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a little lower than the agents

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Now that I’m down to one job, I’m determined to get some more writing done. On both of my days off this past week I spent a fair amount of time chasing down a couple of ideas. I also spent a fair amount of time looking at writing sites on the Web. I’m toying with the idea of National Novel Writing Month, though I’m not sure I can keep up the pace to pound out fifty thousand words in thirty days. Yet, I know I respond to a deadline and even if it got me halfway into a story, it might be worth it. On one of the sites I found a link to an agent who was interested specifically in children’s literature. I’ve got a story I’ve been carrying around for a few years (and I posted it once here), so I sent a query and got back a very positive reply very quickly, which surprised me. I couldn’t help myself. I was elated.

I sent back what they wanted and we did a little back and forth, until tonight when they sent me a contract along with the name of someone who will do a “literary critique,” which would cost me about $70. They almost had me and then I thought I ought to see what I can find out about them. I had simply followed a link on a site that had lots of links. Sure enough, Google pointed me to several folks who had less than complimentary things to say. One guy even posted the query he sent in, using the same form I used:

Title of Work: the little poo that could

Grade Focus: High School

Synopsis: one time there was this little poo and he wanted to be liked by
everybody else so he went to this park where they made dinosaurs and then
the dinosaurs got out and all the dinosaurs started eating everybody and
then the little poo's wife gets killed by a one armed man and he gets
accused of the murder and then he becomes a fugitive and then he goes up and
blows up the death star and saved the day and then he woked up and realized
it was all a dream, and then he got flushed down the toilet

NYP-Work Been Edited: yes by my mom

NYP-Sample Illustrations: yes i drew some stuff

NYP-Bio: i am elevn years old and my language teacher says i am good so i
should write a book.  please accept my work

He got the same encouraging response I did (yup — the one about very few being chosen).

I know better and yet they almost got me to get out my checkbook. I know I’m an easy mark. When it’s Girl Scout Cookie season, Ginger won’t let me answer the door because she knows I’ll buy whatever they’re selling. But that’s not the deal here. I wasn’t donating to an organization I trust; I was trying to sell a book. I think I get pulled by this stuff because I don’t understand why someone would intentionally deceive another, especially when it comes to what matters most to them. From what I read, these people have set up a deal intent on taking people for all they can. They aren’t trying to sell books, just prey on those who are. I hate having to come to terms with that kind of intentional deceipt.

At work Saturday, one of the servers came to me and said, “I need some help with what to do.” The party she had served — who had just paid and left — had a bill for $38 and change. On the tip line the left her $6 something, but when they totaled the ticket, they wrote $55, which was a ten dollar mistake in favor of the server. She couldn’t find them and wasn’t sure how to fix things. I took a pen and changed the five to a four and she put the ticket through correctly. The customers will never know what happened; neither would they have known had she taken the extra ten. That’s what I expect of people.

I’m not opting for rose colored glasses here. The consequences of holding the whole world suspect seem enourmous. Ginger and I were talking today about someone we know who is incredibly cynical. They were not always so. I said, “Exhausted idealists make for harsh cynics.” I’m stuggling with how to live life with trust as the default setting knowing the bastards who want to take me to the cleaners are out there hoping I will do just that. If Jesus is the model I turn to, what I see is he trusted Judas down to the Last Supper without flinching. His trust got him arrested and, ultimately, killed. What do I do with that?

As I said on Thursday, Ginger preached from Psalm 8 and Hebrews today, focusing on the language of our being created “a little lower than the angels.” Several years ago, my friend Billy and I wrote a song because of a cartoon our friend David had given us. The picture showed a guy standing in a crowded subway car on his way to work. He was the only one in the scene with a smile on his face. The caption read, “At 7:01 Ernie remembered he was created a little lower than the angels.” Our words said this:

lower than the angels

monica drive like a mother of two
she goes to the store she stops at the zoo
candlelight dinners of pb & j
she picks up the toys and puts them away

a little lower than the angels

she opens the letter as she closes the gate
my love to the kids the check will be late
she puts away dishes she pulls down the sheets
she picks up her novel and falls into sleep

tell her she’s higher than the monkeys and out on a limb
tell her she’s right on the money but late on the rent
tell her she’s fallen in the standings but still in the game
a little lower than the angels

now ernie gets the train about seven o one
gotta reputation that he gets things done
it isn’t really living but he can’t say no
pours another coffee as the streetlights glow

tell him he’ higher than the monkeys and under the gun
tell him he’s better than average but he ain’t the only one
tell him to raise his expectations and keep his head low
a little lower than the angels

and down around seventeen floors
some banner on an old church door says
keep watching out keep watching out for the lord

now monica drives through for something to go
she’s got errands to run she’s got noses to blow
and ernie’s in his office where he works downtown
he turns on the lights the sun’s going down

tell them their higher than the monkeys and still under fire
tell them they’re fighting for survival and it’s down to the wire
tell them that things will get better and that’s how it goes
a little lower than the angels

