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lenten journal: a league of our own

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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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
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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
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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

lenten journal: meals and memories

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

Wedding season officially began today at the Inn. Weddings in New England are not the finger-sandwiches-in-the-Fellowship-Hall affairs I was accustomed to attending in churches across Texas. You don’t have a reception, you have a meal – and you stay all day. We have at least one wedding on the books every weekend from now until the end of November, along with all sorts of other functions, which means we will feed anywhere from one hundred and fifty to five hundred people in our function hall every week for the next seven months.

And it’s beginning to look like I’m going to be the chef running the function kitchen.

Life is funny. Less than two months ago they were laying me off and now they want me to take on a bigger job. I’m not sure how all of that is going to go, but for this week, I was the Function Chef, which is a lot like being king of Rhode Island: I was in charge of a very small crew. It was me and Alfonso, a Brazilian high school student who works for us on weekends. Together he and I prepared the following menu for one hundred and twenty five people:

a cheese and fruit display
an antipasto display
bacon wrapped scallops
chicken satay
brie and apple puffs
lobster fritters
Caesar salad
Statler chicken breast with teriyaki mushroom demi-glace and red onion jam
roasted salmon with lemon sage beurre blanc
scallion and truffled whipped potatoes
haricot verts (that’s green beans to you and me)

He and I did all the preparation on Friday and Saturday and served it this afternoon, with some help from the dishwashers when it came time to plate the entrees. Of the five of us gathered to put chicken and fish on the plates, I was the new guy. When we started to work, Pedro, my favorite dishwasher, said, “Milton! First time in charge.” Then he patted me on the back and smiled. I may have been the one in charge, but I was not the one who knew all the details. Things went well because I leaned on the ones who did know – Pedro and Alfonso and the other Brazilians – to show me the ropes. They knew when to put the plates in the warmers, when to put the dressings on the salads, how to stack the filled plates in the warmer, and lots of other stuff. I asked for their help and they made us all look good. The day went really well. If today was any indication, we are going to have a good season ahead of us. I made a point of thanking my crew over and over for the job they did today. They don’t get noticed much.

Wedding season. It makes it sounds like a sport, as if some months ago the call went out for “brides and grooms to report.”

I went upstairs at one point this afternoon after the meal and the crowd was on the dance floor moving (notice I didn’t say dancing) to the beat of some wedding disco standard. For them, it was The Afternoon; for us it was the first of many. I worked hard to give them the best food I could, but I still don’t know their names. It was their wedding; it’s my job. We were all part of the same event but did not find the same significance and we will carry away different memories.

Some of the things I want to remember from today are cut the wedding cake in smaller pieces, don’t start dressing the salads until the begin the toasts or the lettuce gets soggy, seventy pounds of potatoes is more than enough to feed a hundred and fifty people. I imagine the couple’s memories will run more along the lines of the old Sinatra song:

some day, when I’m awfully low
when the world is cold
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
and the way you look tonight

I cooked one other meal today. Ginger and the staff at church asked me some time ago to provide a meal for a Leadership Appreciation Brunch after worship. Everyone serving on a committee or singing in the choir was included. About forty people stayed for the meal. I prepared it along side the wedding stuff over the last couple of days, so all I had to do was finish cooking it today. I served a pineapple and roasted corn risotto-stuffed chicken breast with a sweet chili glaze and lemon sage beurre blanc (yes, the multiple use of the sauce was intentional) and green beans. The meal went well but the memory I took away was Ginger and the other staff people taking time to call everyone by name and talk about how they had led us and served us as a church. We were all invited to fill up on food and affirmation. The comments were well-articulated memories of specific talents, words, and actions that spoke to our connectedness. Though being a part of the church means different things to different people, the memory we all were asked to carry away from our time today was it matters that we are here together for these days.

One of the members of the youth group asked me earlier if he could help this morning, so I had another high school student – Nick – working with me much like Alfonso does at the restaurant. While we painted the glaze on the chicken, I found myself explaining what was in the glaze and why we were doing it as we were. When I caught myself, I said, “I’m teaching like you asked me how to do this. You may not be interested, but I can’t guarantee I’ll stop. I like talking about this stuff.”

He laughed and said he liked cooking and was having fun. I kept talking as promised.

Tomorrow we move on to new meals, new marriages, and new meetings (I thought I’d keep up the alliteration). Oh – and new memories.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: shield the joyous

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7

My day started with a bowl of Cheerios, a cup of coffee, and this prayer of Saint Augustine, which is part of the Compline in the Book of Common Prayer and found in Nora Gallagher’s book:

Keep watch dear Lord with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.

