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aging, grieving, dreaming, and laughing

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

I have several disconnected things on my mind, so here they are in no particular order.

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I got my first birthday-related piece of mail today: an invitation to join the AARP now that I am turning fifty. I am old enough to remember when AARP stood for the American Association of Retired Persons, but that didn’t bring in enough money so now the letters are the official name, the same way Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC so you would think they quit frying stuff.

In the course of conversations a couple of weeks back, I talked with an eighteen year old and an eighty-two year old. I got to thinking about it later and realized I am exactly the same number of years from either age. I don’t really have a point here, I just thought it was interesting.

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I also got a package in the mail today from my friend, Billy Crockett, who has a new instrumental CD called Passages that is fourteen original pieces for classical guitar. (Listen to an excerpt of “Pilgrim I.” There is also a companion score available. To quote him:

My hope is that you will, with Passages, be reminded of the wordless ways of the heart, of midnight voyages on the water, and of the simple gifts of old architecture and strings on wood.

You can purchase the record through his web site.

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I read last night that Robert Altman died a week ago of leukemia. He was eighty-one. Altman was a creative and unique voice in American filmmaking, hitting some out of the park and striking out brilliantly with others. His last movie, A Prairie Home Companion, is a gem. His first breakthrough, M*A*S*H, is worth a look, along with The Player and Shortcuts. CNN has a nice video tribute here. He never won an Oscar, but was given a lifetime achievement award this past year. “The major studios, since I’ve been involved with Hollywood . . . they make shoes and I make gloves,” he said.

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Speaking of movies, one of my favorites kept coming to mind today. I think I’m going to watch it tomorrow: Miss Firecracker. It is the story of Carnelle, a struggling girl who thinks winning the Miss Firecracker Beauty Pageant in her home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi will set her free to leave town “in a blaze of glory.” Mary Steenburgen, Tim Robbins, Scott Glenn, and Alfre Woodard are also in the cast. It was directed by Thomas Schlamme, Aaron Sorkin’s partner behind The West Wing and Studio 60 fame.

In the closing moments of the movie, Carnelle says, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.” Scott Glenn’s answer is worth the trip.

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I close with a video clip I Stumbled Upon: Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog.

the wait

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

Advent is un-American.

The malls have been decorated for Christmas since the day after Halloween and we are still days away from even beginning to wait for Christ to come. We, as Americans, are not really built to wait. We are accustomed to getting what we want when we want it. But there is more going on during Advent than God saying, “You sit there and wait and Jesus will be born when he’s good and ready.”

Heck, I can’t even wait to start writing about Advent.

There are two qualitative differences between what it felt like to wait before Jesus was born the first time and what it feels like to wait now when we know who’s coming and we capture the story with construction paper donkeys and towel-headed shepherds. The first difference is how long they waited. The four pages in my Bible between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew’s gospel took centuries to turn. The Hebrew people had already been waiting for the Messiah, but by the time John the Baptist showed up, God’s prophets had been silent for three times as long as we have been a country. Generation after generation had come and gone without ever leaving the waiting room. Before there were Cubs and Sox fans waiting for the World Series, before there was a John Mayer, there was century after century of Israelites waiting for the world to change.

The second thing is, despite the grand arc of history, when it came to living their daily lives they didn’t know what or whom they were waiting for. Some might not even have known they were waiting at all. We already know the story. We know we’re waiting for Jesus to enter the world just as all of us have done: as a baby. We know the story so well that we wait, perhaps, mostly to tell it. We are not shocked like the shepherds or Mary or Joseph or Herod. The birth does not surprise us; we are too often participants in a sort of spiritual C-section: we get to schedule when the Child arrives. And he will look just like his pictures.

Since it was my day off, I got to listen to All Things Considered this afternoon. A commentary by philosopher Alain de Botton (who is one brilliant guy) caught not only my attention, but my imagination: “Motives Behind a Mantra: Revise, Revise, Revise.”

He stared off by saying that we often see art as a repository of values and meaning and we don’t expect an artist to take his or her painting off the wall to take home and reconfigure. When the book is finished and published, it stays that way. But, de Botton said,

Artists do have the option to pull a creation back into the workshop and mend and update it and then return it to the public realm . . . It’s a particluarly romantic myth that leads us to suppose that artists could never improve what they previously delivered to the world . . . Artists should through time grow more lucid about their work and infuse it with their lastest and most mature insights.

