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alternate tuning

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Something in the day lead me to a poem rather than an essay. I’m less confident in my poetry, but it is what I have to offer.

Alternate Tuning

I’m confused.
I don’t understand.
I’ve played guitar a long time.
But tonight, I’m trying something new.

I press the string against the neck for a
G, but the note that sounds is B.
My fingers go where they have always gone,
Only to find notes they don’t know:
My guitar has learned a foreign language.

My hands know the chords in English, I guess —
But my instrument now converses in
Farsi, French, Urdu — Arabic?
I am a beginner again,
Trying to recognize an old friend
Who has reinvented himself.

I recognize the shape,
The way the curve fits under my arm,
But I don’t understand what he is saying.
I stumble through the dictionary
Of chord shapes, looking for something
I recognize: a meaningful translation,

Looking for a way to not feel so stupid.
I could retune the strings back to the notes I know,
We could go back to the same old chords,
But I think I would always hear
The trace of an accent in the strings.

So I try again, forcing my
Fingers to find the notes in new
Places, to let my guitar lead
Me to a new melody.

Peace,
Milton

the next voice you hear

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

God called again, “Samuel!”—the third time! Yet again Samuel got up and went to Eli, “Yes? I heard you call me. Here I am.”

That’s when it dawned on Eli that God was calling the boy. So Eli directed Samuel, “Go back and lie down. If the voice calls again, say, ‘Speak, God. I’m your servant, ready to listen.'” Samuel returned to his bed. (I Samuel 3:8-9, The Message)

As I have tried to listen this week, here are some of the voices I have heard and read:

Joe: It’s not often at halfway to a hundred you get to start all over. Ride on Milton ride on.

Anj: I will be holding you in the Light, as we Friends say, as the Spirit brings you and Ginger to mind.

Zorra: I wonder what God will do with this time in your life?

Bill Hill: Go for it, Milton. Make it happen. Immerse yourself in it. Write your fool head off. Work at other things to support your writing habit. You need to do it, and we need to read it. Grieve over the loss and the injustice of your dismissal, but then write.

Tim Sean: I’m on your side, whatever that might mean.

KQ: I believe two things about your situation (and mine): The twins Danger and Opportunity are always present in the crisis of unemployment. You will prevail over the former and excel in the latter, no matter what professional path you chose.

muphinsmom: I’d say you probably need a much bigger blank piece of paper now.

fishrock: Have faith that you will survive. Keep “a kind heart” to everyone, including yourself. Keep writing.

Lisa in Austin: I was wishing you’d write a book.

Anne: Some of us are aching for such a book…something that validates our lives and feelings as woven into the tapestry of ‘normal’ life.

RLP: Please God, find Milton a job, if you do that kind of thing. I hope you do.

Ginger and I have felt an amazing amount of love and support from people both far and near, in both words and actions. We have also continued to get bills in the mail. I’ve spent a good bit of time scouring the Web, making phone calls, and reading want ads, trying to see what was out there, trying to discern God’s call in all of this.

Growing up in a preacher’s home, I learned early about call. It was how I was taught to think about work: God called you. My father talked about how he was called into ministry – it wasn’t where he was headed to begin with. My mother talked about feeling called to take care of my brother and I. As I sat in Baptist churches growing up, I watched more than one person walk down the aisle during the invitation hymn to answer God’s call to “special service,” which meant the vocational ministry. I never saw anyone come forward to say God had called them to be an accountant, a physical therapist, a truck driver, or a chef.

When we first moved to Boston, Ginger and I both had to find jobs to help supplement our income as church planters. I worked at the Blockbuster Video in Charlestown. One night, I was walking through the store and asked a woman if I could help her find a movie. She looked up surprised and said, “I don’t usually talk to the help in places like this.”

What I wanted to say was, “I have a Masters degree and could talk circles around you when it comes to movies.” What I did was go back behind the counter and leave her to search on her own. It created an identity crisis for me: I had to come to terms with who I was and what I did not being the same thing. If all I was could be summed up in renting copies of Terminator 2, I couldn’t take it.

Once again, I’ve had to learn to live in the creative tension between the two extremes. When people ask me what I do, don’t I usually answer, “I am a chef,” rather than “I cook for a living”?

One of the things I have heard in the past week is both writing and cooking are expressions of my spirit: they are who I am. Regardless of the circumstance, if someone asks who can help with the food, my hand goes up and my mind starts dreaming up what to make. Several times a day, I catch myself looking at what is going on around me and thinking about how to put it on paper so others could be in that moment as well. I do these things; I am a chef and a writer.

The kicker comes when we add money to the equation. A friend used to work in a hospital with a woman who spent all her vacation time working in indigent clinics overseas. The woman said she did her job during the year for those four weeks of meaning. Not everyone in the world gets to think about meaningful jobs. Some get to choose based on necessity and compensation; others have to take what they can find. At different times, I’ve lived on both sides of that line. I’ve come to feel that the sense of calling comes in the doing of the thing: the work ethic, the loyalty, the commitment to excellence, the sense of community with co-workers. Again, not all of those are available in every work place.