She records her brother’s response:

Shield the joyous. I like that. When you are joyful, you need a shield.

I read the prayer to Ginger as she was getting ready for work and she repeated the phrase thoughtfully: “Shield the joyous.”

I’m a big fan of verbs. They’re the best card we have to play in English. When I studied Greek in seminary, I learned that language was driven by nouns, which could be packaged in several different cases. Not English. We rely on action – and the verb is the action word – so much so that we try to turn our nouns into verbs. My new pet peeve is people saying they “were gifted” something. No. We already have a verb for that: they were given a gift. All of that to say I went back to the prayer to look at the verbs.

  • tend the sick
  • give rest to the weary
  • bless the dying
  • soothe the suffering
  • pity the afflicted
  • shield the joyous

The five verbs that precede shield feel like the natural partners for the needs to be met. What we can do best for those who are sick is tend to them – take care of them. The answer to weariness is rest. Bless is packed full of forgiveness and compassion for those who are coming to the end of their days. Certainly those who are suffering need words and actions that lessen the pain. In Augustine’s day, pity was not about feeling sorry for someone but was also a word of compassionate action. All the recipients are vulnerable and fragile. In Augustine’s mind, so were the joyous. They needed to be shielded.

Joy is fragile.

I’ve never really thought about it that way, which makes me feel kind of stupid because the more I think about it the more obvious it seems. It’s fragile because it’s fleeting. Whatever the moment or the experience, there’s another moment quick on it’s heels. Perhaps that was part of Jesus’ point on the mountain after the Transfiguration when Peter wanted to build a small hotel and stay up there, caught in a moment of joy. “Wrong,” said Jesus in so many words. “We’ve got to go back.” When the returned to the others, everyone was in such a frenzy that no one asked what had happened. I realize there’s room to talk about joy as something at the core of our beings, thanks to God’s presence, but when we experience joy it’s at the thin places of life when it rises to the surface. Those don’t last long.

Joy is fragile because it’s unfamiliar. I work with a lot of really good people who I think don’t expect joy in their lives. They know about the pursuit of happiness and love to have a good time, but as I watch some of them they seem to have allowed themselves to choose to believe that this is the way life is: you go to work, you party when you can, and you live with a lot of shit. Some of them have good reason to think that’s the way life works, based on what they’ve been through. It makes me sad and it makes me understand the prayer better. If I could give any of them a chance to expect joy in their lives, I would want them to be shielded long enough to know it was real.

It’s also fragile because it’s so basic. In the Periodic Table of Life, it is an essential element, just like suffering. Though I make no claim to being any sort of scientist, I’m going to take my shot at a chemical analogy. I think I remember (from some chemistry class long ago) that some elements are not stable enough to hold together when they hit the air. They have to be protected, shielded, if you will. (And I know you will.) So it takes a lot of work to figure out how to make use of the substance because you have to live with the fact that it’s probably going to fall apart.

I don’t mean to sound as pessimistic as that last sentence felt when I reread it. Joy is essential to the fabric of our humanity and it isn’t stable when it hits the air. (I think I’ll move on.)

Though I read his prayer over breakfast, Augustine was praying at the close of the day, which is when I’m writing. He prays for those who have to work the night shift, or are keeping watch, or whose grief has taken away any chance of sleep, and then he moves to his list of vulnerable ones: sick, weary, dying, suffering, afflicted, joyous. As much as anything, he seems to me to be praying that we could all get a good night’s rest from the circumstances of the day. As Hedwyg quotes Madeleine L’Engle, “The problem with life is that it’s so damn daily.”

And we are so damn human.

The house is quiet now. All three of my girls did their best to stay awake until I got home from a very long day at work. Our friend Jay is spending the night, so Lola is keeping him company on the couch instead of being tucked in with Ginger and Gracie upstairs, as she always does when he stays with us. The night will be a short respite for us all because tomorrow already feels as though it is rushing to get here. As I think about Augustine’s prayer, I can name at least one person I know that fits each definition, so I will close by writing it one more time:

Keep watch dear Lord with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: in harmony

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

My reading this morning came from one of the books I got for my birthday: The Intellectual Devotional. The subtitle is great: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class. The book is a series of daily readings, each day of the week focusing on a different field of knowledge.