God is the quintessential artist — every word, every breath, every move intentional and imaginative. God is also quite capable of revision. Every layer of the history of creation speaks to God’s dynamic creativity at work, every layer full of change. And we, created in God’s image, are both art and artists, called to give birth to God’s brilliance right where we are. One of the reasons we keep telling the story and making the journey to Bethlehem is to revise the artwork. As Meister Eckhart said, “What good is it if Mary gave birth to the Child fourteen hundred years ago if I do not give birth to Christ in my time and in my culture?”

We are called to revise the story once again, not as spectators but as participants, birth-givers, incarnations of Love and Grace in our time. We are waiting for our turn.

In Fiddler on the Roof, in the scene where the Russian army comes to evict the Jews from their town, their home, one of the men says to the Rabbi, “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?”

Isn’t the answer to that question always, “Yes”?

De Botton spent some time in his commentary talking about the risk of revising. Sometimes the Revised Edition is not as good. So it is with the American revision of Christmas as a shopping holiday. What was once about anticipation is now about immediate gratification. The wonder of the Magi as they followed the Star has been replaced by the guy who got shot standing in line to get a PlayStation 3 so he could resell it on eBay. We’ve lost sight of the story.

Jesus was born into a desperate world. It was a time of war, oppression, abject poverty, gluttonous wealth, and religion with all the heart of a department store mannequin. Once he was born, the waiting was not over. It would be thirty years before the expectation of his birthday night ripened. All he could do was wait, just like everyone else. And, as Tom Petty taught us, the waiting is the hardest part.

We wake up daily to stories of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And those are the stories they tell us. We are not made mindful of much in Darfur, or Congo, or Chad, or any number of countries in dire straits who have no natural resources to make caring for them a part of our national interest. We live in a nation who sees the Great Divide between rich and poor and seems content, overall, to leave things as they are. We live in a country – in a world – of wounded, hurting, and fragile people, all of them children of God.

Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?

Yes.

God is waiting, in this revision, for us to be willing to go into labor. I’m not sure the world can wait much longer.

Peace,
Milton

the old man and the kitchen

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

In the span of a day, I have gone from reveling in knowing that I am uniquely and wonderfully created in the image of God to feeling painfully in touch with my human limitations. I’m not speaking in metaphor here: I really hurt today.

Mondays are my longest days at the kitchen. I get there at ten-thirty and I leave at ten-thirty. In between, I’m the only chef in the house, so if it gets prepped, made, served, or sautéed, I do it. A Monday like today, on the heels of an incredibly busy weekend, means we’ve used up most of everything. One of the guys who worked Sunday night left me about an eight inch list of things that needed to be done. I read his note, changed into my chef clothes and went to work trying to check things off the list between cooking for lunch customers.

The big issue, as far as my work in the kitchen goes, are my feet, or should I say, my shoes. I have a pair of Birkis that have served me well for some time, but they have ceased to do so, leaving me to hobble home at the end of the shift. I don’t know if the change was in my shoes or my feet; either way, I’ve got to figure it out. I tried to buy a pair of Dansko clogs (which is what Chef wears), but the place I called on the way to work only had women’s shoes. Since he wasn’t at work today and we wear the same size, I decided to wear his to see how they felt. I came home with my feet aching in different places.

The bigger issue this whole week has been my eyes. I live with a severe astigmatism in both eyes, which makes finding glasses and contacts that let me see well hard to do. Last Tuesday, I ripped one of my contacts as I was putting them in. I wore my glasses to work. Normally, I wear glasses only for reading and have the habit of setting them down all over the place and then not being able to find them. Somewhere between changing clothes at work and getting out of the shower when I got home, I put my glasses down and have not seen them since. Serendipitously, I learned I can read my computer screen without glasses or contacts, so I have been able to write, but, as far as the rest of life goes, I’ve been squinting my way through.

Both things unleash very basic fears in me.

I love being in the kitchen cooking for people. I even like days like today when I’m challenged to work my butt off to make things happen. The fearful voice in me asks, “What if this is not a shoe issue but a foot or body issue that means you can’t do what you love doing?” The eye thing cuts even deeper. I am afraid of blindness because I can only see that it would separate me from reading and writing, two of the things which feed my soul.

Yes, I know both scenarios are extreme. Yes, I know I’m jumping ahead of myself. But this is not about knowing, this is about deep archetypal, this-is-what-I-think-makes-me-who-I-am feeling. I am a cook and a writer. Those are not just things I do; they are expressions of my being. I am working and squinting through the pain and discomfort, even as I hear the voice of fear inside me ask, “Where do you think this is going?”

One of the stories in the Gospels that has spoken to me most deeply over many years is Jesus’ encounter with Peter after both Peter’s denial of Christ and Jesus’ resurrection. Back and forth they go: “Do you love me?” – “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.” – “Feed my sheep.” Then Jesus says something that has always had a difficult resonance to me. I thought about the verse on the way home.