About noon today, I heard another voice. The general manager from the Inn called and asked if I would consider coming back to work. She did a good job of saying she knew I had not been treated well over the past few days and she also said they understood what a good worker I was.

I told her I would think about it.

When I hung up the phone, all I could hear was Jackson Browne singing, “Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.” Except I don’t feel caught. I do wish there was a clear indication – a Voice, if you will – to show what the best path would be. I won’t know that until I take a few steps, at least; maybe more.

I have some time to keep listening and I will because, before long, it will be my turn to speak.

Peace,
Milton

PS — And I did find time to post a new recipe.

stand up and sing

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my favorite poets and one of my heroes because of the way she wages peace with words. When I found a book of her poetry I did not have, You & Yours, I whipped out one of my Christmas gift cards and gave it to myself. This was the first poem:

Cross that Line

Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border
of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.

He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was
not allowed to cross
that line.

Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

When I first read the poem, I recognized Robeson’s name as that of an actor and singer from an earlier time, but I didn’t know why he had to sing into Canada, so I did a little research. Here’s what I found.

Paul Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, NJ, the son of a freed slave who became a Presbyterian minister. He received a scholarship to Rutgers, where he became an All-American football player. He then graduated from Columbia Law School, but left the law soon after because his secretary refused to take dictation from a black man (not the words she chose) and he saw no way around the racism in that field. In the mid-twenties, he entered the theater. After singing “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat, he decided singing full time was what he really wanted to do. One biography describes his growing social conscience this way:

Robeson had been giving solo vocal performances since 1925, but it wasn’t until he traveled to Britain that his singing became for him a moral cause. Robeson related years later in his autobiography, Here I Stand, that in England he “learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.” Consequently, he began singing spirituals and work songs to audiences of common citizens and learning the languages and folk songs of other cultures, for “they, too, were close to my heart and expressed the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music.” Nathan Irvin Huggins, writing in the Nation, defined this pivotal moment: “[Robeson] found the finest expression of his talent. His genuine awe of and love for the common people and their music flourished throughout his life and became his emotional and spiritual center.”

A PBS biography continues the story:

During the 1940s, Robeson’s black nationalist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite his contributions as an entertainer to the Allied forces during World War II, Robeson was singled out as a major threat to American democracy. Every attempt was made to silence and discredit him, and in 1950 the persecution reached a climax when his passport was revoked. He could no longer travel abroad to perform, and his career was stifled. Of this time, Lloyd Brown, a writer and long-time colleague of Robeson, states: “Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever.”

He wasn’t allowed to leave the US for eight years, when the Supreme Court reinstated his passport. By then he had gone from being a noted celebrity to persona non grata to most. It was on one day during those eight years in the fifties that Paul Robeson sang into Canada.

Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into?

At the interfaith service before our governor’s inauguration, a rabbi (whose name I can’t find anywhere) quoted another rabbi, Abraham Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery and then wrote afterwards:

For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

It is a sad thing to me that I grew up in a denomination that is rooted in the South and never met a white minister there who had prayed with his legs.

Remind us again,
brave friend. What lines should we all
be crossing?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is best known for being one of those whose nonviolent resistance broke apartheid in South Africa. Now he is singing across lines about the way the world treats gay and lesbian people.

“We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about; our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given.” Mr Tutu says he could not have fought against the discrimination of apartheid and not also fight against the discrimination which homosexuals endure. “And I am proud that in South Africa, when we won the chance to build our own new constitution, the human rights of all have been explicitly enshrined in our laws,” he said, adding that he hoped this soon would also be the case in other countries.

We talked with one man during the inauguration festivities who told us of Deval Patrick going to visit his eighty-year old father, by his son’s definition, a real Boston Irishman. The son was worried about how his dad might take to the idea of an African-American governor and he wanted his father to meet this man whom he respected and supported. When the old man met Patrick, he apologized: “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to do more back then.”

Remind us again,
brave friend. What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

Darfur is singing.
Sierra Leone is singing.
Iraq is singing (a different song than we are hearing)
Our immigrants are singing.
Our poor are singing.
Our gay brothers and lesbian sisters are singing.

The list is far from exhaustive. The melody, no matter in whose voice, yearns for resonance in our hearts and minds.

Stand up and sing, brave friends.

Peace,
Milton

what hope sounds like

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

I opened one of my Christmas presents yesterday. My friend, Lance, gave me a gift certificate to Calabash Music, a global music web site unlike anything I’ve ever seen (or heard). Here’s how they describe themselves:

Calabash Music™ is the ultimate global music destination giving easy access to all the great, but hard-to-find, music from around the world. We’re providing you with the most unique and broadest based international catalog – served the way you like it, via the Internet.

