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lenten journal: borrowed words

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

I am wordless tonight, my friends. There are a lot of things running through my head and my heart, but I can’t seem to get them to shoot out my fingers and onto the keyboard. So I will lean a little on the words of others.

I Feel Sorry for Jesus

People won’t leave him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name . . .
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

“The truth tastes better here” and “a secret pouch of listening” are two phrases that remind me why I think poetry matters to the heart.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

My idea of camping involves at least a Holiday Inn, so I can’t honestly say I have lied down where the wood drake rests, but I do resonate with the image of the day-blind stars and searching for rest.

The News of the World

Like weather, the news
is always changing and always
the same. On a map
of intractable borders
armies ebb and flow.
In Iowa a roof is lifted
from its house like a top hat

caught in a swirl of wind.
Quadruplets born in Akron.
In Vilnius a radish
weighing 50 pounds.
And somewhere
another city falls
to its knees.

See how the newsprint
comes off on our hands
as we wrap the orange peel
in the sports page
or fold into the comics
a dead bird

the children found
and will bury
as if it were the single
sparrow whose fall
God once promised
to note, if only
on the last page.

— Linda Pastan

The more I read of Pastan, the more I love her stuff. I found this link to a free e-book of nineteen poems. I also found this harbinger of better weather at The Writer’s Almanac this week:

While We Wait for Spring

The last three days snow has fallen.
No thaw this year, no day even above
twenty since the end of December.
Climbing the hill, my two boys slip, fall,
stand again. They complain, but there’s nothing
to be done except to make it to the top
where above the trees we will look down
upon the river. Near the peak a barred owl
releases from the limb of a burr oak, sweeps
over our heads and out above the tree line.
Our eyes follow its flight to the river ice,
current moving beneath its blue surface.
Like the owl, our breath rises, drifts
toward something warmer, something better.

— Todd Davis

I will return with a sackful of words I have collected and sorted tomorrow.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: awakenings

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Several weeks ago, Ginger asked me if I would put together a worship service focusing on the genocide in Darfur as a way to inform our congregation and help people know what they can do. When I started doing my research, I wrote this post and found out rather quickly that the primary response people had was one of feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Since them, I’ve been thinking about how to get beyond those feelings to see what else we can find in ourselves.

I got an email from my friend Burt who was responding to my post on The Secret and he said:

Been reading the Lenten journal … It’s great as always. One thought about the “name it claim it piece,” I think in it’s right form, it’s mature expression, the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness proceeds reality… creates it… or influences and shapes it. So, as conscious (or at least semi-conscious) beings, our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things for better (and I guess for the worse too). I think it’s in this sense, that I can believe in intercessory prayer… our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think… so are our minds. So… you have this spiritual principle that’s been around a few thousand years and pops up in all sorts of places but what happens is, that in the hands of immaturity it turns into the shit that we hear and that you wrote about. Most “shit” out there has some connection to reality… even “name it, claim it.”

I chewed on his paragraph for a good while today as I looked over worship resources and articles on Darfur and found myself pulled by his phrases:

  • in it’s mature expression the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness precedes reality
  • our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things
  • our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think
  • in this sense I can believe in intercessory prayer

Intercessory prayer is an enigma to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I am saying sometimes I’m not sure. When I pray for someone I can take a meal to, I can feel it. Praying here in Massachusetts for my father-in-law as he recuperates in Alabama leaves me a bit puzzled. Would the healing happen differently if I had not prayed? Would they have found more cancer? If enough of us had been praying over the last four years, could the genocide in Darfur have been averted? Are those fair questions?

The beginnings of the trouble in Darfur started at about the same time George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. We have people keeping count of how many soldiers have died. We hear about car bombs and IEDs most everyday on the news. Yet ten thousand people a month are being killed in the Sudan (my father pointed out to me that’s about fifteen people an hour) and we have not been awake to those numbers for the most part.

How then should we pray? How then should we live?

Since I grew up in Africa, I have a pretty sensitive antenna when it comes to news from the continent and I get a little snippy when what the American media feed us are photographs of Britney Spears’ shaved head and Anna Nicole’s funeral. Two weeks ago the Zambezi River flooded in Mozambique leaving almost 300,000 people homeless. I’ve not heard it mentioned in any American newscast. The news makes my heart hurt; the lack of coverage makes me angry. Yet, I still don’t know how to pray.

Trying to awaken a congregation to the needs of the refugees and victims of the civil war in Sudan is risky because offering the information and challenge as an invitation rather than a polemic is a difficult high wire to walk – at least for me. My passion too quickly comes across as indignation. I want people to hear for the first time things I’ve been conscious of for a long time and rise up and do something.

That’s the next issue: do what?