I sang it in church this morning between the scripture reading and Ginger’s sermon. The song came flooding back in my head as I read the warnings about the agency that had inflated my hope for my story. I need to know tonight that things will get better and be reminded that that’s how it goes here where we are, a little lower than the angels.

I wonder if they’ve had better luck selling their manuscripts.

Peace,
Milton

what the day had to say

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

Somedays, figuring out what the day had to say is like putting together a puzzle or breaking a code. Sometimes, on days like today, assembly is not required, only watching and listening, the way you watch a sunset or listen to a mourning dove.

I learned something new today: NPR picks a Song of the Day on their web site. I found some wonderful things, but none more enchanting than the song for today, “All the Time in the World” by Gregson and Collister. It is a beautiful and melancholy story of the ending of a relationship, What’s amazing about it is it was recorded live over twenty years ago on an impulse and is just now making its reissue on CD. I’d never heard of the two singers before (my loss) and did not recognize much about them other than they were proteges of Richard Thompson. (Here’s a wonderful interview with him, including a Britney Spears cover.) The song captures a moment of magic in a night full of possibilities that were never fully birthed.

One of my other almost daily stops is one I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions: The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor’s daily dose of poetry and interesting historical tidbits, which I turned to tonight after hearing the song. Today’s poem by Deborah Cummins describes a grown child looking at a picture of her mother before she was married and realizing she could have lived another life — perhaps one happier and less painful than the one she did live.

Another Life

My mother, 18, the summer before she married,
lounges belly-down in the sun,
books and grass all around, her head on her hands
propped at a jaunty angle.
She smiles in a way I’ve never seen
at something beyond the camera.
This photograph I come back to again and again
invites me to re-write her life.
I keep resisting, certain
I’d have no part in it, her first born
though not exactly. A boy first,
two months premature, my brother
who lived three days, was buried in a coffin
my father carried. “The size of a shoe box,”
he said, the one time he spoke of it.
And my mother, too, offered only once
that she was pregnant and so they married.

Drawn to this saw-edged snapshot,
I’m almost convinced to put her in art school.
Single, she’d have a job in the city,
wouldn’t marry. There’d be no children
if that would make her this happy.
But I’m not that unselfish, or stupid.
And what then, too, of my beloved sister,
her son I adore?

So let me just move her honeymoon
from the Wisconsin Dells to the Caribbean.
Let the occasional vacation in a Saugatuck cabin
be exactly what she wanted. The house
she so loved she won’t have to sell.
Winters, there’s enough money to pay the bills.
There are no cigarettes, no stroke, no paralysis.
Her right hand lifts a spoon from a bowl
as easily as if it were a sable-hair brush
to an empty canvas.
And the grass that summer day
on the cusp of another life
is thick, newly mown, fragrant.

In the historical notes that follow, Keillor points out that today is the birthday of Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and playwright who became president of his country and who is one of my political heroes right up there with folks like Mandela and King. A couple of clicks later and I came across these words of his from a speech entitled, “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World.”

A modern philosopher once said: “Only a God can save us now.”

Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.

It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies – it must be rooted in self-transcendence:

  • Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
  • Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
  • Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.

The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems [one] can realize that liberty only if he [or she] does not forget the One who endowed him [or her] with it.

I went to get something out of the car tonight after supper and the night sky took my breath away. The clouds that came in this afternoon were rolling back like the ceiling on a giant stadium and the moon was already shining through the quickly dissipating veil. On the clear side of the sky, the stars shone in formation, marking the night as they do every evening. All I could think about was Psalm 8, which is Ginger’s text for Sunday:

I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way? (The Message)

Yes, there is a real alternative to extinction.

Peace,
Milton

one of those days

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

The day started off as if it were going to be one of those days.

