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the eye of the storm

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5

One of the first scripture verses I learned was, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’” Actually, it was a song we sang in Sunday School or VBS – that detail I don’t recall. The verse came back to me as I sat down to write because today was one of those days when I was reminded – again – why I love being a part of the church and of my church.

Worship at North Community Church is always a bit of a whirlwind, with the congregation sitting in the eye of the Spirit Storm. Ginger and the rest of the team do a great job planning the services, making each detail matter. There are no discards. In the course of a service, there are often eight or nine people participating in everything from scripture readings to prayers to children’s sermons. All of our readers and participants are given clear direction as to what it means to lead worship. It shows in how they are able to lead us.

I got to church early to get things ready for Coffee Hour. I entered the Parish Hall to find a few members of the youth group who had had a sleep over and were eating breakfast. About nine o’clock, the fifth through eighth graders arrived because they have Sunday School before church. A couple of people came in to return dishes from meals delivered to them during the week. I turned on the coffee pot and went over to the sanctuary, which is across the street, and had time to greet a few folks before things began.

The announcements gave a quick snapshot of what makes up the whirlwind: the coming Church Fair, Coffee Hour, thanks for care during illness and recuperation, Community League – those were just the verbal ones; there was a page of printed announcements in the worship guide as well.

We make a clear distinction between “having gathered and preparing our hearts for worship.” Our call comes after the announcements, as the choral introit brings us to focus. Many of the elements stay the same: an opening hymn, a prayer of confession and words of assurance, the Psalm of the Day, the offering, the children’s sermon, another hymn, the prayers of the people, the scripture reading, the sermon, and the benediction. Today we had some added extras (as we often do): a baptism, a liturgical dance, and Communion (which happens every first Sunday). After church, the storm didn’t stop: Coffee Hour, Teaching Parish Committee, another youth group gathering, Confirmation, and a couple of other ad hoc meeitngs. Ginger and I drove out of the parking lot about one.

Ginger is a very gifted, dancer, choreographer, and worship leader. Though she has danced most of her life, today was the second time (I think) that she has danced here in Marshfield. She, along with Dana (one of our seminarians) and Heather (our CE Minister) danced to a song my friend Billy and I wrote called “Twenty-One Times.” We got the idea for the song from reading Paul Bowles’ wonderful novel, The Sheltering Sky, and this quote in particular:

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you, that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

Our take on his sentiment, which resonated deeply with us came out this way:

she saw the sun go down twenty-one times
twenty-one times in thirty-five years
she saw the sun go down
she thought there’d be a million
and she thought that she would see them
but she saw the sun go down twenty-one times

she stayed and danced all night only one time
only one time in thirty-five years
she stayed and danced all night
the moonlight fell like laughter
on her happy ever after
but she stayed and danced all night only one time

and over new England
geese are flying south
a November night fall
settles round about
and a lighthouse calls another home

she walked away from love so many times
so many times times in thirty-five years
she walked away from love
and hearing lesser voices
she turned them into choices
but she walked away from love so many times

and over new England
geese are flying south
a November night fall
settles round about
and a lighthouse calls another home

The woman in the song was thirty-five because that’s how old Billy and I were when we wrote the song. Fifteen years and some 5,500 sunsets later, I still believe what we wrote. If, as they sang in RENT, life can be measured “in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,” then it can be measured in coffee hours, children sermons, hymns, and prayer requests. I’ve been alive for almost 2,600 Sundays: 2,600 morning worships, 2,600 choral anthems, 2,600 invocations, 9,000 hymns, and about 25,000 announcements.

There are days I grow weary of the details that require attention in order to live in community. What matters to some does not matter as much to me, and vice versa. I always wish Church Council Meeting was shorter and I have no idea how to make sense of the Treasurer’s Report, even though he works hard to make it make sense. Our faith will not thrive because of political lobbying efforts, nor will it crash and burn because of public spectacles like the one we saw this past week. Our faith lives and thrives in the everyday motions of its people between every sunrise and sunset.

For two millennia, Christians have come to the Communion Table and fed one another as we did again today. As Ginger offered us the bread, in an unscripted moment, she said, “If you’ve ever felt alone, broken, hurt, isolated, judged based on your appearance or by your behaviors, this is the place of acceptance and grace where you are welcome, a place you can trust. You are loved. Take and eat.”