Monday – History
Tuesday – Literature
Wednesday – Visual Arts
Thursday – Science
Friday – Music
Saturday – Philosophy
Sunday – Religion

Today’s topic was melody. The entry began:

Melody, often referred to in everyday speech as the tune, is perhaps the most immediately recognizable element of music. A melody can be played on one instrument or many and, along with harmony and rhythm, is considered one of the three basic elements of all music.

Driving home from work tonight I started thinking about some of my favorite melodies. The one that stuck in my mind was an old American folk tune, “The Water is Wide.” I particularly love the way James Taylor sings it.

the water is wide I can’t cross o’er
neither have I wings to fly
give me a boat that can carry two
and both shall row my love and I

I realize I’m typing lyrics and not melody, but I’m counting on you to sing along at home. There are a lot of tunes that can get down inside of me and pull up all kinds of emotions. What I realized as I thought about them on the way home is the melodies that move me are the ones that lend themselves to harmony, because of the three basic elements of music, harmony is the one I love most. As long as I’ve been singing, I’ve looked for the harmony part.

In ninth grade I got a record player of my very own to keep in my room. We had a stereo in the living room, but the record player meant I could listen to my music in privacy. The next thing my parents gave me was a pair of headphones and they thought they were all set. They were wrong. One of my favorite records was Crosby, Stills, and Nash – the one with the three of them sitting in front of an old house – that had “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “Marakesh Express,” and “Helplessly Hoping,” among others. I would go in my room, put on the ‘phones, start the record, and lay down on my bed to listen, and to sing along.

I sang the harmony parts. All of them. What the rest of my family heard was only me, singing at the top of my lungs and changing from part to part, which sounded a lot like a howling cat on crack. Their revenge was I sang with my eyes closed. So they all stood at the door of my room and laughed until I opened my eyes and found them there.

Good times.

In college, I remember buying James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, still one of my favorite albums. All those years later, I was still sitting and listening and singing along, once I’d heard a song one time. The record is full of great harmonies, but I had one unsurpassed moment my first time through. He started singing “Long Ago and Far Away” –

long ago a young man sits and plays his waiting game
but things are not the same it seems as in such tender dreams

and then the harmonies came in

slowly passing sailing ships and Sunday afternoon
like people on the moon I see are things not meant to be

I couldn’t believe it. But there was more. He began singing the chorus

where do the golden rainbows end

and then Joni Mitchell’s voice came in behind him

where do the rainbows end

and it may have been my best moment ever listening to a song. Her harmony line still grabs me by the heart.

One of the things still on my To Do List, as far as my life is concerned, is to sing in a bluegrass band, mostly because I think it’s the best music for harmony. The simple melodies yearn for company and make room for layer upon layer of voices. I also like it because the harmonies are found rather than predetermined. Though I’ve been around music all of my life, I can’t read it. I learned to play guitar by ear and by learning chords; I find the harmony part by listening and joining in, or learning it from someone else. Growing up Baptist meant learning a lot of good old gospel hymns, which carry the same kind of invitation. One of the curious things about many modern hymns is they are written to be sung in unison and without harmony. I think they are making both a musical and a theological mistake.

At the risk of offering my third big metaphor in three days, which feels a little excessive even for Lent, my other realization driving home tonight was I’m built to not only sing harmonies, but to live them as well. I like being the pastor’s husband rather than the pastor. One of the things our congregation expects with some regularity is in the middle of a sermon or another part of the service, Ginger will say, “Milton, would you sing this song?” and I stand up and sing. I don’t know it’s coming, yet I’ve been harmonizing with her long enough to not be surprised. I know my part: she’s Gladys Knight and I’m a Pip. No — The Pip.

At the Inn, one of the things I do best is get things set up for Chef before the dinner rush. I know him. I can tell when things aren’t going well, or he feels isolated. I know how to find the harmony part that gets him back to the melody and we both have a good time. It happened again tonight.

If I ever got to meet Joni Mitchell, I’d have a lot of questions. But I would certainly put on my James Taylor record and say, “Tell me what that moment was like.” I don’t expect she would have an answer, but I’ll bet we’d listen to the song over and over again before she went home.

Peace,
Milton

PS — There’s a new recipe.

lenten journal: the lay of the land

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3

My friend, Doug (aka Pork Butt, for those who read the comments on this blog), is a surveyor. Before we became friends, all I knew of surveying was in the glimpses I had of the guys in orange vests holding poles by the side of the highway while another guy looked through some sort of viewer. During our regular lunches –also known as meetings of the Pastoral Spousal Support Group — I’ve learned a bit more about the field, but I’m far from an expert. What I now know about the two guys by the highway is together they provide the perspective that allows for the land between them to be properly mapped. You have to have a second point of reference from where you are standing to get an accurate reading.