There are petitions to sign and speakers to hear. We are going to watch a DVD Sunday night as part of our emphasis. There are organizations to support and contributions to make. I realize, though, when I say we can pray I’m almost apologetic, or at least a little dismissive, as though it is an action of last resort: there’s nothing we can really do, so let’s pray.

I’m not satisfied with either side of that equation.

I know part of what I have to get past within myself is the feeling (which I’m not proud of) that if people just knew as much as I do about Darfur or cared as much things would be different. It’s not my primary feeling, but it’s there and it can get the best of me. I may know a lot, but I’m still sitting here in Marshfield ranting into my keyboard. I don’t need to start wearing my “activist” button just yet. I’m not someone other than the folks in our congregation who are frustrated and perplexed by what is going on in the world. I’m one of them. Neither Marshfield nor Darfur has given any indication I might be their Messiah.

Burt talked about our “thoughtful and awakened presence.” It just struck me that he didn’t say awake, but awakened, as in someone else woke us up, opened our eyes. Once again, I’m back to prayer:

open my eyes that I may see
glimpses of truth thou has for me
open my eyes illumine me
Spirit divine

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: special and ordinary

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

When I arrive to open the kitchen on the days I work, there’s always a piece of paper hanging where the tickets hang during meal service listing the things that need to be prepared for the day. On Mondays, it’s always a long list because we’ve usually managed to deplete most of our supplies over the weekend. Today was no exception. The list said:

chowda
onion soup
cut romaine for salads
parmesan cups
honey mustard dressing
cole slaw
lobster salad
slice tomatoes
slice red onion
caramelized onions
demi-glace
cut salmon
cut filets
sauerbraten
rouladen
risotto
mashed potatoes
veg du jour
beurre blancs

I put on my chef jacket and got to work doing the ordinary things that keep the kitchen going. Telma, who bakes all our wedding cakes, works with me on Mondays. She came in a little after noon and we kept crossing things off the list. By the time the dinner service started, we were in pretty good shape and I was putting the finishing touches on the special.

In The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman describes one of the parts of the Certified Master Chef’s Exam called the Mystery Basket where the chefs are given a basket with a number of random items and they have to come up with a four course meal for six using as many of them as they can. Mondays are my mystery basket because I have to come up with a special based on what I can find left in the walk-in refrigerator after the weekend. (I don’t mean left over food; I mean things that have yet to be used. Forgive the second list, but here’s what I found:

statler chicken breasts
a few shrimp
green tomatoes
fresh basil
risotto
asparagus

What I came up with was a roasted Statler chicken breast with roasted corn risotto and green tomato and basil jam served with shrimp fritters and grilled asparagus. The green tomato jam, as I called it, was my favorite thing because I made it up. I diced the green tomatoes and put them on the stove with some aji mirin (a sweet rice wine), some chopped fresh basil, a couple of chopped scallions, and some sugar. I let most of the liquid cook out and then I pureed the whole thing and put it back on the stove to reduce some more. I then cooled it and kept it in my prep area. My plan was to heat it and pour it over the top of the chicken to finish the dish. As is my custom on Mondays, I made the dish for the three servers both to feed them and to allow them to speak firsthand about it to the customers. It turned out really well. I loved the way the tastes and textures went together. I loved getting to make up some recipes. I loved how much they enjoyed the dish.

And no one ordered it all evening.

My unrequited cooking brought two things to mind. The first is a question I have pondered for years. At the end of any sports championship, the winning team quickly dons the official championship hat and shirt as a way to make all of the fans want to get up early the next morning to buy their own. The instantaneous appearance of the attire means there are unopened boxes in the other locker room (or near it) that make the same claim for the other team. Here’s my question: where do those clothes go? I have a fantasy that they are given to aid organizations who send them to other parts of the world. Somewhere in East Timor, a guy is wearing a Colts Superbowl Champion shirt and thinking he’s pretty cool.

The second thing was a distant literary memory (so much I couldn’t chase down the exact quote) from Wallace Stegner’s wonderful novel, Crossing to Safety. The way I remember the passage, the narrator is talking about his love of writing and feeling incredibly grateful he had been born into a family that afforded him the opportunity to get an education and follow his passion. He then wonders out loud about the tragedy of being born a writer into a family and a culture that valued only spoken words and never being able to uncover your gift and your passion, and perhaps never know what you were missing.

Not selling any specials tonight was not quite that traumatic, if at all, but that’s what came to mind. I’m guessing Chef will find the chicken and fritters when he comes in tomorrow and do something with them at lunch. I know the sauce will make a reappearance, or morph into something else.

I created a near miss; all I can do is circle and try again.

I know part of the reason I make one of the specials for the staff is I want it validated. I want to know how it tastes to them. I want a response to my effort. That they try it takes away any stake I have in seeing how many sell over the evening. I’m feeding them and taking care of myself.