Our equal exchange business model and focus on international artists is revitalizing the music industry in developing nations around the globe. When our artists sell their music directly to you, they keep half the money from each sale and they avoid the high costs of manufacturing, marketing and distributing their music on CDs.

Needless to say, my time spent roaming around on their site, which is full of chances to listen to great stuff — including a free download of the day, helped to lift my spirits. Thanks to their willingness to share, I’m including two things: a video trailer to a movie about The Refugee All-Stars in Sierra Leone and a listening sampler of the Mutubambile Orphan Choir from Zimbabwe, which is what I got with my gift certificate.

The civil war in Sierra Leone is one of those conflicts that doesn’t break into our news cycle very often. Many of the refugees from the war have fled into the neighboring country of Guinea. Calbash describes how the two men who began the band came to do so:

Reuben’s and Franco’s collaboration actually goes back to 1998 in Kalia camp. “I had nothing to do,” recalled Reuben. “In the morning, I would go to the center were all the refugees would just be talking. I saw that many people were not happy. I thought: If I start to play music here, people will really feel well.” Precisely so, and soon a Canadian NGO provided the band with PA gear so they could tour to other camps and raise spirits there. “Me and Franco,” said Reuben, “we were very serious over the matter. At first, my wife was not happy. She didn’t want me to go sing in remote places. But I was so stubborn.” His wife, Grace, eventually joined the band once she saw how the music was helping to build community in the camps, drawing people to meetings where they could discuss their circumstances and options.

You can also visit the official web site of the film and hear an interview on NPR.

The Mutubambile Orphan Choir is made up of children from Zimbabwe who were orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Again, here is Calabash’s description:

‘We are the Orphans’ was produced by popular Zimbabwean musican Oliver Mtukudzi alongside children who are part of the Mutubambile Orphan Choir.

The children composed their own songs with Mtukudzi, who also worked on the musical arrangements. This extra-ordinary album by children who have lost most of their parents to HIV/AIDS reflects a sigh of hope and spreads the message of the disease that has taken their loved ones. Through the beautiful, often sad, songs of the choir, produced in collaboration with Oliver, highlights the national problem posed by the many orphans left by HIV & Aids every year. The sale of their album will contribute to the orphans’ education.

Use the player below to hear samples. It will also connect you to Calabash if you want to buy some of them.

Reuben is right: when I start to play music, I feel well because I can hear what hope sounds like.

Peace,
Milton

bluebonnet spring

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

There’s the theology you discuss late at night over coffee or beers and then there’s the theology that gets lived out. The challenge, for me, is for the two to be quite similar.

In coming to terms with my job situation, I turned to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Mt. 6:25-34)

When it comes to dealing with adversity, it’s easy to become self-focused. In some sense, that’s exactly what we have to do: put on our thickest skin. In another sense it’s reflex: we turn inward to keep from getting hurt even more. One of the earliest definitions of depression I learned was it was “anger turned inward.” Since the anger couldn’t get out, it cannibalized whoever was trying to hold it in.

Trust me – that’s a good definition.

It’s easy to do the same thing with adversity or despair. Much of the power in Jesus’ challenge to consider the lilies comes from knowing that most of the folks who heard those words that day and the rest of us that have read them over the centuries all have moments when we think, “No one knows how I feel.” I’m not the first person to suffer the anxiety of losing a job, or the humiliation of going to the Unemployment Office, or the tension of wondering how to pay the bills or what to do next for money. I am unemployed, sitting in my house, typing on my MacBook, drinking a cup of coffee, while my wife who loves me works downstairs.

I’m a fortunate person going through a difficult time who wonders what to expect from God.

Every five seconds a child dies from hunger related causes in our world – about 16,000 children a day. Here’s a way I can grasp that number. A Boeing 747 used for domestic flights holds 568 people. Imagine one of those planes packed with children crashing and killing all the passengers every fifty minutes of every day. That’s how many children are dying of hunger in our world. I couldn’t find a number for the adults. Of that number, I have no doubt many are from Christian families who have read the Sermon on the Mount and have prayed for God to provide food. They prayed all the way to the grave.

What do I do with that?

Yesterday, Massachusetts inaugurated Deval Patrick as our seventy-first governor and our first African-American governor. As a part of his inaugural address he said:

On this very day 165 years ago, a young man named Kinna, who had been part of that [Amistad] rebellion, sent a letter from prison to our own John Quincy Adams, who had retired from public life at home in Massachusetts.

Kinna pleaded with Adams to help the 36 captives from his ship to earn their freedom. Adams took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won. As a gesture of thanks and respect, the Africans gave Adams a Bible, called the Mendi Bible, after their tribal homeland.

I took the oath this morning with my hand resting on that same Bible — and with my resolve strengthened by that same legacy. I am descended from people once forbidden their most basic and fundamental freedoms, a people desperate for a reason to hope and willing to fight for it. And so are you. So are you. Because the Amistad was not just a black man’s journey; it was an American journey. This commonwealth and the nation modeled on it is at its best when we show we understand a faith in what’s possible, and the willingness to work for it.