I walked into the kitchen to find the receptionist at the inn looking frantically for rags because someone (I never did find out who) had split a can of stain on the stairs. Luckily, it was the same color as the stairs, but it still had to be cleaned up. Then the bartender, who is the only one working in the pub at lunch, didn’t show up until five minutes after the pub was supposed to open. We were all in a bit of a panic by that time. It was about then I actually said, “This feels like it’s going to be one of those days.”

Several years ago, when the Red Sox were in the midst of an even more disappointing season than the one we just lived through, Ginger and I were at Fenway Park. Not only were we getting beaten, but the game was also boring. It was also a Saturday afternoon and the Fenway Faithful were a bit restless. Somewhere around the fifth inning, I think, a woman jumped over the wall and ran on to the field to hug one of the players. A few minutes later, someone else – a man, if I remember – also made a run across the diamond. Within the next couple of innings, the fans had more base runners than the Sox. After about the fifth or sixth interloper, there was a palpable moment when you could feel almost everyone thinking, “If we all went, they couldn’t stop us.”

We flinched, the moment passed, and we all went home talking about how we almost stormed the field.

Somewhere around noon today, it felt as though we could have jumped the fence and ridden the day down into some sort of absurd catastrophe, but we didn’t do it and the moment passed. What began with a hint of a small apocalypse shifted and stayed in the ordinary. Today was a good day partially, at least, because we chose not to believe otherwise.

There’s a level of crisis in our daily lives that gets way too much attention. We can get worked up about it, or we can figure out how to keep going. Our receptionist, to her credit, was frantically looking for rags so she could clean up the mess. The stain was water based. It took some time, but nothing was irrevocably damaged. The bartender’s tardiness was annoying, but we didn’t have any customers for the first forty-five minutes we were open, so his error was harmless, though I want him to be on time next week.

Anyone who has spent anytime in church, whether member or minister, understands the kind of holy hysteria that can take hold when a little thing is allowed to become a big thing for no apparent reason other than we can’t (won’t?) stop ourselves. Churches often spend more time haranguing about what color to paint the walls in the Parish Hall than they do talking about mission. When I was in seminary, I remember a seasoned minister saying, “When it comes to budgets, make your requests big. You’ll get a unanimous vote if you ask for $10,000; you’ll end up in an all night discussion if you ask for $100.” The small decisions and responses in life are important and they’re still small. Sometimes we need help finding a sense of context. Before I started writing tonight, I punched around on the news links I have here. The BBC had an article about how people in India and Pakistan were getting on one year after the deadly earthquake that hit their region of the world. Seventy five thousand people died. A year later, four hundred thousand people are still without permanent shelter as they head into their second winter.

We spilt stain on the stairs and the bartender was five minutes late. See what I mean?

When I got home tonight, I told Ginger I had a good day, and I did. The first hour was not much of a harbinger of things to come. I didn’t even tell the folks who came to work in the afternoon what had happened. I just cooked and swapped lines from Stripes with Robert in the kitchen.

It wasn’t one of those days after all.

Peace,
Milton

missing the point

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8

I suppose I’m only one of any number of bloggers writing about the three school shootings this past week. Watching the scenes from the Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania was heartbreaking. I felt for the families whose daughters were killed and for the community who was invaded by the international media in search of a story. For all the hundreds of cameras and reporters, I think they missed the mark.

As the morning news shows scrambled to answer the question that burned in their minds – are our kids safe at school? – they quickly drew comparisons to what happened at Columbine High School several years back. (The more cynical side of me thinks part of the reason was that was the most compelling video they could get their hands on; the Amish folks standing around and refusing to be recorded weren’t that interesting.) I’m cynical because I think our media are lazy. They go for the money shot and the easy analysis because they know we will swallow it and we have a short attention span. They can feed us tragedy, break for commercial, and then come back to fall fashions for our pets.

In two of the three shootings this week, adult males went into schools and shot young girls. They let the boys go and then shot the girls. I do have to give props to The Christian Sciencer Monitor. It had an article on its web site pointing out this trend goes back for years:

“The predominant pattern in school shootings of the past three decades is that girls are the victims,” says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociologist whose recent book examines the roots of “rampage” shootings in rural schools.

Dr. Newman has researched 21 school shootings since the 1970s. Though it’s impossible to know whether girls were randomly victimized in those cases, she says, “in every case in the US since the early 1970s we do note this pattern” of girls being the majority of victims.