Over New England, the geese are flying south and I’m writing as another November nightfall settles around me. I’m grateful that part of the way I learned to mark time in my life is in counting how many sunsets must pass until I can say, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’”

Oh – I wish you could have seen the dance; it was amazing.

Peace,
Milton

affluenza

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

For the month of November, Ginger and I are writing down everything we spend so we can get a good picture of where our money goes. (All of a sudden, all I can hear in my head is Robert Palmer singing, “She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went.”)

It was her suggestion, brought on by her reading of Your Money or Your Life in preparation for an adult education class we are doing at church based on the PBS show, “Affluenza”:

Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth.

I haven’t been to class yet, but I can self-diagnose: I’ve got it. I’m not a daily visitor at the mall, but I’ve got lots of stuff I don’t need and would gladly invest any amount of money in CDs – the kind you play, not the ones you get at the bank.

Today I spent $54.72 on groceries and $2.10 on a cup of coffee while I was doing some reading and writing, which turned into a bit of web surfing after looking at the Affluenza site. My friend Doug bought my lunch at our Pastoral Spouse Support Group meeting today. While I was drinking my coffee, I came upon a wonderful web site called AfriGadet, which says it’s “solving everyday problems with African ingenuity.”

The first story was about a man in Ethiopia who builds coffee makers out of old mortar shells from the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

“These shells have all been used.” says Azmeraw Zeleke, the creator of these wonderful things. “We all need peace and we don’t want war but once these shells have been used, we should use our skills to do something with them. Sometimes I think about the fact they were used for war but I want to change them to do something good. They could be a symbol of war but I am doing something good out of the bad.”

Mr. Zeleke is still surrounded by war. Ethiopia is bordered by Somalia on one side, which has been a failed state for fifteen years, and Sudan on the other, which is not a viable nation these days either. His own country languishes in poverty and corruption, yet he is making coffee makers, something that promotes community and hope. According to the BBC story, “After meals, the traditional coffee ceremony allows family and friends to get together to share news and discuss the issues of the day.”

Ethiopia also shares a border with Kenya, which a little more stable but also quite poor. Afrigadet linked to a YouTube video about two handicapped guys in Kenya who make a living by turning their wheelchairs into mobile phone booths.

Massachusetts is one of the top three wealthiest states per capita in the country. When it comes to charitable giving, we fall to about forty-eighth on the list. Many of our churches struggle to make their budgets not because we are too poor to give, but because aren’t particularly generous. I’m talking about Massachusetts because that’s where I live. not because it’s some sort of exception. Though it’s true that Mississippi, who comes in at the bottom end of the wealth scale is the top giver, nobody’s really knocking it out of the park. Things get tight for most of us financially because we’ve been raised to want more stuff, not because we have to live on a dollar a day like most of the world.

My point is not to hand out boarding passes for a guilt trip. I’m writing out loud in hopes of figuring out what sort of chemotherapy my soul needs to cure my affluenza. I want to learn to live within my means. I don’t want to buy into the lie that my Mastercard is what makes moments priceless anymore. Beyond being out from under financial pressure, I want to learn how to share what I have – what we have – with people who have to make coffee makers out of bomb shells and strap phones to their wheelchairs.

On Randy Newman’s prophetic record, Land of Dreams(1988), he sings:

Of all of the people that I used to know Most never adjusted to the great big world I see them lurking in book stores Working for the Public Radio Carrying their babies around in a sack on their back Moving careful and slow It’s money that matters Hear what I say It’s money that matters In the USA

The verse that kills me is the last one:

Then I talked to a man lived up on the county line I was washing his car with a friend of mine He was a little fat guy in a red jumpsuit I said “You look kind of funny” He said “I know that I do” “But I got a great big house on the hill here And a great big blonde wife inside it And a great big pool in my backyard and another great big pool beside it Sonny it’s money that matters, hear what I say It’s money that matters in the USA It’s money that matters Now you know that it’s true It’s money that matters whatever you do”

Five days before midterm elections, Newman’s satire bites hard. As disenfranchised as I feel, sitting somewhere in the middle class, I’m far from being one of those who is worst hit and hit over and over and over. We, as Americans, have convinced ourselves that being rich and being smart are the same thing. We’re wrong.