The prep list I left for tomorrow night was short: Chef needs to spice the walnuts for the spinach salad. That’s what Mondays are for: to leave a short list. I don’t get to see how he responds either. He’s the one coming in early tomorrow because it’s my day off. Chances are, as he opens up refrigerators and sets up the line, he will find something that needs to be done that I missed. I won’t be there for that, either.

Part of what it means to be human is not being able to see all of the impact of what we say and do. Our actions do not have to affect large groups of people to be significant. I came up with the special and the ordinary today.

What I’m most proud of is leaving the short list.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: be kind

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
12

Somewhere towards the end of her sermon this morning, Ginger quoted Philo of Alexandria (not to be confused with Philo of Pawtucket):

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

The words have hung with me all day. When I sat down to write tonight, they took me back to a conversation I had with Chef on Friday, as we were getting ready for a monster weekend and already feeling the pressure. At this point, it looked as through I was going to be responsible for preparing a meal for 260 people on Saturday with only one of the dishwashers to help me. I was frustrated, not at Chef, but at the Owner, who appears to see labor costs as The Thing You Cut First and Often.

“You’re right,” Chef said, “and I can see things from his si—“

I interrupted him and went on with my lament. He tried again.

“I understand. All I’m saying is I can see where he’s coming from.”

With indignation I said, “I have no need to defend him. I’ll get the job done regardless of his abuse. I’m just tired of it.”

In the eighteen months I have worked at the Inn, the Owner has been around maybe four of them. He has homes in two other countries and spends much of his time traveling. He calls in daily to say what he has to say. I’ve never had an extended conversation with him and the brief talks we’ve had have all related to my job. I know a few of the details of his life, but I don’t know him at all, nor him me. I see how he treats his employees and how he relates to people depending on how he views their stations in life, but I have never heard him explain why he makes the relational choices he makes. I have an image of him, but I don’t know what his questions are, what his struggles are, what battles he is fighting. Every time he makes what I consider to be a bonehead move, or an insensitive one, I allow myself to feel justified in writing him off. I don’t want to feel like he matters, or that he has a perspective with even the least bit of credibility. And then Ginger had to go and say:

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Everyone. That means the Owner, too. That means what I perceive as his deliberate insensitivity has roots in a past I know nothing of, the way my determination to make something or somewhere feel like home grows out of my rootlessness, or my passion to do a great job comes, at least partly, from my own crippling yet dogged sense that love is earned and I have to keep proving myself. That means I have to make room in my image of him for moments when he might wish he were not the way he is, or that he might want the same kind of acceptance and approval I’m looking for.

Damn.

Ginger often says of me that I’m pretty longsuffering, but if I think something’s not fair I dig in hard. I don’t want to hear any explanations. I don’t care what the explanations are. There is right and fair and just and there is – well, there is no other option. When I allow myself to be the Aproned Crusader at work, I see the Owner’s actions as unjust and unfair and I can quickly allow myself to not give him any identity other than the one who is responsible for it all. I don’t want to give him a chance to be human in my eyes. If I allow myself to see him as a person, then I’m forced to come to terms with the way in which my attitude towards him is incompatible with the faith and ethic I profess. Hey, wait a minute – how did this become about me?

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

The first therapist I ever saw said, “Remember in any situation there are only two things you can control: what you do and what you say. You can’t change anything else.” I can’t make the Owner treat people differently. I can’t control whom he fires or lays off or pretty much anything else he says or does. I can decide whether or not I spend time at work talking about him. I can control where I draw the line as to how I respond to what I see as injustice. I can choose to be kind to him, to work to humanize him in my eyes so I think of him as more than a caricature. I can decide to stay true to the person I want to be regardless of what he does.

I can be kind.

I don’t foster any rosy fantasy that if I can just befriend him and he realizes I really want to get to know him that he will become a different person. I don’t even think Philo thought that about whoever was driving him nuts when he said those words centuries ago. Changing him is not even the point. It is about me: what I do, what I say, what I feel, how I live.

Ginger also quoted Teresa of Avila this morning:

Christ has no body on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

I find it easy to be the hands that carry the soup for dinner at church, or the feet that move to help Pedro. But to be the eyes that see the Owner with compassion or allow him to be humanized in my sight is hard, hard work.

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: marking time

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

The time clock at the Inn measures the hours by decimals rather than minutes. When I punched out I had worked 12.12 hours, the same numbers as my birthday, 12/12. Chef shares my birthday as well, along with Frank Sinatra and Dionne Warwick.

3/3, one quarter of 12/12, is also a significant day for me because it is The Day of Gifts for No Reason. Unless you read my writing last year, it may not be a day you are aware of. Actually, it is, shall we say, a niche holiday, being significant only to Ginger and to me. And it’s not much of a holiday. I still had to work twelve hours.