In the other shooting, a student shot his principal. None of the three mirrored what happened at Columbine, where two very troubled and alienated boys randomly massacred their fellow students. We move too quickly to label and categorize things so we can feel as if we understand what is incomprehensible and we miss the point. The shooters were no more of one profile than those we call insurgents in Iraq are wreaking havoc for the same reasons. We talk about “terrorists” around the world as if they are all members of a cookie cutter fraternity when they are as diverse as the world’s population.

In the summer of 2002 I worked as a security guard at the South Shore Music Circus, a wonderful summertime concert venue in our area. Because of “the war on terror” the manager required we search everyone’s bag and jacket as they came in. The exercise was ludicrous. I finally said to my supervisor one day, “What are we doing? Do you really think Osama is sitting somewhere in Afghanistan thinking, ‘If we can just take down that little venue in Cohasset we can rule the world!’?”

Our fear has destroyed our capacity for nuance and, therefore, keeps us from reasonable and meaningful discussions on who we are as a society and how we should respond.

I’m deeply troubled that the two men went into schools to specifically kill girls. I know the men were different in both their situations and their motives, and I think their actions are emblematic of our culture at large. The situation calls us to do more than put up metal detectors. Why are we, as a society, taking out our rage, our fear, or whatever the feeling is, on our daughters?

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

I grew up in a denomination that tried to teach me women were not allowed by God to be in leadership positions because they were somehow inferior. I didn’t buy it. I’m a part of a denomination now that ordained a woman to the ministry eighty years before women could vote in America. A significant percentage of our clergy are women. That matters to me tonight because I know I’m a part of a group telling our girls they matter and they are loved. I know we are not the only ones. All of us need to shout it from the rooftops and make sure we are loud enough to be heard over the vapid sound bites and video clips that pass for news and strong enough to stand down the violence against them just as Jesus knelt next to the adulterous woman and wrote in the sand until her would be killers dropped their stones and walked away.

If we don’t, who will?

Peace,
Milton

first reflections

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7

Sunday was an amazing day, an overwhelming day, and an exhausting day. I had every intention of writing last night, but fell asleep before the Housewives had time to get desperate. I came home with an armload of gifts and notes that will take me a week or two to read. Since I was at the restaurant today for twelve hours, I’m at the end of another day without much time or energy to write, but I’m trying to keep my promises to myself.

I’m not capable of unpacking all of my thoughts and emotions from yesterday just yet. There’s too much there. What I can talk about is how grateful I am to have been a part of the church in Hanover, to have come to know so many wonderful people, to have had a chance to be with a great group of young people, and to been sent on my way with such love and intentionality. Growing up in Baptist life, I saw pastors leave quickly. He (most always he) announced his resignation one Sunday and was gone in two weeks, leaving the church to muddle through the grief on its own. The UCC has a much more intentional process, which requires both pastor and congregation to say goodbye well. I resigned in July; I left yesterday. There’s even a liturgy of release and Godspeed in which we forgave each other, thanked each other, and released each other from the bonds of calling. We did good and important work yesterday.

I have “left the ministry” twice in my life. I stepped out of vocational ministry when I began teaching full time and I did so again yesterday. As I drove to work this morning, I decided maybe the best way to describe the move I have made is to say I’ve retired from vocational ministry to be a chef and a pastor’s spouse. I love the church, struggles and all, and I feel called to be a member, not a pastor, in the same way I love being around young people and don’t feel called to be a parent.

So here, two months from my fiftieth birthday, I’ve retired from my second career. I retired from teaching when we moved to Marshfield; now I’ve retired from ministry. (Neither offers much of a pension. My retirement plan is to drive into the desert when the money runs out.) I regret neither career. Both have been deeply significant, rewarding, and important. For the days I did them, I was doing what I was meant to do and learning about who God was calling me to be. As I head into my second fifty years, I get to chase my two passions: being with Ginger and cooking for others. All of the journey was worth it.

My friend Caroline was kind enough to send me the e.e. cummings poem I (mis)quoted the other day when I said “love is stronger than forget.” His words fit well here.

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

My friend Betsey took pictures yesterday. The one below is of me holding the chalice the church gave me as a symbol of our time together – on World Communion Sunday, no less. What an amazing gift. I got to drink from it as we celebrated the supper together. I will be drinking from the memory of my days in Hanover for a long, long time.