If we were smart, we would have learned long ago that money is not the root of all evil, but our affluenza is. One of my favorite stories of Jesus’ healing is at the pool of Bethesda when he asks the man who has been poolside for thirty-eight years, “Do you want to get well?”

I’m trying hard to learn how to answer, “Yes.”

Peace,
Milton

I sing a song of the saints

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

One of the first churches I remember going to regularly was the Argyle Road Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. We went there while my parents were in language school before we began going to the predominantly African churches. The church was a British Baptist Church, which was different from Southern Baptist life in several ways, mostly cultural. The services were in English. Two things stand out to me: one, the ushers did not pass offering plates, but velvet pouches that had short handles on either side. You took one handle, put your money in the pouch, and then held out the handle for the next person to take. (It was also quite fun to stick your arm all the way down to the bottom and jingle the change.)

The second thing was a hymn I never heard in Baptist life: “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” by Lesbia Scott. (Listen here.)

I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green;
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and his love made them strong;
and they followed the right for Jesus’ sake
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.

I have no doubt that I’m probably the millionth blogger to quote the hymn on this All Saints’ Day, but I’m still captured by its imagery. I had never thought about a “shepherdess on the green” until I sang this song. Living in Africa made the line about being “slain by a fierce wild beast” feel plausible. My favorite lines still make me smile:

You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea

Even though I didn’t think I had ever been down a lane and had only just learned from our British friends about afternoon tea, there was something so wonderfully ordinary about her list that made sainthood seem simple. Bill Reynolds, one of my seminary professors, wrote:

Lesbia Scott wrote hymns for her three children during the 1920s as expressions of their faith. Never intended for publication, many were written in response to the children’s own requests. They would ask, ‘Mum, make a hymn for a picnic,’ or ‘Mum, make a hymn for a foggy day.’

‘I sing a song of the saints of God’ was intended for use on saints’ days to reinforce the fact that saints not only lived in the distant past but may also live and work in everyday lives.

Three years ago, Ginger gave me Iconography classes for Christmas. Chris Gosey was my teacher. He still is when we can find time to get together. One of the first things I learned was icons were considered “windows into heaven”: ways to find God. The point was not to worship the icon as if it were a sacred relic, but to focus on it so that it pointed you to God. The spiritual practice of writing the icons has been crucial for me in dealing with my depression. In that practice, I also learned that the darkest colors are laid down first and then you “paint to the light.” I have held on to that image tightly.

The paint we use is almost translucent, so it takes painting each line over and over – about fifteen to twenty times – for the lighter colors to establish themselves against the darker background. After hours and hours, a face begins to emerge from the darkness and the icon takes shape.

Chet Raymo wrote a wonderful book called The Soul of the Night, in which he talks about standing underneath the night sky and wondering how there could be so many stars in the heavens and yet there was still darkness. There was enough light in the sky to chase the darkness away, but it was still dark. And then he said he realized what was happening: all the light has just not gotten here yet. The light of the stars, much like the light of the lines painted again and again, will come in time.

I sing a song of the saints of God because we, too, are light not fully arrived. In a world with so many who say they follow Jesus, why is there still poverty and injustice? Why do people live and die alone? Why are we at war? Why is love not our common currency? There is still more light yet to break forth.

And so we must keep singing.

Peace,
Milton

back in our old haunt

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

When Ginger and I first moved to Massachusetts in 1990, we settled in Charlestown, one of the neighborhoods of Boston and home to the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument. We lived first in a small apartment on Pleasant Street, in the shadow of the Monument, and then in a row house, circa 1840, at 14 Hill Street, looking down over the Mystic River.

I had never known what it was like to live in a neighborhood until I moved to Charlestown.

Boston residents, for the most part, don’t have air-conditioning in their homes. Summertime means the windows are open. Moving from Texas, where I drove into the garage, closing the door behind me, and then entered my sealed home, I never knew much at all about what was happening next door. Three days in Charlestown and we could tell you what our neighbors were cooking, what TV shows they watched, and what they called each other when they were mad. Ginger said the day she felt like a real Bostonian was when our friend Marilyn yelled up from the street, “Hey, Ginga! Open the dowah!” (Translation: “Hey Ginger! Open the door!”)

