasonably confident: I made it all winter without feeling seriously depressed, which is a first in the last six years. I instigated a conversation about cutting back on one of my medications to see how I would tolerate it. He remained neutral about the idea, but willing to follow my hunch, so we set up a two or three month timetable to wean me off the pill. The first step was to cut the pills in half each morning. When I opened the bottle after breakfast the next morning, I couldn’t do it. This week, I’m grateful I trusted my second hunch. The storm clouds are gathering; they don’t call them tropical depressions for nothing, I guess.

Learning about my depression meant learning that sometimes it grew out of circumstance and sometimes it ambushed me through my body chemistry. The source doesn’t necessarily make a difference in how it feels for me (in me? to me?), and part of the beginning of making some meaning out of the darkness for me is found in knowing where I am. This time I know the ambiguity of my work situation is exacerbating things. Over the past six years, the one place I have always been able to find solace is in the kitchen and I’ve been scheduled out. I haven’t helped things by allowing myself to postpone going by The Inn to find out what’s really going on. Wednesday I stayed in the garden; today my car stayed in the shop. I’m determined that tomorrow be a Day of Non-Avoidance.

Gordon posted a link to an article on depression by Norman Bendroth posted at Christian Century online, which referenced William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a book that has also been meaningful to me. Bendroth quotes Styron:

By far the great majority of the people who go through even the severest depression survive it, and live ever afterward at least as happily as their unafflicted counterparts. Save for the awfulness of certain memories it leaves, acute depression inflicts few permanent wounds.

Man, I hope that’s true. Tonight, it doesn’t feel true. Though I first found a name for it a little over six years ago, I can look back now and see a far less visible darkness present in my life for many, many years. I took the MMPI in 1987 and was on the borderline of being clinically depressed my psychologist told me. I knew nothing about depression then and couldn’t imagine that was me. To come to a place now where I can see the darkness has been a part of my life for almost half of my life compels me to see the depression as part of who I am because it has been a significant factor in the calculus of my humanity, to borrow last night’s phrase. It’s in my mind. It’s in my body. It’s in my heart, my soul. It’s not all of me – or even most of me – but it is part of who I am.

I’m six weeks into Weight Watchers and I’ve lost eighteen pounds. Going to the gym and getting on the elliptical trainer is becoming both habit and ritual for me. Though I’m not ready to claim I like working out, I’m happy to say I like the way I feel when I’m done and I can tell a difference because I’m working out. I’m figuring out how to alter my equation of body, mind, heart, and soul to come up with an answer to who I am that is something other than “the fat kid;” it’s working.

I work hard on the calculus of depression as well, but it’s advanced calculus and the truth is I suck at math. I was, however, always pretty good at the word problems because, I suppose, I always liked words better than numbers. The problem here is to figure out how to live with depression, I think, rather than how to get rid of it. When I worked as a hospital chaplain, I heard cancer patients talk about the importance of thinking of themselves as living with cancer rather than dying with cancer; the semantics changed the equation. My mother was clear of her bladder cancer for nine years – long enough to be regarded as officially cured – when it recurred. She beat it again and she lives with cancer.

I live with depression.

As I sat down to write tonight, Ginger was watching the season finale of ER in the other room. The only thing I heard were the strains of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah,” floating in to find me.

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

That’s it: “It doesn’t matter which you heard/ the holy or the broken hallelujah.” In the equation of my life – advanced calculus, if you will – with garden dirt under my fingernails, vocational uncertainty unsettling my brain, the blanket of Ginger’s love surrounding me, and the gathering storm of my depression daring to deluge, holy and broken feel like the same thing.

Hallelujah.

Peace,
Milton

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