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” (John 21:18).

Then Jesus added, “Follow me.”

In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago dealt with the pain from the bones spurs in his heel by remembering that he had read that the great Joe DiMaggio had bone spurs and finding hope in Joe’s not giving in to the pain. “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” I thought about Santiago, a favorite literary character of mine after several years of teaching ninth grade English. I wonder if bone spurs feel like my feet do tonight.

The pain in my feet and my blurred vision pale by comparison to the situations of most people on the planet, I’m sure. I am far from fluent in the language of extreme suffering. My reality is I get my new contacts tomorrow and I have a couple of days to chase down some new kitchen kicks before I have to go back to work. I probably also have some things to learn about how to take better care of my feet. And my reality is I’m getting to experience the wonder of my humanity from the temporary side.

Perhaps, as I sleep, I can also dream of the lions on the beach.

Peace,
Milton

snowflake sunday

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

Since she got back from sabbatical, Ginger has made a point of preaching on some difficult texts and topics, rather than simply choosing the Gospel reading from the lectionary. She has been doing a great job. This week, her text was “the last words of David.” Her choice of subject sent me back to chorus my senior year at Westbury High School. We sang Randall Thompson’s setting of David’s words at graduation. I was then, and am still, a tenor, so I got to wail on the opening lines: “He that ruleth over men, must be just, must be just, MUST BE JUST.”

Trust me, it’s a killer tenor line.

The piece moves on into a beautiful melodic section that carries the lyric, “And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun rises; even a morning without clouds – after rain, after rain, after rain.” Such was our Friday morning after a Thanksgiving storm that deserved a name. We woke to a cloudless day washed clean and blown dry by the rain and wind of the night before.

David’s final words were to say that’s what justice looks like.

Before it was Ginger’s turn to speak, Kathy, one of our wonderful children’s workers gave the children’s sermon and talked about Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley.

No, not Wilford Brimley. That’s this guy.


Wilson Bentley is a man who lived his whole life in Vermont (1865-1931) and spent his whole life studying snowflakes and photographing them. He is the one responsible for our knowing that no two snowflakes are alike. As she began to talk about snow, I found myself thinking about those mornings I’ve spent shoveling out our driveway so we could get to work. All those unique falling crystals can stack up to create quite a barrier. Bentley grew up where the snow is measured in feet and was able to see beauty in individual, short-lived, unbelievably temporary snowflakes. And on top of that, he was patient enough to photograph them. Though he took over five thousand pictures of snowflakes, some winters yielded no more than a dozen useful images.

What amazing things are possible when wonder and tenacity unite.

Our children’s sermons create a very pregnant swirl at the front of the church each Sunday. Kathy has a way of shaping the energy and excitement into meaning with what I think must be the same kind of deftness and patience that Bentley needed to photograph flakes of frozen water. She began by quoting something Ginger says at each baptism – that we are wonderfully and uniquely made in the image of God – and then asking the kids if they ever wondered what that meant. They had not, but she had and she gave them cause to wonder by the way she unwound the story of Wilson Bentley.

She also took some time to describe how a snowflake starts from a single molecule and then, as it falls, adds more and more, developing its symmetrical six-sided shape, and taking its unique form from the unique set of circumstances – wind, temperature, humidity – that are occurring at the exact moment it is being formed. My mind moved from snowflakes back to the people in the room, each of whom was also formed by all that swirled around them as they were growing into who God created them to be. Some of us have been blown off course, some feel more handicapped than holy, some have caught a glimpse of who we are and who we are becoming. One of the best things we can do is stick together, like snowflakes in a drift, as we live out our faith as the church. Nothing we do or say is any more permanent than a snowflake and everything we do or say is crucial to what happens in our world. We, who are as unique and as temporary as snowflakes, can bring about a cloudless day when we incarnate love as justice and believe that things do not have to be as they seem.

The snowflakes had not melted in my mind when Ginger came to this quote in her sermon (sorry, I don’t have the documentation):

Our own future is not dependent upon what human power has realistically done or can do. For those who dare to imagine it, and give poetic voice to it, the future that is God’s future and therefore is always open to the possibilities of justice, faithfulness, and life no matter how realistic might be our assessment of the powers of oppression, sin and death. Surrounded by a troubled and broken world and the crisis of our own lives, we lose sight of God’s power at work beyond and in spite of our human limitations and sin. In the name of realism, we define ourselves, our goals, our communities by our failures and not by our visions. We settle for problems to solve rather than ideals to embody.