We moved in around Labor Day, so Halloween was our first holiday without boxes. Our new friend, Rosemary, told us about a tradition we worked hard never to miss: at five o’clock (because this time of year it’s dark by six), all the children gather at the Bunker Hill Monument – in costume of course – and are led in a Halloween Parade, complete with band, to walk around the Monument and chase away the evil spirits. The good people who live in the surrounding houses reward their efforts with candy.

Each of the Halloweens since we moved south, we have tried to get back to Charlestown. Tonight we finally made it. I didn’t have to work, Ginger left work early, and we drove into the city and the neighborhood we called home for so many years. About 5:15 the crowd began to gather, and by the time the band got there (a little late), there were between three and four hundred children and parents, dressed as pumpkins, puppies, princesses, Power Rangers, super heroes, Chicken Littles, lady bugs, bunnies, pirates, and flowers. Since we’re in Boston, there were also a couple of lobsters. The gathering worked its magic once again: there were only good spirits on the wind as they circled on a perfect autumn evening.

People in New England celebrate Halloween with a great deal of gusto. Garrison Kellior points out that Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America in the 1840s, when the immigrated because of the Potato Famine. He goes on to say:

Halloween no longer has any real connection to the festival it came from. Unlike most major holidays in this country, it is not a religious holiday, it does not celebrate an event in our nation’s past, it does not involve traveling to visit family, it doesn’t even give us a day off work. But it gives us the chance to try out other identities. For one day, people can feel free to dress as the opposite gender, as criminals, as superheroes, celebrities, animals, or even inanimate objects.

Some see cities as troubled, if not evil, much the same as some see Halloween as a holiday. But what I miss about living in the city is the same creative energy that swirled around the Monument tonight. You see people who don’t look like you, who come from other places, who ask different questions, who cause you to think about who you are. Pressed up against each other, you have to figure out how to live together in a way that chases away the evil spirits and makes room for the good to thrive.

It’s not easy; it’s not always pretty — but, damn, it’s fun.

Peace,
Milton

songs to learn and sing

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Sleep came before words last night. They aren’t coming so easily this morning either, so I’ll pass along some words and music that have been collecting in my mental jukebox recently.

Thanks to John Brashier for pointing me to the new John Mellencamp song, “Our Country,” which you can listen to here. Makes me want to pull out my copy of Scarecrow for another listen.

I also spent some time looking at the NPR Song of the Day for the last week or two, which led me to a sample of Amos Lee’s new album. I gave his first record to Ginger for Christmas last year. If you have not heard him, here’s your chance:

Another John, one of our seminarians at church, gave me two CDs by Girlyman, a three person group who know a thing or two about harmony. They have some sound clips on their website. I would recommend checking out “Kittery Tide,” “Fall Stories,” and “Montpelier.”

On James Taylor’s website, there are two exceptional covers you can listen to on the home page: Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and Joni Mitchell’s “The River.” Even though it’s only Halloween, it’s never too early for me to hear, “It’s coming on Christmas and they’re cutting down trees. . .”

Bob Bennett, an old friend and a wonderful song writer, has written “My Heart Across the Ocean,” about what it feels like to have a son in Iraq. You can download the song for free. Bob also offers a “song of the month” from his previous recordings for download.

Over the Rhine offers has an MP3 Attic on their site that has some cool stuff, as well as an MP3 Rarity (though not recently updated). “Flown Free” is a song based on lines for Psalms 124 &129. You can download all of the songs for free.

One more blast from my past. I don’t remember how I came across her website, but Karla Bonoff has some free downloads as well. I have two favorites: “Let It Be Me” (a duet with J. D. Souther) and “If He’s Ever Near” (recorded live).

That ought to keep you busy until it’s time to start handing out the candy.