Though Ginger and I had only been dating a short time, by the time March 3, 1989 rolled around, I was completely amazed that she was in my life. That year, like this one, March 3 fell on a Saturday. When I showed up to pick her up for our date, I had some flowers, a CD, and a theology book. The card I gave her said something like, “I’ve never dated anyone I could give flowers, a CD, and a theology book.” (Pretty good, huh?) I’ve given her those three things every year – except the one I forgot. This year, the book was The Faith Club, the CD was Colorblind by Robert Randolph and the Family Band (the man does serious things with a steel guitar), and, since I’ve worked twenty four hours in the last forty eight, the flowers are coming tomorrow.

The first time I did it, I was simply responding to the wonder in my heart. I wasn’t trying to start a tradition or to make a grand gesture. My actions expressed the joy of my astonishment: I was dating an amazing woman and finding resonance in ways I never imagined possible. It was the year I forgot – which was three or four years on — that I think sealed it as a Red Letter Day in our marriage. I remember going to bed that night and realizing something was bothering her. I pressed her to tell me and all she said was, “It’s March Third.”

My heart sank, not out of guilt as much as watching the opportunity to let her know I love her in a way that she really hears and feels it fly out the window. I missed my chance and there was no getting it back. I didn’t try. I didn’t go out and buy something on March 4. I realized that night what mattered was not the gifts as much as reaffirming the resonance we both felt so early on. I’m still as full of wonder and gratitude that I get to be with her this year as I was eighteen years ago. No, more.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a league of our own

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

Since Opening Day is officially less than a month away, I guess it’s OK to use a baseball metaphor: this weekend I feel like I’ve been called up to the big leagues.

Tonight we had a rehearsal dinner for thirty, tomorrow a fundraising dinner for 275 — as well as a tasting for a couple who is getting married this summer, and Sunday there is our regular brunch (for about fifty) and then five tastings in the afternoon, each one wanting different things off our function menu. It’s my job to get all of those things done, and done well.

My “staff” today consisted of Alfonso, who did a great job. Tomorrow, Pedro and Fernando will join him. We will have a good time together and I will spend most of the day not understanding a word that is being said. We have a lot to do and, when it comes time to serve the meal tomorrow night, it will all be done and the meal will be great. I think it’s one of the main reasons I love cooking for a living. I like the pressure, I like challenge, and I like finding a way to make it happen.

In The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman talks about going through training at the Culinary Institute of America and writes:

I remember this exchange between a chef and his bachelors class in the CIA’s four year program:

Chef: “How long does it take to make rice pilaf?”
Class: “Twenty minutes.”
Chef: “How long does it take to make pilaf if service is in sixteen minutes?”
Class: “Sixteen minutes.”

You got it done. No matter what. You like it this way. You’re a chef.

Making things happen requires titrating the balance between organization, creativity and mechanics. Let me clarify my terms. Organizing, for me, means making lists (and checking them at least twice) so I don’t get ready to plate the meal and wonder where the mashed potatoes are. It’s my job to make sure everything they asked for shows up on the plate. Creativity comes in fleshing out what is written on the page. The banquet order said “herb crusted chicken.” After consulting with Chef, what that meant for the dinner tonight was a mixture of finely diced fresh Italian parsley and lemon thyme, some Montreal steak seasoning, and enough oil to make a paste we could press on the top of the chicken breast. Mechanics describes the assembling of the dishes. It took me over an hour to pull the little thyme leaves off the stems and make the herb mixture. It turned out well, but it took a lot longer than I thought. Still, we got it done.

One of the lessons I learn over and over is the difference between a good dish and a great dish is often in the very small details. How the food is presented is the easiest example. Tonight, the banquet order said desert was “cheesecake with coulis and fresh berries.” Chef had ordered blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. I did one small thing to the plate (which I had see Chef do at another time) and an average desert came out looking special. We zigzagged the coulis across the plate and then turned the slice of cheesecake on its end, so it sat up on the plate like a triangular sculpture surrounded by the different berries. People actually oohed and aahed when the plates came out.

The big group coming to eat tomorrow night wanted something called a Genovese salad, which was a new term to me. What I learned is it is a salad of roasted tomatoes and fresh mozzarella served over mixed greens with balsamic vinaigrette. The small detail we are going to add is a different kind of crouton: a slice of breaded and fried eggplant like we make for Eggplant Parmigana. Thanks to my brilliant idea, tomorrow we have to slice, bread, and fry three hundred pieces of eggplant. Nice.