One other thing happened with the children before the sermon. I’m teaching them a song for the Christmas Pageant, so I walked over to the Parish House with them after the children’s sermon to teach them during their opening time. Last week, a small altar was set up and, after we sang, we lighted three candles, one for each person in the Trinity, and then prayed together. Today, when we got over there, things were not set up for either the song or the ceremony. One of the teachers had a boombox and the CD of the song we are learning, but the altar was locked up. I was getting ready to pray and send them to class when one of the boys raised his hand and said, “We can do it without the candles.”

He was right. And so I asked them what each candle symbolized and they answered:

for God, who created us;
for Christ, who loves us;
for the Spirit, who fills us.

I walked back to the sanctuary in the sunshine and took my place in the pew, among the other snowflakes who melted together in prayer and praise. David used his last words to say love has less to do with legacy than with listening, less to do with permanence than patience, more to do with community than accomplishment.

And he learned all that without ever seeing a snowflake.

Peace,
Milton

most of all that love has found us . . .

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

The last pie is in the oven.

Since I got a late start, there are only eight, most of which will end up on someone else’s table tomorrow. OK, half of them will be somewhere else. I made a couple of old favorites (chess, pecan, pumpkin, blueberry), a new one (chocolate whiskey pecan), and a mistake (walnut – I poured in the wrong bag of nuts). I have to shift into dinner mode for tomorrow, so the baking must come to an end. If you want to see how I prepare my turkey, check here.

The wind is picking up; a Nor’easter in on the way. It’s not cold enough for snow, so we are just going to get a bunch of rain, which is not nearly as much fun. But we have a house full of food and friends and a day to relax. Now that’s something to be thankful for. As I shopped today for my groceries, I was conscious of trying to keep a balance between making a wonderful meal and not going to excess, which I can do quite easily when it comes to food. Ginger and I both are working hard to think the same way about Christmas. It is, as they say, a growing edge for me.

Though I’ve referenced it before, I can think of no better words on this Thanksgiving Eve than those of Fred Pratt Green’s hymn, “Thanks be to God”:

for the fruit of all creation, thanks be to God
gifts bestowed on every nation, thanks be to God
for the plowing, sowing, reaping
silent growth while we are sleeping
future needs in earth’s safekeeping
thanks be to God

in the just reward of labor, God’s will is done
in the help we give our neighbor, God’s will is done
in our worldwide task of caring
for the hungry and despairing
in the harvests we are sharing
God’s will is done

for the harvests of the Spirit, thanks be to God
for the good we all inherit, thanks be to God
for the wonders that astound us
for the truths that still confound us
most of all that love has found us
thanks be to God

Peace,
Milton

talk about pop music

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

Several months ago, I was walking down the aisle of our local Target store when a mother and her son, who looked to be about ten or eleven, rounded the corner and started coming toward me. They were obviously having a fight. I only heard one sentence. The mother said,

“You’re right. I don’t know who Slipknot is. But I know who Led Zeppelin is and I know who Lynyrd Skynyrd is.”

I felt like yelling, “Free Bird” right there between the eye care products and the printer cartridges. What I did was smile and think back to the faces my dad would make when I put on my Jimi Hendrix records. Ah, but those castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually.

I came home from work tonight to find Ginger watching the American Music Awards. She and I are both intentional about keeping up with popular music because we like a lot of it and because we like young people. That said, tonight’s lineup of nominees made me keenly aware of how the music business changes. Many of the folks I grew up listening to are still making good music. Many of them spend their summers singing songs from long ago without any new stuff so we can yell, “Free Bird” from the back row. But many of the ones getting the awards were not easily recognizable to me (except the Isley Brothers – I’m assuming it’s really the Isley Brothers’ grandkids).

When it comes to award shows, I’ve got three or four good essays in me. There’s the one about how cool it must be to work in a business that is determinedly self-promotional and affirming. We don’t have the American Dishwasher Awards, if you know what I’m saying. There’s one about the vanity, opulence, and waste of such an over the top evening. Wait – Vanity, Opulence, and Waste would be a great album title. Better yet: those are good names for rappers, except they would have to be spelled VaniT, Opwelens, and Wayst. I can see it now: “The Bring the Bling Tour.”

Where was I? Oh, yeah. There’s another one on fashion do’s and don’ts. After a few of those outfits, I want to sing, “Ya’ll gonna make me lose my mind up in here, up in here.” There’s one wondering why so many popular artists have to swear so profusely in their songs.

Then there’s this one.