Peace,
Milton

darkness and light

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

I begin with thanks to Mark Heybo for pointing me to some of Frederick Buechner’s words:

The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind and it can be cruel. It can be beatiful and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the stongest. When good things happen, we rise to heaven; when bad things happen, we descend to hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits roar. I know how just the weather can effect my whole state of mind for good or ill, how just getting stuck in a traffic jam can ruin an afternoon that in every other way is so beautiful that it dazzles the heart. We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

In church today, Ginger baptized Harrison, a wonderful, globe-headed, chubby-cheeked kid who seemed completely taken with the whole experience. Baptism in our church is full of energy. All of the children come down to the front and gather round while Ginger leads us all – parents, godparents, congregation – in the promises we make to God to bring up our new family member to follow Christ. When I became a part of the UCC, many years ago now, “infant baptism” (as I learned to call it growing up Baptist) was unfamiliar. To me baptism meant going all the way under. I’ve come to see that we use one word for two different things. I’ve also come to find deep meaning in the watermark we place on our children as they begin their journey with God.

After the baptism Ginger carried Harrison up and down the aisles so we all could see him up close and personal – another one of my favorite parts of the service. Today something new and incredible happened. Heather, our new minister of Christian Education, who was with the kids at the front, caught the kids’ attention just as Harrison was drawing near to them and said, “Ready?” Together all the children said, “Welcome, Harrison!”

The kids were all over church today. They not only read the Gospel lesson – as a dramatic reading, but also sponsored Coffee Hour with a wonderful assortment of cheeses, cookies, and candy corn. It was not too many years back that we spent some time in Church Council worrying about what to do with the children during Coffee Hour; today they served us. I like that.

In the midst of such wonder came a request for prayer from one of our members who is a nurse in Boston. She told us about one of her patients, a young Haitian girl who came to this country with her mother and siblings after being granted asylum. As a five year old, she witnessed some sort of “police” come into her house in Haiti and hack off her mother’s legs. Once they got to the States, they learned that everyone in the family was HIV positive. The little girl is now in the hospital and very ill.

Darkness and light smashed one against the other. How do I make wholeness out of these fragments?

The distance between Charlestown High School and Winchester High is about seven miles. My last year in Charlestown, I taught all the seniors, which added up to about 140 students. About half of them were girls. Of those seventy or so, over thirty of them had children. When I got to Winchester, I had no mothers in any of my classes. One day, some of the students brought bags of flour into class as a part of a mock parenting exercise for a Marriage and Family class. What was fiction to them was real life for people their age just seven miles away. Such is the power of geography.

Part of the reason Harrison was welcomed today is because he wasn’t born in Haiti or India or Zambia. For the same reason, he will get to grow up and dream about his life and have a shot at seeing those dreams come true. The little girl from Haiti is one of a much larger number of children who will never know what that feels like.

Darkness and light smashed one against the other. How do I make wholeness out of these fragments?

One of the ways I’ve heard people try and cope with such disparity is to say, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” I’ve said it, too. I don’t want to say it anymore because that’s not what I want to say about God’s grace. I don’t see a possibility for wholeness if my perspective begins with, “Thank God that’s not me.” That only heightens the fragmentation of our existence. Grace is not a reprieve from hardship and the realities of life. Grace calls us into the pain, not to give thanks that we weren’t the ones who got hit by the train.

“We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors,” Buechner says. Life in our time feels too much like being in a batting cage with seven or twelve or twenty pitching machines throwing all at once. One of the powerful things about the sacrament of baptism is we are not reacting; we are intentionally dedicating one of our own to God and saying, “Welcome,” even as the pitches whiz past our ears. But for the grace of God, we would not have a chance for such a moment.

By the grace of God, we are called to carry what light we have into the darkness shouting, “Welcome” all the way.

Peace,
Milton

this is the way the world ends

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
9

I was almost a teenager when Planet of the Apes hit the theaters in 1968. The film was a futuristic cautionary tale of what we were in for if we kept living like we were living, ending with a shocking image of the Statue of Liberty buried up to her armpits in desert sand.

My experiences today showed me exactly how that’s going to happen.

For some time now, the faucet in our kitchen sink has dripped. Today was the day I finally decided to do something about it. I’m not necessarily the quickest to take care of such tasks, but once I take it on I stick with it until I get it done (because I know if I don’t finish it while I’m somewhat motivated I will let it lay there for another six weeks). I took the faucet off – after turning off the water – and removed the cartridge assembly (as I learned it was called) to take with me to the hardware store so I could make sure and get the right part. I stopped first at Taylor Lumber, our local hardware store, because they’re our local hardware store. The last time we had a drip, they had the part. Not this time.