Ginger and I had a chance to be a part of the interfaith worship service that preceded the inauguration. It was an amazing collection of people from all over Massachusetts. I sat with two Sikhs and a Muslim, the four of us standing shoulder to shoulder singing,

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
thou who hast brought us
thus far on the way;
thou who hast by thy might
led us into the light;
keep us for ever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places,
our God, where we met thee;
lest, our hearts drunk with the wine
of the world, we forget thee;
shadowed beneath thy hand
may we for ever stand,
true to our God, true to our native land.

The tenor of the day called us outside of ourselves — beyond our parochialism and our cynicism – to see new possibilities. When Patrick said he was descended from “a people desperate for a reason to hope and willing to fight for it,” I felt he was calling us to claim the same heritage. The story of being human is one of both considering the lilies and working hard to change our circumstances in the midst of adversity.

Face it: the lilies never had to pay a mortgage.

When I lived in Texas, my favorite time of year was early spring, when the bluebonnets bloomed. The beautiful little wildflowers cover every highway median and any number of fields with a purple-blue blanket – for about two weeks. Then they’re gone. They brought Jesus’ words alive to me in a new light. My paraphrase goes something like:

Consider the bluebonnets. They don’t work or punch a clock, but they’re beautiful. They also don’t worry that they last such a short time. They simply revel in being bluebonnets and leave it at that.

If perennial wildflowers are the working metaphor, there is much to learn beyond a bluebonnet spring. After the flowers fade, the Texas Highway Department doesn’t mow the medians until the bluebonnets have gone to seed. Then there is nothing to see beyond the grass and weeds that cover the space between the opposing lanes of traffic. The life of a lily or a bluebonnet involves rest, growth, and some work, along with a little luck and time to bloom. Spring doesn’t come everyday.

Jesus’ last comment on this topic is the clincher for me (again, my paraphrase):

Don’t start worrying about tomorrow – there’s plenty of time for that. You have enough on your plate just dealing with today.

A little over a month ago, I was working hard to put together a plan for running the Bakery at the Inn. Today I don’t work there anymore. If I had worried then, I would not have let myself dream about the bakery and would not have learned all I did about putting together a business plan. If I had gone to work everyday for the past year stressing about the tenuous nature of my job, I would not have been able to let myself get to know my colleagues, or learn as much as I did about cooking. Now my blooming time is over there and I am called to trust God on a day that is not a bluebonnet spring. Whatever I know of time and circumstance, God was here before it and will be here long after it is over. Whatever shape there is to this life we live, I can only live today.

Now I know why I like to discuss theology with a beer in hand.

One of the readings at the service yesterday was “A Prayer” by Maya Angelou. In the midst of change, they came as helpful and hopeful words for me:

Father, Mother, God
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence
during the bright and sunny days,
 for then we can share that which we have
with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence
during the Holy Days, for then we are able
to celebrate you and our families
and our friends.

For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely,
we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed,
we ask you to shower upon them
the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most–Peace.

Yes.

Peace,
Milton

living the dream

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
18

Ginger and I were watching something on TV on New Year’s Eve when one of the characters said something that gave me my watchword for 2007. I told her I had decided that, when someone asked me how I was, rather than saying, “I’m fine,” or “I’m doing well,” I was going to answer, “I’m living the dream.”

We met at the gym yesterday afternoon and decided to grab a cup of coffee afterwards. In between the gym and the Au Bon Pain – about a three-minute drive – Chef called to tell me I had been laid off. The owner decided to let all of the non-salaried employees go without any notice. In a matter of moments, I joined the ranks of the gainfully unemployed. I was stunned.

I think I still am.

After fifteen months and some choices, on my part, to become a full-time chef, I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of my week and a life in the kitchen. I love what I do and I do it well. Now I’m not doing it. And I’m not making any money. Both things are significant issues.

I’ve spent most all of my professional life in vocations that had some sense of stability to them. If I was going to leave, I gave them fair warning; if my position was going to change, they gave me adequate notice. The idea that they can simply call and say to me, a full-time employee, so long and thanks for the fish is both foreign and shocking.

Here I am, living the dream.

I got up this morning and went to the Unemployment Office sign up for unemployment compensation. I got there at 11:00 and left at 1:37. I was not alone. The room was fairly full of folks filling out the same form I was. There were even a couple of families. I assumed they had nowhere else to leave the kids. While I waited, I looked through some of the want ads that promised good money for delivering phone books and stuffing envelopes, and I looked through booklet of jobs the agency had put together. Out of ten pages of possibilities, with about twenty entries a page, less than fifteen of them paid more than ten dollars an hour.

There were no restaurant jobs, other than an invitation to join the McDonalds’ management training program at $20,000 a year.