American popular culture, in the form of most of those who crossed the stage tonight, is easy pickings. I like making fun of it because much of it deserves the ridicule, along with several other slices of our society. Most of what makes it to our radios and televisions is not the best stuff out there. The Billboard Hot 100 is littered with well-marketed mediocrity. Just ask Milli Vanilli, Rupert Holmes, and either one of the Simpson sisters. But I have to come clean. I like some of it, too. I’ve been a closet Christina Aguiliera fan ever since “What a Girl Wants.” “Any Kind of Man” is Ginger’s ring tone on my cell phone. Come on – you have to give the girl props for singing “You’ve got soul, you’ve got class, you’ve got style, you’re badass.” Now those are lyrics, my friend. Ginger has danced all of her life, so she gets a kick out of the choreography of the Pussycat Dolls and Justin Timberlake. She’s says I dance a lot like Timbaland.

However dismal I think much of today’s music is, I must remember I graduated from high school in the year that “Seasons in the Sun” was the number one song. It remains one of the worst songs ever inflicted on the world, along with “The Night Chicago Died,” “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero,” and pretty much anything Meatloaf has ever done.

And then, of course, there’s Celine Dion, or, as I like to call her, Satan.

You won’t find an phat beats or mad rhymes on any of those records. The rise of hip hop will not bring the fall of civilization as we know it anymore than Elvis, the Beatles, or Jim Morrison. But it will make me feel old, which is hard to take. Kelly Clarkson, who won the first American Idol competition as a teenager, won an award tonight as Adult Contemporary Favorite Artist. U2 has been making records for twenty-five years. A friend saw Bob Dylan last weekend and said in concert he can’t play guitar anymore because the arthritis in his hands is too bad; he only plays the keyboard.

As I age, I can choose to walk around yelling, “Turn that music down,” and talk about how they don’t write songs like they used to. I can choose to act like I’m hip and cool (or whatever the kids are calling themselves these days) and not act my age. Or, I can continue to do as I’ve tried to do most of my life and that is look for excellence in the sea of unimaginative marketing that is American popular culture. It’s easy to be condescending. When I was writing songs, which were played mostly on Christian radio, I struggled because I wanted to feel better than the guy who was singing about cartoon characters getting saved (that was a real song). It wasn’t easy for me to come to terms with his song and my song getting played back to back because I thought it put us in the same boat.

We were.

There are folks out there in every genre – in every field — working hard to do it well and doing good stuff. There are also bunches of people phoning it in or just meeting the minimum daily requirement. Not everyone lives in the same category all the time. Most of the best songs I know never made it to Number One. When they did, it had less to do with how great the song was and more to do with timing.

I’m with the lady in the store. I don’t know who Slipknot is, other than a thrash metal band. I also don’t know much about Chamillionaire, one of the presenters tonight. I’m guessing, based on what I saw, that excellence is not his primary pursuit. But, that I don’t know who is doing excellent work in hip hop or metal has less to say about those genres than it does about me. I like guitars rather than drum machines. I prefer singer-songwriters to digital sampling DJs. And I wonder if we have hip hop Muzak to look forward to in the elevators of the future.

John Mayer, one of the young and excellent ones, sings:

me and all my friends
we’re all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there’s no way we ever could
now we see everything that’s going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don’t have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

I remember feeling like that when I was his age. I also remember feeling like that driving to work this morning listening to the news. I’m not going to be much help encouraging him or me to do something other than wait if I spend most of my time stating the obvious about American popular culture.

Excellent work never settles for stating the obvious.

Peace,
Milton

thankful boy: part two

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

About a month ago I found out I was going to have to work on Thanksgiving.

The Red Lion Inn has a long history of serving dinner on Turkey Day and we serve a lot of them. There are three seatings – 11:30, 2:30, and 5:30 – and over three hundred people will stuff themselves with everything from clam chowder to turkey and stuffing to pumpkin pie. The whole place has to fire on all cylinders to make it happen. The Head Chef simply said, “Everyone has to work on Thanksgiving.”

I came home and told Ginger and the first words out of her mouth were, “Then quit!”

She wasn’t joking. Despite the financial straits such a move would put us in, she was calling for a values check. Thanksgiving is the one major holiday for her, as a minister, that doesn’t carry religious overtones in one way or another. She never has to work on Thanksgiving. It is our best family day, as I mentioned yesterday, full of deep emotion, tradition, ritual, and meaning. The arc of the day goes something like this: we have breakfast (with bacon!) and then, while I get the turkey started, we bring in the old futon mattress from the garage (which has been well wrapped in plastic) and put it on the floor in front of the couch, where it stays until New Year’s. Ginger covers it with sheets and blanket and it becomes our bed for the holiday season. It’s something we’ve done since we lived in Charlestown, though I don’t remember how it started. I love it. There’s something that happens to our sense of expectation when we move downstairs for the season.