From there I headed to Lowes, where we bought the faucet five years ago when we moved in. The first guy I talked to seemed fascinated with the concept of running water inside the house. He had no idea where to find the part. I went back to the kitchen faucet display and found the exact faucet we have at home. With the model number in hand, I went back to the plumbing aisle and moved one step up the food chain to a guy who did know something about plumbing. He said,

“How old is your faucet?”
“Five years,” I answered.
“Oh! Well, we don’t keep parts for anything that old.”

I was holding a solid metal part for a faucet they still had on the shelf and they did not stock the part. His answer was to buy a whole new unit.

I left and drove to Republic Plumbing Supply, which had been recommended by the guy at Taylor Lumber. The guy looked at the part and asked me what brand it was. When I told him Price Pfister, he said, “That’s one of the home warehouse brands (meaning Lowes and Home Depot) and we don’t carry those parts.” When I asked who did, he pointed me to a place in Quincy – fifteen miles away – and then suggested I go on line. After two hours of running all over the area looking for a ten dollar part, I stopped at a local coffee shop that has free wireless internet access, logged on to the Price Pfister web site and, after a ridiculous number of steps, found and ordered the part I needed. It will be here in a week.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

I’m talking a solid metal piece here with a ceramic center. When I was with the first guy at Lowes, as he methodically pulled down every part on the wall trying to find a match, I couldn’t help but notice everything was plastic; the metal parts were long gone. The parts were created to be replaced quickly. The life expectancy of kitchen fixtures should be longer than five years. How can a culture survive if we treat everything as disposable?

Last night at the restaurant we got to talking about the state of the world and the talk turned to unusual food products. Actually, it started with one of the servers talking about how much she loved Velveeta. Though I will admit it makes a mean chile con queso, I’m not much of a fan of “cheese food.” What exactly is it? From there we moved to Cheez Whiz and then on to Go-Gurt. My issue with the latter (“The Grab-n-Go Yogurt”) is this: if you’re five years old and your schedule doesn’t allow you time to sit down and eat your yogurt, your life is seriously messed up. A five year old should have nowhere to be other than being five in the midst of loved ones who surround and protect him or her, not rushing them off to wherever carrying a tube of cultured nutrition. To put our kids under than kind of pressure is to say we consider them as disposable as our faucet parts.

Why should we throw away either one?

As a youth minister and a high school teacher, I worked with five year olds who were fifteen and sixteen. One summer in Fort Worth, I put an afternoon on the calendar for the kids to meet me at the park between the Amon Carter Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum. About twenty kids showed up. We sat around in a circle for a few minutes and then one of them asked what we were doing.

“This,” I answered. “All we are doing this afternoon is being together.”

We spent an afternoon like that almost every week that followed for the whole summer. It was the most popular youth event by far.

Though this post is starting to smell as though we are heading for a “You see, Timmy” moment, I’m not looking to teach a lesson as much as mark the time. Somewhere around four o’clock on Thursday, October 26, 2006 I realized how the Statue of Liberty will end up buried in the sand: one grain, one faucet, one package of Go-gurt at a time, stacked one on top of the other.

Peace,
Milton

I say I want a revolution

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

I discovered a new website today in a rather circuitous way.

Quotidian Grace was kind enough to comment on my post about Zambia yesterday, so I clicked over to find out what she has been talking about. Scolling down over the past few days, I read about the theme for the PCUSA General Assembly and her vote for a more prophetic word, which led me to Kruse Kronicle, a blog I had never visited. Reading through some of his posts, I found this map from Maps of War. It’s worth spending the ninety seconds to watch and see what history looks like.

When we were in Cappadocia on what may have been my favorite day of our trip, our guide Seref was talking about the region being the place you invaded on the way to what you really wanted to conquer. In a little over a paragraph, he gave us a list of all the peoples to whom Cappadocia had belonged. He finished by saying, “Today it is inhabited by the Turkish people; we do not know who will be next.”