I started three books today as a part of my Lenten journey, all three memoirs: Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace by Nora Gallagher; A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah; and The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection by Michael Ruhlman. I picked up Gallagher’s book because her other memoir, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith continues to be meaningful to me. This time she’s writing about learning to deal with the grief of her brother’s death. John Stewart’s interview with Beah sent me looking for the second book, in which the author tells how he lived through being a child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone. My friend Mia sent me the third book some time ago and I’m just now getting to it. The author chronicles seven chefs trying to pass the Certified Master Chef exam. In some sense, each writer is telling the story as a way of getting (or giving) some perspective, asking us as the readers to hold the other pole.

That I got to read most of the day was the result of pulling a muscle in my back yesterday (doing nothing). Since the weekend holds a couple of long days at work, I decided to take it easy today. Ruhlman got the lion’s share of my time because his account of the grueling ten-day chef’s exam reads like a thriller. I couldn’t put it down until I found out how the test came out. Seven chefs began the ordeal, all of them qualified and successful in their own restaurants and/or careers. Three made it through all ten days and only one became certified as a Master Chef mostly because those judging the tests were culinary inerrantists, demanding a level of perfection that saw no other pole in terms of the skill and creativity of those cooking beyond their own need to see themselves as the banner carriers for Auguste Escoffier, the chef whose name is above every other name in cheffing circles.

The first year I taught at Winchester High School, I was taken by surprise. My Honors Brit Lit kids came to class like it was their job. They worked hard and I worked with them as though none of us had anything to prove. We all had a blast. During the summer between my first and second years there, I lost sight of the sense of trust and resulting freedom that had made the class both enjoyable and meaningful and fell into thinking that my job was to uphold the standards of Honors classes. Though I had my reasons at the time, looking back from where the poles are now for me, I see I lost sight of something simple and important. I began teaching the subject rather than the students. I lost sight of the people in the room in my search for perfection.

When Ishmael Beah spoke with John Stewart, he talked about perspective in his own way. The government soldiers who forced him into service gave him an AK-47 and lots of drugs, one of which was a combination of cocaine and gunpowder. Beah said he lost sight of his humanity. By some amazing turns of circumstance, he ended up in the US with people willing to love him back into being. He had to learn how to sleep again, he said. Over time he began to remember what it felt like to be human and felt compelled to tell his story. “Your book made my heart hurt,” Stewart told him.

As someone who lives with depression, I was moved by Gordon’s reflection at RLP of the humanity two years of depression had taken from him:

I had thoughts that were not based in reality. Do you know how frightening and horrifying that is to a person like me?

At one point I decided that my wife of twenty years no longer loved me. I thought that, baby. THOUGHT IT.

And I thought that the people in my church didn’t like me anymore and were probably talking about how to fire me without totally devastating our family. I figured they would be nice in the way they did it, but yes, people were talking about me and trying to find a way to get rid of me.

Our humanity suffers any time we lose sight of our connectedness.

Gallagher actually made mention of the surveyor’s poles in the section I read today. Her brother had been a surveyor for the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico before he got cancer. She writes:

In order to survey, Kit said, you always have to have two points. In a photo, he leans over his tripod looking through the scope high above Otowi Bridge in northern New Mexico, sighting a distant point on the other side of the river. Below him are mesas dotted with pinon trees, a river gorge, a line of blue mesas, and beyond them nothing but a line of clouds in the sky. He marched through salt cedar and tamarisk, the bosque thick with snakes, finding the landmarks that aligned with each other. He could map anything. I thought of him then as making sense of geography. (27)

When Doug talks about people hiring him to survey land, he says it’s often to settle a dispute and determine where a property line really is. When the result isn’t what the clients want, they get perturbed. Doug smiles and says, “Look, this is not interpretation; this is just the lay of the land.” Sometimes, I suppose, the geography of the heart is not any easier to make sense of than the reality of the landscape that surrounds us. Both require more than one set of eyes.

Brian was one of the chefs who didn’t pass the test. It was his second attempt and second failure. Ruhlman describes Brian’s guilt and grief at missing his two-year old’s birthday because of the exam and then describes Brian getting in his Jeep and heading home to his wife and five kids, as well as his successful restaurant, gaining a better sense of perspective with each mile away from the test site. Beah found a new view through the eyes of those who loved him back into humanness. Gallagher tells of those around her who helped her grieve and discern where God was to be found in all of it.