Ah, but I digress. Thanksgiving Dinner is always at two o’clock. Again, I’m not sure why, but that is when we sit down. Once we are seated, we stay a long time, way past the eating. Some of my best memories of the day are the conversations around the table after dinner. More than one year, we’ve sat there so long that we’ve filled our plates for a second time with what were leftovers by then.

What follows is a trip to the movies. The same is also true on Christmas Day. This year, I’m hoping we pick Happy Feet. After the show, it’s a late snack before settling down on the palate.

Every time the schedule came up at work, I talked about what the day meant to us and that we had friends coming for dinner. Chef worked hard to accommodate me, but couldn’t figure out a way to let me be off all day. On Saturday, he said he could get me out of there after the first seating if I would come in early to help prep. When I told Ginger that this morning before I left for the restaurant, she said, “I still haven’t given up on you not working on Thanksgiving. I am willing that you will not work.”

When I got to the Inn, Chef said he thought he could get me out pretty early if I came in at the crack of dawn to help get things ready. Late in the day, he came back to say something had come up that meant he had to be away from the restaurant most of the day tomorrow. He asked if I could cover for him. I said yes. What that means is by the end of my day tomorrow I will have worked twenty-two hours this week. The owner won’t let us work past forty.

“If you work tomorrow,” said Chef, “you can take Wednesday and Thursday off.” I said thank you.

When I called Ginger to tell her the news, what she said first was, “I knew it.”

My pie making will get pushed back a day, but I can live with that. I get to revel and relish in Our Favorite Day around the table with people we love and maybe even get to see some dancing penguins.


I am a thankful boy.

Peace,
Milton

thankful boy

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

I love Thanksgiving. It’s about not eating alone – what can I say?

I can begin by posting a couple of recipes:

We’re not talking gourmet here, but we are talking quick, easy, and pretty darn good.

I’ll have a few more recipes as the week goes on.

Apples were central to worship today. The children’s sermon was the story of Johnny Appleseed, a Massachusetts native who traveled across the Midwest planting apple seeds as an expression of his faith. At the close of the children’s time, as they headed for Sunday School, they handed out apples to the adults in the congregation as an expression of kindness and connection. Nothing like a good healthy snack halfway through the service.

Something about this week makes me want to bake pies. For several years now, a couple days before Thanksgiving Day (this year I only have Tuesday), I bake pies like nobody’s business (last year – fourteen), and then Ginger and I deliver them to neighbors, friends, and folks who are having a hard time for one reason or another. We also save a couple for our table as well, which provide sustenance in the days following the holiday as well. It’s one of my favorite things. I love the way the house fills up with the aromas oozing out of the oven. I love the tactile work of rolling the crusts, pressing my fingers into the dough to flute the edges, and mixing the various fillings: pecan, pumpkin, squash, and sweet potato. I love covering up the dining table with pies waiting to cool so they can begin their journey to their new home. And I love sinking my fork into slices of those that stay here.

One year when Ginger’s parents were visiting, I finished our pies late on Wednesday night and left them out to cool for the Big Day. When I came down the next morning, a little slice had been carved out of every pie on the table. My mother-in-law had come down in the night because she just needed to sample them – all of them. The biggest piece was out of the pecan pie; that’s her favorite.

Pie is good. Let us give thanks for pie. Amen.

On our way to church this morning, Ginger and I stopped at our local supermarket to fill up the Thanksgiving Bags for the food pantry. Walking through the grocery store with Ginger is an interesting and amusing experience because she is like an explorer in a new world. She saw the brownie mix and the cans of prepared frosting while I was loading up on soups and stuffing mix. She assured me the frosting would be quite popular at the pantry. I had no reason to disagree. Together, we provided a good balance of choices. As we loaded the bags into the car, I was aware, once again, of how much I have to be thankful for even in the midst of circumstances I would like to change.