Sometimes the challenge is to stay precise and intentional in the midst of repetition. Tomorrow morning we have to wrap three hundred shrimp with pancetta (Italian bacon), dip them in basil oil and grill them. One of us has to stand at the electric slicer for as long as it takes to cut three hundred pieces of pancetta and then we all get to stand around the table wrapping shrimp for what I imagine will be a good part of the morning. All for something that will be gone it two bites and is meant to keep you busy while we’re getting the entrée ready. And it’s just one of the four passed hors d’oeuvres.

Tomorrow I’m going to cook almost three hundred chicken breasts. I’ve never done that before. I’m charge of preparing and plating meals for almost three hundred people and serve their appetizers, salads, and dinners all within about an hour and a half. I’ve never done that either.

I’m a little daunted by the whole thing (can you tell?) and I’m really excited. I wonder if this is what it feels like to swing a bat at Fenway when you’ve gotten used to the fences in Pawtucket. I’m nervous and I know I can do it. Swinging for the fences is swinging for the fences. regardless of the park.

I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday of this week that I read the passage I quoted earlier from Ruhlman’s book. I laughed when I read it because I knew Ginger would read it and laugh, too. I thought about it driving home tonight not because today was anything like the CIA, but because I hung in there today until the meal was done and done well. I even heard myself say to Robert at one point when he was lamenting how short-staffed we were, “Hey, the point is we’ll get it done. It’s what we do.” I probably should have footnoted Ruhlman after I said it.

He’s right. I do like it this way.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: enter into poetry

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

Monday I was alone in the kitchen at the Inn. It’s Chef’s day off and the cook who usually works with me is pregnant and had a doctor’s appointment. Last week was school vacation around here, so I figured I could handle things on my own. When it came time to start thinking about the special for the evening, I knew it needed to be chicken, since we had some Statler breasts we needed to use. We also had some sliced ham from Sunday brunch and we always have Swiss cheese, so I did a variation of Chicken Cordon Bleu (which is Blue Ribbon Chicken to you and me), which is an “old school” dish in restaurant circles.

A Statler chicken breast is a boneless breast with part of the wings still attached, so they look like little drumsticks. They are there for appearance and also for flavor, because cooking with the bone in always adds flavor to meat. What I did was pound the breasts to about a quarter inch thickness, put the ham and cheese in the middle, rolled the breast up, and folded the wings over, so it looked almost like a Cornish hen. then I wrapped each of them with a couple of pieces of bacon, breaded them, baked them about halfway through, and let them cool. When an order came in, I sliced the breast in half, baked until it was done, and then served it with a bacon and mashed potato cake, asparagus, and a Dijon and demi-glace cream sauce.

People licked their plates. (By the way, I posted a little different Dijon Chicken recipe.)

A lot of old school dishes have names that don’t necessarily tell you what’s in the dish. Chicken Cordon Bleu doesn’t tell you much more than it’s good enough to come in first place. The current trend in restaurant menus is less poetic: we list everything that’s coming out on the plate, making sure you know what it took to construct the dish. The Cordon Bleu becomes a breaded Statler chicken breast stuffed with ham and Swiss cheese, served with a bacon-mashed potato cake, grilled asparagus, and a Dijon-demi-glace beurre blanc. It’s not that the dish sounds bad; it’s just that we’ve taken away some of the mystery, the poetry.

The Border Café in Harvard Square still has some poets in the house. Their dishes have names. My favorite is Chicken Waco: a boneless chicken breast stuffed with roasted poblano pepper, spinach, and mushrooms, and covered with a Monterey Jack cheese and poblano pepper sauce. OK, so they strike a balance between poetry and prose. The description is listed on the menu as well. I like the name because it’s ironic to me. I lived in Waco. It has never been as exciting as this dish.

When Ginger and I started dating, one of the first things I did was cook dinner for her. I knew she was, shall we say, a plain eater, so I tried to come up with a dish I was proud of and she would eat. I cut some chicken into small strips, tossed it in a mixture of Goya Adobo seasoning and Cajun seasoning, sautéed it in butter and olive oil, and served it with fettuccine alfredo. She loved it so much she asked for it again and again, usually on Saturday night. We still have Saturday Night Chicken on a regular basis.

Food improves when it’s wrapped in poetry; so does faith. Life is not prose at its core, no matter how prosaic we are in our expression of it. We are more than the statistics and numbers and calculations and equivocations, more than the sum of the parts. Only when we speak in poetry do we begin to get an inkling of what it means to be human. I’ll give you an example:

During a War

Best wishes to you & yours,
he closes the letter.

For a moment I can’t
fold it up again –
where does “yours” end?
Dark eyes pleading
what could we have done
differently?
Your family,
your community,
circle of earth, we did not want,
we tried to stop,
we were not heard
the dark eyes who are dying
now. How easily they
would have welcomed us in
for coffee, serving it
in a simple room
with a radiant rug.
Your friends & mine.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, You & Yours

I found this Rainer Marie Rilke quote on both Jen and Mark’s blogs today:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then,
someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
live your way into the answers.