Peace,
Milton

not the same

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

This morning after Ginger left for work, I loaded up the Cherokee Sport with two old grills, a broken hand push lawnmower that would have made Bagger Vance proud, and some other junk — all of which has been sitting on the non-driveway side of our house for at least a couple of years. – and took it to the town dump, I mean Transfer Station. Every time I go there, the same woman is in the little booth at the entrance. First she opens the sliding window and asks what I’ve brought to drop off. Then she asks to see my window sticker, punches the card the town issued me if I have any household trash, and instructs me as to where to dispose of the different kinds of rubbish I’m hauling because there are very specific places for different kinds of refuse. We have the same conversation most every time I go there, the only differences having to do with the different kinds of trash I’m carrying. I’ve never seen her leave the booth or walk around; I’ve never heard her ask different questions. Everyday from eight to four, she sits in her tiny little booth, punches cards, and tells people what to do with their trash.

My day had a different contour.

After my dump run, I came home to prepare food for the New Clergy Group that Ginger facilitates once a month. They are a wonderful collection of folks; my contribution to their gathering is to keep them fed as they talk. Each month I try to vary the menu, but I always have to make little bites of Brie and caramelized pears wrapped in puff pastry. The group meets for three hours, during which time I usually get out of the house. It’s probably three and a half hours before I come back and they are always still there. The meeting has officially ended and the conversation may have lightened a bit, but they stay as the tone of the gathering moves from one of colleagues to friends.

Then I headed for the Fall Planning Meeting of the Clergy Spousal Support Group, which meets as often as we can at Namaste, our favorite Indian restaurant in Plymouth. The group is composed of my friend Doug and me, since we are both husbands of ministers. Our planning meeting went well: we decided to keep meeting for Indian Food. I also anticipate the continued meetings of our subcommittees on Good Music, Barbeque, and Fine Ales. If our wives were not in ministry, we would still meet for lunch; that’s what friends do.

By the time we had finished eating and talking, the better part of the afternoon had passed. I went on to Kiskadee, since I was in Plymouth, and had a good cup of coffee while I tried to get a handle on my parting words for Sunday.

After an hour or so, I came home to fix dinner, since Thursday is one of the few nights during the week that I get to cook for Ginger and we get to eat together. There’s no better meal for me than one shared with her. We caught up on our days and enjoyed being with each other. I don’t know anything better.

The other night, while I was watching TV as I walked on the treadmill, a local television station had a story on Parker Brothers, who makes Monopoly and Life (and are now owned by Hasbro). They were founded in Massachusetts and still have a factory here. The visual in the story showed women in the factory putting the pieces in the game boxes, each person putting the same piece in the box over and over again. There was no way to do it creatively, no way to spend the afternoon eating Indian food with a friend.

Patty Griffin sings a song about a person who works at the Table Talk Pie Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, called “Making Pies.” The song begins:

It’s not far
I can walk
Down the block
To Table Talk
Close my eyes
Make the pies all day

Plastic cap
On my hair
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
I used to mind
Now I don’t care
Cause I’m gray

Did I show you this picture of my nephew
Taken at his big birthday surprise
At my sister’s house last Sunday
This is Monday and I’m making pies
I’m making pies
Making pies
Pies

My work week is four ten-hour days and I do my share of cooking, though I’m not making pies. And I’m not on an assembly line. I can end up making a whole bunch of burgers or Caesar salads in the course of a day, but it’s never the same thing over and over. Whatever my life is, it’s not the same ole same ole. I often take for granted that my life is normal. Driving away from the woman in the box today, I was reminded it’s not. Griffin’s song concludes:

5am
Here I am
Walking the block
To Table Talk
You could cry or die
Or just make pies all day
I’m making pies

Variety is a gift, not a given. I’m grateful for my choices.

Peace,
Milton

here’s to the day

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

This time of night the minutes pass faster than the words can move from my brain and through my fingers on to the page. As I look towards Sunday and bringing my time at the Hanover church to a close, I’m struck that serendipitously my farewell falls on World Communion Sunday. (I learned from Jan that it is also the fifth anniversary of the beginning of our bombing of Afghanistan.) Of all the aspects of Christian worship, Communion is my favorite. I even wrote about it in an earlier post. One of the reasons I love the Meal is its unending layers of meaning. Like any good meal, there’s more going on that just eating; like any good worship experience, God finds ways to surprise.