I heard my name called and looked up to see a small man with a long grey ponytail and a big smile. I followed him back to his cubicle, which was filled with stacks of papers, Zen books, and pictures of his daughter and felt welcomed there. He worked through the filing process, but did so with grace and humanity, making me feel like a person who had something to contribute. We talked about schools and music and history and books, as well as how to follow up on my application and make sure my checks start coming. He helped me.

Ginger suggested I wait until Monday to begin looking for a new job to give myself time to get over the shock and build a little bit of a thicker skin. On the way home from Plymouth, I stopped at a new Mexican restaurant that just opened (and we like) to see if they had any openings. They don’t. Ginger is right. Even knowing it was a long shot, the rejection was tough to take.

When I started going to spiritual direction about eighteen months ago, Ken said the questions I had to answer were what I wanted to do with my life, what it would cost to make it happen, and how to pay the bill. My passions are writing and cooking. I was doing both everyday, and counting on the second one to bring in at least a little money. These are the things I want to do. This week, I learned part of the cost is working in an industry that sees me as a “cost,” much like the cleaning supplies and the produce. What I see as relational, the owner sees as bottom line: I’m looking to make memories with our meals; he’s looking to make money. When he cut costs, he cut me, just taking care of business.

Though an anti-capitalist rant is tempting and maybe even appropriate, I want to do more with what is going on here than be pissed off. Though I trust that one day I will look back on these days and see lessons learned, I can’t get out from under the pressure to do something to lessen the financial burden that is quickly descending. We live in an expensive part of the world; I need to be working. That said, I want to find a good job, not just a job.

When Chef called, he said (after he apologized for not being able to stop the owner from axing me) if business picked up my job might open up again in anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, but I don’t think I can go back there and maintain my self-respect. I don’t want to feel owned. I, like anyone else, deserve to feel valued. To go back, for me, would be to say I was condoning the way he treated those of us whom he laid off and that I understood why I was cut so he could save a couple of thousand dollars. I don’t, on either count.

I also have to remember, according to the Global Rich List, Ginger and I fall in the top one percent of the richest people in the world, even without my salary included. 400,000 are dead in Darfur and another two million displaced who have never known anything close to my standard of living even in the best of times. I also think about the Brazilians I work with who got the same call yesterday and face bleaker circumstances than mine. I’m not the first one to go through this, nor am I at the bottom of the pile. Therefore, I must live in the creative tension between my privilege on a global scale and my personal problems. Both are very real.

Three days on, this is not what I expected from 2007. But what can I say? I’ve got to just keep living the dream.

Peace,
Milton

a piece of paper

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Ginger told a wonderful story for the children’s message yesterday.

A second-grader was having trouble with his writing assignment and kept making mistakes. Each time, he would erase what he had written to the point that he tore a hole in his paper. He went up to the teacher unsure of what to do. She said, “Why don’t I give you a new piece of paper. It’s a fresh start.”

Ginger then went on to give each of the children – and then each of us in the service – a clean sheet of paper as a symbol of the fresh start available to us.

A bit later in the service, a man in our congregation who grew up going to British schools commented that Ginger had helped him understand something about Americans. In British schools, he said, the pencils don’t have erasers on the ends. He continued with his point, but my mind went its own way since I, too, spent a couple of years in British schools when we lived in Zambia. They taught me to write.

With a fountain pen.

Each of our big wooden desks had an inkwell and inside was a nib pen with a big handle like a paintbrush. Blotting paper was part of the school supplies we were supposed to have. Along with learning to make our letters, we learned how to dip the pen, blot it, and then begin writing. Neatness was always a part of the equation. If we made a mistake, we were to draw one line through the error and then write it correctly. My teacher explained we didn’t have to mark it out over and over and it didn’t matter that there were words marked out on the page in order for it to be neatly done. One line said, “I made a mistake and I corrected it.” We didn’t write in pencil, she said, because writing in ink meant we meant what we were putting on the page. Pencils were for arithmetic.

Her lesson stuck with me in ways I didn’t even know. As a high school English teacher in America years later, my students struggled to understand why I would not accept work in pencil, which was what most brought with them to class.

“Writing in ink means you’re serious about what you’re writing,” I said.

However language came into being, “Oops” must have been one of the first words ever uttered, along with a few more colorful expressions as the mistakes mounted up. Error and failure are essential elements to our humanity. Screwing up is one of the things we do best – and one of the things that leads us to our most brilliant successes. What we do with our mistakes is more profound than choosing to erase or cross out. Life rarely divides into such an easy either/or.

Something tangible, even visceral, happened in the room yesterday as the deacons passed out the clean sheets of paper to the adults seated in the pews. We all knew more about erasing until we had destroyed the paper than our children did. We all have things we would like to do over, things we hope are not irrevocable. The small blank sheets were leaves of grace and forgiveness, even hope that failure is not the final word, nor perfection the ultimate value.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark,” tells of Alymer, a scientist, and his love for Georgiana, his wife and a woman of incredible beauty. Alymer saw her beauty as perfection except for the small birthmark on her cheek. It was only a problem for him, as Hawthorne noted:

In the usual state of her complexion — a healthy though delicate bloom — the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts.