And this, another jewel from Nora Gallagher, a friend who was talking about what had spoken to his grief:

When Phil died, the one question I had was where is he? I still go back to that moment when he stopped breathing and I feel the goosebumps roll over me as he enters the Other Realm. And there was this huge question there hanging, hanging. I asked a priest, ‘Where is Phil?’ And he gave me some hackneyed Christian line about where the dead go. I think he quoted a piece of scripture. It meant nothing to me.

She moves to later in the day, when her friend called.

While I was hiking up Tunnel Trail, I was thinking about what we talked about and I realized that I needed back then for the priest to enter into poetry because that is where Phil is. He could have said, ‘Well, Phil is at the zoo now.’ Something that would clearly express the fact that he is gone, no longer literal, not here, not visible, but not absent, not without influence, not dead. The problem with the priest’s response was that it was literal and Phil is not literal anymore! That’s why poetry and art are so important, because that’s where he is.” (67)

The most poetic way to serve food, I suppose, would be without words. I would simply create the dish, plate it, and send it out to you to taste and discover both the familiarity and the mystery in each mouthful. You would need to trust my craft and I would need to honor your interpretation. Then I could come out after you had finished and we could share a bottle of wine and enter into poetry, talking about what we had discovered together.

Maybe that’s how we live into the answers.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: abrigar esperanzas

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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9

I’ve spent a good deal of the day thinking about hope, thanks to a passage from Nora Gallagher’s book where she talks about Thomas’ encounter with Jesus after his resurrection and about the doubt Thomas expressed prior to seeing him.

There’s a phrase in Spanish: abrigar esperanzas, to shelter hope. Thomas may have been working hard not to believe the disciples’ story so to shelter hope. Hope is like love, maybe worse. It has to do with what is not yet, what is unseen, an architecture of dreams. If Thomas hoped to see Jesus again, and it turned out to be a hoax, what then? (52)

I think part of the reason it stuck with me was I was at a meeting at church last night and as our time was winding down the conversation turned to The Jesus Family Tomb, a new book and TV documentary coming out just in time for Lent and Easter. While many of us see this season as one of preparation, those in Christian marketing, or determined to market to Christians, see this as a season of sales. I’m sure this book and movie won’t be the last. One of the folks in our circle said, “I don’t think it’s true, but if it is, the implications for Christianity are enormous. I heard his sentiment as a variation on Gallagher’s question: if we believe in Jesus and it turns out to be a hoax, what then? How do we shelter hope?

According to dictionary.com, hope means “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” They also include an archaic definition: to place trust. The meaning has moved from trust, which is steeped in relationship to more of a synonym for optimism. When Barack Obama spoke at the last Democratic convention, his said:

I’m not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

Hope is audacious, but not as a political slogan. And I think it is this kind of rhetoric that made Barbara Ehrenreich’s anger so apparent in her essay, “Pathologies of Hope” in the most recent issue of Harpers.

I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don’t lose hope! Wear your pink ribbon with pride! A couple of years later I was alarmed to discover that the facility where I received my follow-up care was called the Hope Center. Hope? What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies over the years, I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting “Keep hope alive” – all the while crossing my fingers and thinking, “Fuck hope. Keep us alive.”

Her words made me think of the scene in Terms of Endearment when the doctor tells Debra Winger she has breast cancer and then says, “I always tell my patients to hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” to which Shirley MacLaine replies, “And they let you get away with that.”

Ehrenreich finished her article by quoting Camus, who said we draw strength from the “refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

What I realize, reading back through her article, is I think of hope in the archaic sense, more akin to faith than optimism: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The paradox is rich and demands trust: finding substance in the not yet and evidence in the invisible. I’m not sure hope calls us to rally as much as resolve, and less to positivity than perseverance.

I like Gallagher’s phrase: the architecture of dreams.

One of the most beautiful buildings I know is Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. From its terra cotta colored exterior, with all the spires and coves, to the intricacy of the interior, with the variety of stained glass, the elevated pulpit, the murals on every wall, and the gold plated reliefs of the disciples encircling the Communion table, it takes my breath away. It is truly sacred space. It is also obvious that every move made creating the structure was done with intentionality. And before any bricks were stacked or mortar mixed, an architect imagined it and drew the dream into being. Those blueprints were the substance of things hoped for.

Hope is not positive or even wishful thinking; hope is hard work.

Hope needs sheltering. From one side come those who would water it down, who continue to say all it takes is a positive attitude – we just need to be hopeful; from the other side, are those who think we must just come to terms with the fact that life sucks and we die. If we have no expectations, we can’t be hurt or disappointed. When I look at Thomas, I think part of his reticence was he had not experienced what all the others had. The reason none of them had doubts is they had seen Jesus. He may have had his doubts, but he went to the room and waited. When Jesus came, he offered himself to Thomas. We’re the ones who stuck Tom with “Doubting” as a first name, not Jesus.