Iraq became a nation, idependent of its colonizers, in 1932. It’s borders were drawn for the first time — by non-Iraqis — around 1920. This was Persia. In the same way Seref described Cappadocia, this land had belonged to everyone from the Babylonians and the Sassanids to the Mongol hoardes (why are they always “hoardes”?). Bush tried another one of his if-I-say-it-I-can-make-it-happen speeches today in his press conference. At least this time he admitted things were not going so well. One of the things that troubles me is he seems to think Iraq only came on the world stage with any sense of importance when we invaded. He doesn’t have any sense of how five thousand years of history have shaped the land and its peoples.

But he’s not the whole problem. In all the verbal flailing going on as our midterm election nears, I have yet to find anyone who speaks with any clarity and sense of history when they talk about what we should do. Most of the words that come out of the mouths of both Democrats and Republicans sound like little more than playground chatter:

“Your idea sucks.”
“No, your idea sucks.”
“Oh, yeah — well your party sucks.”
“No, your party sucks.”
“You suck.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do too.”
“Shut up.”

Isn’t there someone who can speak cogently about the situation we have created by our invasion in words and not be defensive or condescending? (The question is mostly rhetorical: I can’t think of anyone.)

I have one other question: why aren’t we, the people, angry enough to do something? In Hungary, demonstrations have been going on for over a month with people calling for their president to resign because he lied. Thousands of people are still in the streets. Maybe we have become so cynical that we expect our leaders to lie. While we spend two billion dollars a week to establish a democracy in Iraq, our democratic process is a sham. We have leaders with no vision and a people with no hope. Harsh as it sounds, I know no other way to explain it.

The other night when I wrote about Billy Bragg, I used a Sydney Harris quote that said

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, but is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

I feel cynical tonight. I am more cynical than I was a year ago, or a month ago when it comes to our political process. I’m so cynical that I’m reusing quotes while they are still warm. I did see one hopeful sign this week. I was in Hingham Center a couple days ago and saw about six or seven people, most of them fairly elderly, holding signs that said “Peace” and “Get out of Iraq.” The town has a municpal referendum on the ballot to tell President Bush they don’t sanction the war. No one was screaming, but they were out there.

I need to be reminded they aren’t the only ones.

Peace,
Milton

stand and sing of zambia

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Today is the forty-second anniversary of Zambian Independence.

I was living in Lusaka, the capital of the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, on the day it became the nation of Zambia. For months we had practiced our new national anthem in school so we would be able to sing out proudly when we became our own country. They had songs on television to help us learn about our new decimal currency, the Kwacha, after years of British pounds and pence, which was not decimal in those days. We were hopeful.

On the evening of October 23, 1964, we gathered in Lusaka City Stadium around seven o’clock. There were military bands, dancers and drummers from all the provinces, local pop stars, and all kinds of stuff to help us count down the hours. At about 11:45, the British colonial leader made a brief speech and, as the day came to a close, we sang “God Save the Queen” and watched the British flag come down for the last time. As midnight struck, our new Zambian flag was raised and together we sang the anthem of our new nation:

Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free,
Land of work and joy in unity,
Victors in the struggle for the right,
We have won freedom’s fight.
All one, strong and free.

Africa is our own motherland,
Fashioned with and blessed by God’s good hand,
Let us all her people join as one,
Brothers under the sun.
All one, strong and free.

One land and one nation is our cry,
Dignity and peace ‘neath Zambia’s sky,
Like our noble eagle in its flight,
Zambia, praise to thee.
All one, strong and free.

Praise be to God.
Praise be, praise be, praise be,
Bless our great nation,
Zambia, Zambia, Zambia.
Free men we stand Under the flag of our land.
Zambia, praise to thee!
All one, strong and free.

I still stand in the living room and sing it with great feeling every October 24.

Zambia’s most promising natural resource was copper. When they built the new Parliament building, the top had a burnished copper veneer to show our wealth. But the biggest copper producer in the world was not Zambia, but the United States. With Britain out of the picture, any arrangements protecting Zambian copper fell by the wayside. The new nation could not compete with the big boys; the US flooded the copper market and Zambia never recovered.