Nothing would do but Alymer find a way to erase what he saw as a blot on her beauty. Georgiana was not so sure.

I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into the world?

He continued to obsess until she relented to its removal, a process that ultimately cost her life. The quest for perfection is an exhausting, even deadly, enterprise. Whatever the yardstick, we can’t measure up. Sooner or later, we’re going to drip ink on the page, or erase a hole in it trying to correct our mistakes. The stains go as deep as life itself.

In a past life, I played golf fairly regularly. I was with some friends one day when one of our group hit a ball into the rough ten or twelve feet off the fairway and behind a tree. When he got to his ball, his kicked it a couple of times until it was lying on the mowed grass and in full view of the pin. One of the other guys in our group said, “You can’t just kick the ball like that. It’s against the rules.” The conversation that ensued was instructive.

“Are we playing for money?”
“No.”
“Are you going to give me a trophy if I win?”
“No.”
“Are we even keeping score?”
“No.”
“Then relax and enjoy the game. I’m out here to have fun.”

When Jesus said, “Forgive and you will be forgiven,” I think he meant hand out as many blank sheets of paper as you accept. The more we make room for one another to fail and try again, whether we are working in pencil or pen, the more we come to terms with our humanity and then with the amazing possibility of the grace we can incarnate to one another.

I’ve got a small clean sheet of paper in my pocket to help remind me.

Peace,
Milton

not keeping time

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

My beautiful lapis blue 1997 Jeep Cherokee Sport turned 166,000 miles today and it’s still going strong. Watching the odometer flip made me think about the waning days of this year and what awaits us in the next.

Is this an ending or a beginning?

For my car, on a day long before it became mine, there was Mile One when all but the last numbers on the odometer were zeroes. A little over two weeks ago, I marked the day I came into the world: my Day One. I missed being born on the eleventh by a little less than two hours.

The odometer counts actual miles. I stack up my years from the day I was born. Yet, when it comes to our calendar, our choice to begin our year on January 1 marks nothing more than our arbitrary decision to say our year begins on January 1. The Hebrew calendar marks the beginning of the year usually in what we call September and says we are in the year 5767. Because their years are of different lengths, the Chinese New Year is in either January or February. This coming year, 4705 (The Year of the Boar) begins on February 18. The Islamic calendar marks the year as 1427. The Hindu calendar, which is quite complicated, marks the new year in May and sees this year as 5108. The Coptic calendar sees the year 1724 beginning on January 1. Best I can tell, this is the year 1376 on the Zoroastrian calendar and the year begins in March. The Baha’I calendar uses the same date for New Years and marks nineteen months of nineteen days. For them, we are in the year 163 BE (Baha’i Era).

Quick – tell me what day it is.

In Time Lord: Sir Sanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Clark Blaise tells the story of how Fleming came up with and implemented the idea of standardizing time after he missed his train because the time at the departure point and the time at the arrival point were not synchronized. He’s the one who decided the day should begin at midnight because sunrise wasn’t quantifiable. One of the people Blaise quotes in the first chapter is George Smoot, whose cousin, Oliver, was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge across the Charles River when he was a student at MIT. Instead of using a standard measurement, they used something they knew. Today, current students at MIT can tell you the bridge is 364.4 Smoots and one ear, but few – if any – know the length of the bridge in feet and inches.

Blaise also says:

First of all, time comes in two distinct varieties: the untamed mysterious Time, born with the big bang itself, and civil, obedient standard time, as in “What time is it?” or “How long has this been going on?” It’s not clear that the same word even applies to both, or what the nature of their relationship, if any, might be. Perhaps time should have two names, like “horse” and “equus,” the one to stand for hardworking, domesticated time, that which we control and can describe – the calendars, clocks, minutes and hours of the civil day – and the other for the untamed and unnamable, that which nature has not yet released.

I love that last phrase: that which nature has not yet released.

We can measure the time that has passed – or at least give ourselves a way to think we can – but we can’t quantify what is still to come. We may have things on the books for 2018 or 2029, but who knows how far away they are. Who knows if we will even be here. We can’t even see the next sunrise until the light is already breaking on the horizon.

One of the things Ginger gave me for Christmas is a Watercolor Lesson-A-Day Calendar. I enjoyed working with watercolors a number of years ago and Ginger wanted to encourage me to get back to painting, so she gave me a calendar that calls me to pick up my brush everyday. I spent a lot of years wanting to be a writer without writing. As I wrote the other day, this has been a year where I marked the days by spending time at the keyboard putting words together. I have no idea of where the words or paints will take me, but I’m going to use them to mark my days to see what nature might release in the sunrises still to come.