I’m not living a live-action version of the Three Little Pigs, where James Cameron and his film crew come in dressed as wolves and blow the church down with their boxes of bones. The shelter of hope is not made of straw, nor is it built on sand. I trust in the love and grace of God because I’ve got the scars to prove they are real.

I hope that’s enough.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the secret

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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12

One of my favorite people at work is Pedro, our head dishwasher. He is Brazilian, works a construction job all day before he washes dishes from five to twelve five nights a week, and he has a kind and gentle spirit. When he walks in the back door of the restaurant to come to work, I say, “Master P” and he says, “Mister M” and then he gives me a big hug. Last night it was just the two of us in the kitchen.

As we were working he said, “Is anyone in your church have construction business?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you need?”

“My other job gone now. For three weeks, I come only here. It’ s no good.”

He’s right. What he makes an hour is not a living wage in Massachusetts. I told him I would see what I could find out for him. He, like a lot of the people I work with at the Inn, lives on the edge of poverty. And it’s a slippery edge, too. Vivianne, one of the other dishwashers, also cleans houses. We have hired her to clean our place from time to time. Last week, she couldn’t come because her little girl was sick. I know she doesn’t have health insurance. This week her car broke down. I’m sure she was counting on being able to earn the extra money.

I mention them because of what I saw this morning on the Today Show. They interviewed a guy promoting a new book and DVD called The Secret, which was something called the Law of Attraction, a “scientifically proven phenomenon” by which we can have or be anything we want if we just want it bad enough. If by science you mean a televangelist in a lab coat, then I guess he’s right. He went on to say this secret has been known for centuries by people like Shakespeare, Beethoven, Victor Hugo, Emerson, Lincoln, and many others.

I found a twenty-minute clip of the movie online, which was packaged like The DaVinci Code, and watched because I wanted to be able to be better informed before I started writing tonight. Before I say more, let me share some of the quotes from the movie:

  • “The Law of Attraction – thoughts become things — always works every time for everyone, no exceptions (which means, of course, if your life sucks it’s because you’re a suck magnet)
  • “When you focus on the things you want, the law of attraction will give it to you every time; when you focus on the things you don’t want, they will show up over and over again.” (This is not new. Televangelists had their own name for it: “Name it and claim it.”)
  • “Everything that’s around you right now in your life, including the things you’re complaining about, you’ve attracted.” (The guy on Today even had the nerve to say he wasn’t casting blame but responsibility. Either way, you’re still a suck magnet.)
  • “Every time you look in the mail expecting to see a bill, it will be there.” (Silly me. I thought the bills came because I turned on lights and ran the water.)
  • “You are the creator of your destiny.” (No pressure there.)

Some of the examples in the movie left me incredulous: a man was caught in a traffic jam because he thought he was going to get caught in traffic when he left the house; a woman who thought her cancer would go away and it did (which means, according to this law, that those who die of cancer thought they would). It became very clear to me that the reason I live with clinical depression must be because I brought it on myself.

Not.

Newsweek quotes Rhonda Byrne, the Australian woman who is behind the book and the movie, as saying the way to lose weight is to quit looking at fat people.

Based on what she calls the “law of attraction”—that thoughts, good or bad, “attract” more of whatever they’re about—she writes: “If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.” So if you’re having trouble giving up ice cream, maybe you could just cut back on “The Sopranos” instead.

When the talking heads in the movie spoke of the specifics, they said we should think about what kind of car we wanted to drive, what kind of house we wanted to live in, what kind of job we most wanted to do, what kind of luxuries we wanted to own. It seems laughable to me that a secret known by Shakespeare and Lincoln would find it’s best application in being used as some sort of cosmic gift card. Forget freeing the slaves, start thinking about some serious money:

Believe and know that riches are yours, and feel the feelings of having them now. The more you can feel it, the more power you will add to bring it to you.

I’ve got a secret: these people have been listening to Robert Tilton. They took his stuff, replaced “God” with “the universe,” and started looking for suckers. And its’ working. This week there are 1.75 million books in print and 1.5 million DVDs sold. (But no one’s made a fart tape yet.)

If you go to Tilton’s web site, you can get How To Pay Your Bills Supernaturally and How To Be Rich & Have Everything You Ever Wanted for free (if you make a small donation). In Tilton’s earlier incarnation, one of my seminary roommates and I sent our names in just to see what he would send us. One week – and the mailings came weekly – we got a cardboard wallet with instructions to put fifty dollars inside and return it to Tilton and God would pay the bills. I think he meant his bills, not ours.