Ginger asked me to sing a song Billy and I wrote many years ago that goes well with the season; it’s called “Thankful Boys and Girls.” Here are the lyrics:

let us be thankful boys and girls
for eyes and ears and toes and puppies with wet noses
for lessons we have learned and love we have not earned
we follow the beat of amazing grace
o let us be thankful boys and girls

let us be thankful boys and girls
for kisses on the mouth and teenage heartbeats pounding
for lightning in the sky and laugher in the eye
we follow the beat of amazing grace
oh let us be thankful boys and girls

for all that brought us here and all that will see us through
the passageways of life that lead to you, lead us to you

let us be thankful boys and girls
for a little common sense and painted picket fences
when packing up the plans in rented moving vans
we follow the beat of amazing grace
oh let us be thankful boys and girls

let us be thankful boys and girls
for mendelssohn and brahms and shadows growing longer
for years that slowly go and grandkids we can hold
for memories to keep and sorrow running deep
we follow the beat of amazing grace
oh let us be thankful boys and girls

for all that brought us here and all that will see us through
the passageways of life that lead to you, lead us to you

let us be thankful boys and girls
when hope is not enough that death can’t bury love
for wine and bread and hymns remembering again
we follow the beat of amazing grace
oh let us be thankful boys and girls

This week I’m going to have to fight for time to cook at home because I have to cook at work. For the first time in our marriage, I’m going to have to work part of the day on Thanksgiving, which in many ways is our favorite holiday. I hate it and I’m figuring out how to still make the day happen for us at home. In the midst of it all, I want to remember apples and pie and trips to the store, or anywhere, with Ginger.

I want to be a thankful boy.

Peace,
Milton

faith and phyllo

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

One morning this week, as Ginger and I were eating breakfast and getting ready to go to work, Martha Stewart was on the Today Show showing how to make some nifty Thanksgiving dishes. One of the things she showed Meredith Vierra how to make was a Sweet Potato Soufflé Pie. She made it all look not only easy but effortless. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t.

I understand the time constraints of live television, but what she did in about seven minutes takes hours of preparation and a fair amount of expertise. A look at the recipe gives a clue to what one is in for: bake the potatoes for an hour and fifteen minutes; put them through a ricer (yeah, everyone has one of those) and let them cool completely (another hour); mix in the other stuff; heat the milk and fresh ginger and then strain it through a “fine mesh sieve” (got that, too?); line the Springform pan with the phyllo dough, piece by piece, brushing it with butter (trust me, phyllo isn’t that easy to handle); mix in the egg whites; pour the mixture into the phyllo; cook for fifty minutes; and let stand another twenty before serving.

She never said a word about spending close to three hours making the soufflé. She never warned that working with phyllo dough will turn you into a serial killer (cereal killer?). She just kept pulling bowls and pans with stuff already done from underneath the counter as if that’s how it happens in everyone’s kitchen. I came away from the segment feeling as though the point was not to make me think I could make the soufflé (and I cook for a living!), but that I would notice how much better she was in the kitchen than I am. She was promoting herself, not teaching me.

My friend Billy’s dad was brilliant when it came to most all things having anything to do with computers and engineering. He had a problem solver’s mind and he was brilliant on top of that. At his funeral, the recurring theme had to do with how he responded when you went to him with something he knew how to do and you did not. Rather than impress you with his expertise, or fix whatever was wrong so he could get back to what he was doing, he would ask questions: what do you think is wrong? what do you think we should do? have you considered this? Before long, not only was the problem solved, but you had learned something knew without feeling stupid. What a gift.

I was pretty good at math until the second semester of my junior year, when we moved from Accra, Ghana to Houston, Texas. My Algebra II teacher was Ms. Gibbs; she was impatient and I was lost. The pivotal day, as I remember it, came when I raised my hand to ask a question about something and she said, after hearing my question, “I don’t have time for stupid questions.” I never took another math class, even though I placed out of my BA math requirement at Baylor because of my ACT scores. Whatever affinity I had for math she ran down and left as intellectual road kill.

I majored in history.

I’m a cook because of the way my mother taught in her kitchen. I was always an inquisitive kid and the kitchen was the best room of belonging in our house, wherever we were living at the time. While we were talking and she was cooking, I would ask, “What are you making?” She would answer by inviting me to help. The next time she was making the same thing, she would say, “You watched me do this the other day; you make it this time,” and before long I felt like it was my kitchen, too.

Much of what passes for Christian rhetoric in the public (and, I suppose, private) arena is not good teaching because it begins from the vantage point of “Let me tell you where you’re wrong.” Condescension is not a good conduit for grace. We can’t look down our noses at people in Jesus’ name and expect them to knock us over trying to get through the church doors. Jan Edmiston has a great post on “Radical Hospitality” that’s points out the incongruity between God’s expansive love and the exclusionary actions of some Christian groups. Those who are being labeled as sinful, and thus unworthy, are going to be as excited about finding hope in Jesus’ name as I would be about taking another class with Ms. Gibbs. If church is not a place for broken hearts, searching souls, and stupid questions, what’s left?