Finding the lay of the land takes more than one point of view.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: lenten reduction

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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24

One of my regular tasks at the Inn is making the demi-glace, which is one of our “mother sauces,” providing a base for a number of our dishes. Our version is not exactly the old school French cuisine version, but it tastes good and it takes a long time to make. On Monday mornings, I begin by putting fifty pounds of veal bones onto baking sheets and roasting them for three or four hours. In the mean time, I rough cut ten pounds each of celery, carrots, and onions, which all go in the big fifty gallon kettle, along with all the herbs I can find, a big can of tomato paste, extreme amounts of red wine, and water. When the bones are done, I deglaze the pans with red wine and all of it goes in the kettle. By about four o’clock, I set it to simmering and I leave it cooking until I come back on Wednesday morning. By then, the liquid has reduced by about a third to a half.

I drain and strain what is now a rich brown liquid and put it in the square skillet, adding some more water and red wine and then I bring it to a boil and let it reduce by a little over half. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, I’m ready to strain the sauce one more time and put it in containers to cool. What started as almost fifty gallons of water and eighty pounds of ingredients reduces down to eight to ten gallons of demi, which will last three or four days. On Saturday I will start the process again to finish on Monday. We always need more.

As I was working this afternoon, I heard an interview on NPR with Dennis Ziegler from Tulsa who owns a company that supplies ashes to churches. He described how they took the palm fronds (what a cool word) and dried them and then burned them to make the ashes. He said two thousand pounds of palm fronds (just had to write it one more time) reduced to forty or fifty pounds of ashes.

I’ve held the ashes of both Hannah and Phoebe, two of our beloved Schnauzers, after they died. What was left of our dear little dogs could be held in one hand. In both cases, Ginger and I took their ashes down to the beach at low tide and scattered them across the water in the moonlight. In those moments, I was reduced to tears.

In the kitchen, we reduce sauces to intensify both substance and flavor. When we get ready to plate an order, we put a ladle full of sauce in a sauté pan and let it simmer on the burner until it’s thick enough to grab the steak and hold on as we pour. The flavor becomes rich and intense. If we didn’t take time to reduce the sauce, the whole dish would be something other than what we intended. It takes time and patience to reduce everything to its essence. Of course, we have to pay attention. There is a point where the sauce can move rather quickly from reduced to burned. No one is interested in those ashes.

As a part of our Ash Wednesday service tonight, we moved from taking Communion (by intinction) to being marked with the ashes from fronds of our own. As I dipped my bread in the cup, Dana, one of our seminarians, said, “From ashes you came and to ashes you will return.” As Ginger marked me, she said, “You are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God.” In that moment, my faith was reduced to an intensity of both body and flavor. The service congealed both truths into one: I am a fleeting image of God. It’s not about being eternal, it’s about being right now.

Monday nights are my night to run the kitchen, which means I get to come up with the special for dinner. Since it is the first night of the week (and after the weekend), I have to make a special out of what we have. What I ended up serving was an eight-ounce sirloin steak (with a caramelized red onion teriyaki demi-glace – reduced, of course) and two crab stuffed shrimp (with a lemon thyme beurre blanc) served with a warm fingerling potato salad and fried green tomatoes (I married a girl from Irondale, Alabama; you don’t think I know how to make those?). The plate was beautiful and it tasted good, as well. And, for at least one night, a few folks in New England learned that fried green tomatoes are something other than the name of a movie. But cooking is a temporary art form. My creation stayed intact only as long as it took to get it to the table. When we closed the kitchen Monday night, that was the end of that special. My calling is not to make pretty plates for a display case or for posterity, but to make food for folks who are hungry right now. And then it’s time to do it again.

No matter how many times I make demi-glace, it’s always time to do it again.

No matter how many meals I make, there will always be another ticket.

No matter how many times I hear I’m created in God’s image (even if I’m a firefly in the universe), I will always need someone to tell me again.

When we reduce existence to it’s essence, we come down to daily living. I quoted it yesterday and we read it tonight: “Consider the lilies,” Jesus said. He went on to say we need not worry about anything other than today. One of my favorite benedictions in church is “The Lord bless you in your going out and your coming in.” When you think about it, that’s pretty much what we do on a daily basis: we go out and we come in. Either way, we’re blessed. I like the image of God in that blessing because God’s presence is infused into every small and seemingly insignificant move we make filling our lives with the substance and flavor of Love, over and over and over again.

Peace,
Milton

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