So I rather than help Pedro find another job, I just need to tell him the secret: he’s a poor, struggling, construction worker/dishwasher who is struggling to make ends meet because he’s a magnet for that kind of pain and he looks at way too many other poor immigrants. If he were just white, American, and rich things would be different. Until he changes his stinkin’ thinkin’, the universe is not going to vote for Pedro. As for the folks in Darfur, they’ve created a horrible situation with their thoughts of hunger, war, and rape. If only they had dreamed of owning BMWs and living in Beverly Hills.

After all, it always works every time for everyone, no exceptions.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: talking ourselves into being

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

The last of my Books for Lent arrived over the weekend.

I would not have known about it except I’m one of those suckers who clicks the link at Amazon.com that says, “We have recommendations for you.” Perhaps they know me better than I think they do.

The book is called Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian by Thomas G. Long. He begins with this premise:

We talk our way toward belief, talk our way from tentative belief through doubt to firmer belief, talk our way toward believing more fully, more clearly, and more deeply . . . When we talk about faith, we are not merely expressing our beliefs; we are coming more fully and clearly to believe. In short, we are always talking ourselves into being Christian. (6,7)

I’m not too far into the book, but his clever turn of phrase seems to be working out for him. He certainly set me to thinking how we are changed by our words. Or perhaps unchanged or even petrified. If we can talk ourselves into something, we can talk ourselves out of it as well. We are created in the image of a God who spoke all of creation into existence. We were talked into being human. As we talk, we give ourselves clues as to who we are becoming.

Many years ago, I was going to speak at a youth camp for a church in East Texas. I was a youth minister at the time. The group was big – almost two hundred kids – and they were excited to be at camp. The youth minister stood up at the first gathering and said, “OK, I know you all aren’t going to follow the rules this week, but I’m going to tell them to you anyway.” With that sentence he spoke a week of chaos and frustration into existence. He talked the kids into being young surly ne’er-do-wells and they lived up to their calling. I went to camp with my youth group a couple weeks later and a little wiser. In the front of the camp notebook, which everyone got, it said:

  • Live, act, and speak like the children of God that you are.
  • There is a bus that leaves from Giddings for Fort Worth everyday.

In six summers of camp and numerous other retreats and gatherings, we never had a problem that required anyone to get on a bus and go home. We talked ourselves into having a great week.

I talk myself out of being in shape. There are any number of things I would rather do than work out at the gym, but that’s not the reason I don’t get there. I talk myself into believing there are other things that need to happen first. I plan to go. I even carry my gym bag in the car with me. But then the day goes the way the day goes and my bag travels with me unopened. I struggle to learn how to talk myself into a new attitude.

Ginger and I talked ourselves into getting married and continue to talk ourselves into a deeper level of love. I’m speaking more literally than figuratively here. When we realized we were getting serious and headed for marriage, we made two choices. (Actually, Ginger made two suggestions and I agreed.) First, we would not go to sleep angry. If things were not right between us, then we stayed awake until we cleared the air. There were some late nights early on as we learned how to talk ourselves into deeper trust and forthrightness. The second thing was similar: we don’t go to sleep without hearing about how each of us spent our day. By being committed to these two things, we have talked ourselves into a great marriage, even if I do say so myself.

I talked myself into being a chef. I have a – how shall I say this? – fairly diverse employment history. I’ve chosen jobs, or let them choose me, because someone talked me into it by telling me I was good at whatever it was and these people needed that job done. It’s not that I regret my major vocational choices; it is that none of them were things I talked myself into doing. When I started going to spiritual direction about a year and a half ago because I wanted to talk myself into a better sense of vocation, Ken, my spiritual director said, “You have to figure out what it is you most want to do, what the price is for you to do it, and how you’re going to pay that bill.”

What I found was I love to cook and write more than anything else. I’m still talking myself into the implications of what that means for my life, but I am cooking and writing pretty much everyday. For me, writing is one of the best ways to talk myself into a better sense of being, particularly writing in the conversational context this forum provides. Reading supplies the other side of the dialogue.

If words are the seeds of faith, then every conversation is planting something. We are talking ourselves in some direction. If we aren’t talking ourselves into a deeper faith, then what are we talking about? The strength of the possibilities is one as good as the questions we ask as we grow.

(OK. I need to talk myself into a different direction. This is turning into a sermon and that’s not what I was trying to create.)

On the way to work this morning, I listened to half of my Valentine’s present from Ginger, Shawn Colvin’s new CD, These Four Walls. The last cut is a cover of the song “Words,” which I remember first hearing done by the Bee Gees (before Saturday Night Fever and falsettos). The last line of the chorus says

it’s only words
but words are all I have
to take your heart away

In the beginning, God said . . .

They’re never “only” words. We’re always talking ourselves into something.

Peace,
Milton

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