“Stack up the stones,” Joshua said, “so when the children ask what the stones mean we can tell them the story.”

One of the things I gave Ginger for Christmas was a recording of me singing, “When You Say Nothing at All,” one of our favorite songs. I learned how to use the GarageBand program on my MacBook and turned my office into a little studio. I also went to the Apple Store for instruction. One of the biggest challenges was learning how to keep time as I played and sang, which meant I had to learn how to play consistently with the beat so I could use the drums and bass sounds stored in the computer.

It’s a funny phrase: keeping time. It can’t be done.

Time moves less like the clicks of a metronome and more like the meanderings of a small stream as it pushes its way through the valley, running over stones, cutting into the soft clay, winding back and forth as it finds its way to the sea. I learned early that Christian theology holds that time is linear: history is going somewhere. The contrast was with those religions that see time as a circle: the great mandala. I don’t think it’s either/or, but both/and. Like any good story, the history of creation is going somewhere, though I doubt seriously that any of us has yet to peg the ending. And the cycle of life, from sunrise to sunset to sunrise, year to year, generation to generation, goes around and around, even as we, as a planet, circle the sun. The circle is one of the archetypal images of creation, from the life cycles of the tiniest of insects to the awesome wonder of the galaxies. We are circling on our way to somewhere.

When I write again, it will be a new year because we have deemed it so, even though it is only four sunrises away. As the sun and moon traverse the sky, I will make my circles to work (again), to church (again), and come home (again and again), as I do my part to unlock the time that nature has not yet released, setting loose the untamed and the unnamable.

Peace,
Milton

looking back

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

don’t eat alone is one year old today.

Corndogmatic mentioned a meme that’s going around where you post the first line of the first post of each month as a way of reviewing your blog for the year. I’ve altered the idea a bit, going back to pull out some quotes along the way that point to some of things that matter most to me.

_____________________________

“A crazy guest eats and leaves right away.” (Arabic proverb)
12/28/2005 – “staying at the table”

In the midst of all the tossing about, I feel these are very pregnant days, if I might change metaphors. We’ve been busy before. We’ve had weeks with more on our plates than we know how to eat; this is not that. As Bill said to Ted (or the other way round), “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Something is happening. Something is growing. Something is about to be born.
1/27/2006 – “building a mystery”

Every trip to the supermarket, it seems, is a test of faith. Globalization means that my picking up grapes from Chile in the dead of winter means some poor farmer is taking it in the face. I have more fresh produce available to me in the dead of a New England winter than the people who live in the countries that grow the stuff ever get to see themselves. So I’ve joined the growing band of folks who are working hard to figure out how to eat more locally and challenge the big corporations.
2/05/2006 – “we are what we eat”

Faith, however, is not about civil rights; it’s more than that. We are called to love the world — everyone not because it’s the legal thing, or even the moral thing, but because it is the truest thing we can do. There is a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, says the hymn. From the beach at the end of my street, the sea is endless.
2/25/2006 – “open and affirming”

But to ride the monster — to come to terms with the depression being part of me, rather than an unbeatable foe and let it take me down, to submerge me until I could learn how to breathe and see and hear in the dark — offers a ray of hope. At the deepest, darkest places I find I do bump into both grace and danger, healing and wounding, life and death, not as polarities, but as creative tensions that offer me the chance to grow and learn and thrive: to begin to feel whole.
3/05/2006 – “riding the monsters”

Jesus was saying live the kind of life that will get you in trouble with the authorities. Love so emphatically, so prophetically, so audaciously that you could be construed as criminally subversive. When we talk about the “crosses we bear” as the hardships we live with, or the difficulties we face we are missing the power of the image. The call is to be holy terrors, to make nuisances of ourselves and wreak havoc in Jesus’ name.
3/12/2006 – “wreaking holy havoc”

Life is not an equation. Whatever my body is doing chemically is not the story of my life, even for today. As the snow falls, the animals huddle close, calling me to hear the strange harmonies that unlock walls, redeem destruction, and echo deep into the darkness.
4/05/2006 – “things to think”

Centering may be a better word. I’m a little over six months away marking my first half a century on the planet and walked today where Paul walked forty of my lifetimes ago, as he walked over ruins of those who had been there six or eight lifetimes before that. Two thousand years feels like a close connection when I think of it as forty lifetimes. We have accumulated more than two thousand years of living just by adding up the ages of the people riding on our bus. Stretched out over centuries it is a long time; imagined as a connected web of human existence it is not so far away.
4/25/2006 – “what history looks like”

We walked home under the moon, below the old city walls, and surrounded by the crowds and the beautiful sights, sounds, and smells of the abandon that flourishes within a celebrating community. We have walked today in the footsteps of our faith, in the heritage of our history, in the delight of discovery, all the time wading in the deep, deep river that is our common humanity. Faith, says Frederick Buechner, is a journey without maps. Ah, but with all these traveling companions, it’s not so hard to find our way.
5/06/2006 – “out for a walk”