The colonialists did very little to give the new nation a chance. The British did not educate the people of Northern Rhodesia very well so they could keep telling them they were not prepared for independence. Zambia’s first university was built after independence. The point of a colony was to use it up, not to help it grow to statehood. The British, politically and economically, did to Zambia what Kathy Bates did to James Caan in Misery, hobbling the nation and then having the audacity to concede independence with a straight face.

Today, Zambia is one of the poorest nations in Africa. Somewhere between twenty-five and forty percent of the population is HIV positive. Zambia is bordered by Angola, Zimbabwe, and the Demcratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania, all countries in turmoil, which means there are many refugees looking for shelter. Zambia is dying and we, as Americans, don’t know because it has no oil and it’s in Africa.

I still want to stand and sing of Zambia.

When I was in fourth grade, the den mother of my Wolf Cub pack (that’s British for Cub Scouts) made arrangements for us to sing Christmas carols at State House, our presidential residence. There were eighteen or twenty in our troop and we worked up several numbers and then went on a December evening and began to sing on the front porch of Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president. He and his wife answered the door and stood there smiling as we sang “The First Noel,” complete with soprano descant. After we sang four or five songs, they invited us in for tea and we sat around the living room with our president who seemed quite happy to sit and chat with a room full of ten year olds. After a few minutes, he put down his cup and sat down at the grand piano in the middle of the room.

“You were kind enough to sing of the birth of Jesus,” he said. “Now I would like to sing for you of my faith.” With that, he began to play and sing, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .. when he finished singing, he sat down with us again and continued to converse.

Much of David Livingstone’s work was in Zambia, where he died. His colleagues prepared to take his body back to England, but the people with whom he worked said his heart belonged to Africa. Though he has a tomb in Westminster Abbey, Livingstone’s heart was buried in Zambia. Part of mine is still there, also.

As I was driving today, I listened to Tom Ashbrook interview Casey Parks, a young journalist who spent time in Africa with Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times reporter who is one of the few in our country committed to keeping the genocide in Darfur, Sudan in our consciousness. She told a story of watching a young woman die because the fetus had died in her body and the doctor had delayed doing a caesarian section because she didn’t have the hundred dollars for the operation. By the time he did operate, the woman had contracted a severe infection for which there were no antibiotics in the country.

Zambia is not unique in its problems among the other nations of Africa. Malawi, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, Liberia, Togo, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Ghana are all countries where the average annual income is about $200 and the biggest killer is malaria. While they die for lack of a hundred dollars, our government is spending $2 billion dollars a week in Iraq and our pharmaceutical companies are doing all they can to keep coming up with new products for male erectile dysfunction and female contraception. (Talk about creating your own market!)

I hope I live long enough to see America treat the African continent as if it really mattered. It is no accident that most Africans will not live that long. The governments of America and Europe have done little more than offer feeble lip service to the continent they labeled “dark.” A change in policy and approach is unlikely because our lip service, as the American public, is even feebler.

We don’t stand and sing about much more than ourselves.

Peace,
Milton

listen to linda

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

Yesterday was a day outside; today was a day inside: I worked for twelve and a half hours. I came up to write tonight with few words anywhere in or on my person, so I decided to go back through last week’s poems at The Writer’s Almanac. Maybe reading how someone else puts words together, I thought, would push me to do the same. And I found this poem by Linda Pastan:

Rereading Frost

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

I had never heard of Linda Pastan before tonight. My loss. I took a little time to try and find more written about her and by her. Inspired by her own willingness to sit and read how someone else has already captured the moment, I offer you two more poems I found.

Vermilion

Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he’d add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were
the purest form of love.

That last sentence kills me. I’ve lived that sentence more than once.

Women on the Shore

The pills I take to postpone death
are killing me, and the healing
journey we pack for waits
with its broken airplane,
the malarial hum of mosquitoes.
Even the newly mowed grass
hides fault lines in the earth
which could open at any time

and swallow us.
In Edvard Munch’s woodcut,
the pure geometry of color—an arctic sky,
the luminescent blues and greens of water—
surrounds the woman in black
whose head is turning to a skull.
If death is everywhere we look,
at least let’s marry it to beauty.

I don’t want to say much. Her words need room to resonate, not to be drowned out, even if it is applause. Suffice it to say, if there is not a Linda Pastan Fan Club, I’m starting one.

Peace,
Milton

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