We make following Jesus sound as complicated as a Martha Stewart recipe. The path of discipleship is difficult but not complicated. It’s difficult because of its call to intentionality to love God with all of our beings and to love our neighbors – the smart, the stupid, and the sinful – as ourselves – who are also the smart, the stupid, and the sinful. It’s difficult because we are called to be encouragers, not experts. It’s difficult because Christ leads us more with questions than with answers – oh, and that line about “Love everyone as I have loved you.”

As I get ready to prepare Thanksgiving Dinner, I like reading through Food & Wine and seeing what newfangled versions of old standards they have created. Martha’s soufflé looked good despite all the grief I’ve given her. What I’ll end up making are not new things but favorite things. Everyone coming to dinner has at least one particular dish they want on the table, from sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows to Refrigerator Rolls to canned cranberry sauce. The point is not for me to prove I can cook fancy stuff but to create a table that makes everyone feel a place was created just for them. I love cooking all of it, and opening the can of cranberry sauce, because I’m cooking for family.

I watch Ginger do the same thing as she plans worship each week and works with the various committees in the church. We talk a lot about making people, both new folks and old timers, feel welcome and at home. It’s hard work and she makes us all feel like we can do it, like faith is easier than phyllo dough.

Peace,
Milton

kitchen philosophy

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

In the deepest throes of my depression, one of the things for which I was most grateful was Ginger wasn’t depressed. The Power of Two became increasingly evident to me: we thrive because we take turns having a hard time. The viability of any group of people relies on an assumption that we won’t all be crashing and burning at once. From two people together in a household to whole populations of countries, we depend on one another to not all go down at the same time.

Today I saw that assumption pushed to the limit.

For some reasons I know and others I don’t, pretty much everyone at the Red Lion Inn was having a crappy day and they were responding with an extra helping of surliness. A couple of folks came to work in a decent mood, but once they got their heads chewed off by one of the Surly McSurl Pants, they turned as bitter as everyone else. My focus was trying to keep the Head Chef from coming unglued, so I didn’t have time for surly. We have been friends for a while and he was hurting today. I understood why he was acting the way he was and did my best to be a good friend, which helped both my mood and my intentionality. The bartender was also in a good mood, as he most always is. Together, the two of us held things together without realizing that’s what we were doing until quite late in the evening.

I understand bad moods. I know them well. I even understand the skewed logic that makes us enjoy wallowing in our bitterness sometimes. What I don’t understand – even though I’m quite capable of participating – is why our reflex seems to be to lash out to make those around us hurt and angry. Randy Newman nailed it in his insightfully satiric song, “I Just Want You to Hurt Like I Do.”

I ran out on my children
And I ran out on my wife
Gonna run out on you too, baby
I’ve done it all my life
Everybody cried the night I left
Well, almost everybody did
My little boy just hung his head
And I put my arm, put my arm around his little shoulder
And this is what I said:

“Sonny I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

As soon as we ask ourselves how any parent could say that to a child, we become aware that we know the answer, even if not to that extreme. Newman spells it out in the last verse of his song.

If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I’d want to speak to all the people of the world
I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform
First I’d sing a song or two you know I would
Then I’ll tell you what I’d do
I’d talk to the people and I’d say
“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan
But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it’s something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

Compassion, says Henri Nouwen, is “voluntarily entering the pain of another.” What is the word for voluntarily inflicting pain on another? Why does the first require such intentionality and the second come so easily? Thanks to Mark Heybo for steering my thoughts in a redemptive direction through the words of Walter Wink.

The belief that violence “saves” is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience- unto-death . . .

In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo . . .

Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself. It is no longer a religion that uses violence in the pursuit of order and salvation, but one in which violence has become an aphrodisiac, sheer titillation, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships. Violence is no longer the means to a higher good, namely order; violence becomes the end.

Wink says the lie that pervades our world’s view of violence as solution rather than problem is we think violence was there from the beginning. The Creation account in Genesis 1, however, says over and over God saw that it was good. Violence came later as a problem to be solved rather than as a given of our existence. Maybe it’s too big a leap to try and make a connection to make between the sniping of the surly people at the restaurant and the fallacy of violence as a means to solve our problems. But the difference between how folks shot at each other tonight and the car bombers in Baghdad seems to be one of degree more than substance. The similarities between us as human beings are more substantive than we know.

As long as I’m being “quoteful” in this post, I offer REM’s words of hope in the midst of pain, “Everybody Hurts”:

Sometimes everything is wrong.
Now it’s time to sing along–
When your day is night alone, hold on
if you feel like letting go,
if you think you’ve had too much
of this life, well hang on.

‘cause everybody hurts.
Take comfort in your friends.
Everybody hurts.

Let us both give and take comfort.

Peace,
Milton

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