I don’t want to forget what’s important, or be a slave to the immediate, and I have to come to terms with my limitations. As much as I would love to champion most every cause I come across, I can’t do it. There are too many important things for me to keep track of them all. That’s a hard truth for me to face.
6/05/2006 – “keeping up”

Love gets lived out in daily tasks and responsibilities, helped along by washers and dryers and mixers and grinders. Getting a new one reminds me why it was there in the first place: we decided to live our lives together.
6/22/2006 – “appliance time”

Ken Lay dropped dead in his vacation home in Colorado. One news account said it might have been caused by the stress of the trial and the verdict. Evidently, he felt little stress in committing the crimes, which leads me to my second thought. His death demonstrates the uselessness of the death penalty: Ken Lay is dead; nothing had been made better.
7/06/2006 – “life sentence”

Sometimes I’m caught by surprise by the sacredness of simple things.

Caught the way a child is caught when he jumps off the side of the pool into his waiting mother’s arms, gleefully giggling the whole time. Caught the way an expression is caught in a photograph, a two-dimensional picture holding layer upon layer of memory. Caught the way a fly ball is caught when the outfielder lays himself out in a desperate dive and comes up with the ball in his glove.
8/03/2006 – “caught by surprise”

We’re created in the image of a go-for-broke-swing-for-the-fences-what -can-I-do-next-man-that-was-fun-do-you-know-how-much-I-love-you-you-ain-t-seen-nothing- yet-I-saw-this-and-knew-you’d-like-it-what-do-you-say-we-skip-school-and-go-to-the-beach- drive-with-the-windows-down-singing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs kind of God who does miracles and other things with an extravagance we can’t explain and we live much of our lives in fear. How can that be?
8/21/2006 – “bartender jesus”

A rabbi, a priest, a physicist, a yoga instructor, an auto mechanic, a bag piper, a farmer, a ballet dancer, a soccer player, and an economist all go into a bar. I’m not sure where that story goes, but it will be better than one that begins, “Six teachers (or accountants, or artists) locked themselves in a room together and said, ‘Good. Now we’re safe.’”
9/19/2006 – “einstein’s ipod”

There’s an ad campaign for something called Tag cologne that makes it seem as though any teenage girl who smells it on a boy will immediately disrobe. There’s something in the attitude towards the girls in those commercials that is kin to the shootings. Everything from Hooters to hip hop is telling our girls they are expendable. They are the targets caught in our cultural crosshairs.
10/03/2006 – “missing the point”

There is an ongoing lamentation to our humanity: we, like the leaves, will only hang on so long before we fall. Hopefully, we, too, can go out blazing. But there is a melody more enduring than the sounds of grief and pain, a song that permeates life at every level, one that we were given from birth.
10/22/2006 – “how can I keep from singing?”

And when I feel overwhelmed, I let my world get smaller. I can’t find the answers to my life, so I quit listening to all the questions. But there aren’t answers, only a call which requires that I listen and look up to hear and see more than me.
11/14/2006 – “it’s a small world”

Memory is essential to purpose and compassion. Let us look beyond the slight of hand that tricks us into thinking the immediate is all that matters. Look up. Look in. Look out. I can only see what I can see; the same is true for you. Together we can assemble a perspective of purposefulness with eyes open wide to let all the light in.
11/30/2006 – “the vision thing”

We grow like Jesus grew. I’ve walked the earth now almost twenty years longer than Jesus did in his lifetime; my grandmother just tripled Jesus’ age when she turned 99 a couple of weeks ago. For all of us, the years happen a day, a moment at a time, in both significant and insignificant increments.

Christmas is coming incrementally for us this year, just as life and faith come day after day. And I still have time to hang the lights.
12/18/2006 – “an incremental christmas”

_____________________________

Thanks for reading.

Peace,
Milton

the morning after

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Mary rose before sunrise;
The baby was still sleeping,
As was Joseph and most of
The animals, except for one cow
Who looked a little sheepish.

The shepherds were long gone.
In their excitement, they had not
Cleaned up well after themselves.
The Magi were resting somewhere,
Waiting for night and the Star.

But Mary did not yet know
Of gold and myrrh and frankincense,
Neither did she know much about
Motherhood, messiahs, or
Life beyond this nativity.

I am up early with a cup
Of coffee and a donut
Of a dog asleep in my lap;
The house is quiet. Christmas
Has come and is fading away.

I know little of parenting, or
Babies, or what to do with
Swaddling clothes. I do know
Christ is born again, for the
Fifty-first time in my life.

In my mind’s eye I watch
Mary turn back to the stable
When she hears her little one cry
For the first time on his first
Morning; she is smiling.

My dog perks up her ears,
As though she, too, hears
The crying, and looks up at me.
“Merry Christmas,” I say,
Wondering what gifts have yet to be opened.

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