At a youth camp one summer many summers ago, we were closing the week by sharing Communion together. That night, we set up the elements in the middle of the room and let people come in various groupings to the Table to serve one another. I went to the table with my friend Reed. Before we served each other he said, “You know what blows my mind? We’re doing something every Christian before us has done and every Christian after us will do.” A few years later, I was with my friend Ken (who pastors here) and he was talking about being moved by Jesus’ words, “But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.” (Matt. 26:29) My friend Billy and I took his words and wrote a song, which I’m going to sing at Hanover on Sunday.

here’s to the day

pieces of life laid on the table
here is the blood poured out in love
fill this cup raise it up

here’s to the day, my friend

time draws a line down innocent faces
years mark the dreams that failed to come home
so you’ll say goodbye say goodnight
and here’s to the day remember

can you say it for the ones whose voices are silenced
can you say it for the ones who’ve never been free
can you pray for peace ache for peace
here’s to the day that’s coming
god speed the day

gather in close now cling to each other
sing to the night you don’t sing alone
fill this cup raise it up
here’s to the day remember

Jesus served his disciples the bread and the cup in the context of goodbye. Part of the deep meaning in the meal is love is stronger than forget (I know I’m borrowing that from someone; I just can’t figure out who). Part of the meaning is no one is around forever. We are all essential to God, but, in these days we call life, none of us is indispensable. When I was youth minister in Fort Worth, I tried to communicate my point by sticking my hand in a glass vase full of water.

“While my hand is in the water, you can see its place,” I said. Then I pulled my hand out of the vase; the water didn’t leave a hole where my hand had been. “The only evidence I have that my hand was there is that it’s wet.” The church in Hanover has gathered for around three hundred years and generation after generation, person after person, has left fingerprints all over the place and, one by one, they have been both remembered and forgotten. The point of standing in the Unbroken Line that brings us all to the Table is not to be remembered as much as to be in line. I’m proud of the fingerprints I’ve left at Hanover and the water will fill in behind me (I think that’s mixing metaphors) and the church, both in Hanover and around the world, will keep going. When November comes (we share Communion once a month), I will be in a different church, but still in the same unbroken line, leaving my fingerprints there.

Don’t let my theologizing fool you: I’m sad to leave. I’m leaving people I have grown to love. I’m leaving people I’ve grown accustomed to being with. I’m leaving things unfinished. I’ve spent my life saying goodbye and have yet to experience a time when it doesn’t suck to have to do it. I’m grateful we will get to say goodbye gathered at the Communion Table, where we can lean into the love that reminds us goodbye is not an ultimate word. One day, we will say hello.

Here’s to the day.

Peace,
Milton

borrowed words

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

Tonight was my last deacons meeting, preceded by my last staff meeting. For many months Don, Chad (our choir director and organist extraordinaire), and I have met at the local Panera each Tuesday evening at six to eat and discuss whatever we feel like talking about – and some church stuff as well. Our time together has a been an amazing idea factory. I will miss being with them each week.

As I left deacons’ meeting and walked across the parking lot to my car, the reality of this goodbye came to rest on my heart in a way it has not done before. I’m making the move I feel called to make and I’m going to miss these people terribly.

Since I came up to write tonight, I haven’t been able to get past the parking lot. So, I turned to The Writer’s Almanac hoping to find some words that might speak for me. I even read ahead through the poems yet to be broadcast this week. Thursday’s poem is one by Mary Oliver with which I find deep resonance, and so I share it with you. If you are a regular listener to Garrison Keillor’s daily dose of verse, act surprised when he reads it on Thursday.

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

What she said.

Peace,
Milton

what i like about you

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

Tonight marked the beginning of my final week at the church in Hanover, which means the first in a series of last things. The Monday Night Bible Study group had a special gathering tonight for me (it doesn’t usually start up until after Columbus Day). The group has met on Monday nights for twenty five or thirty years. I started going because I figured the folks who were committed to the group would be leaders in the church whether they held any church office or not. Over three years of Mondays we studied and laughed and cried and prayed together. That group is one of my favorite things about the church.

One of the things Don did tonight was to ask people to tell me what they appreciated about my ministry. Their affirmation was overwhelming, deeply affirming, and incredibly humbling. The people who were speaking have great stories to tell in their own lives and were taking time to encourage and compliment me. As I drove home, I thought about how few jobs ever offer the kind of moment I got to have. I’m a fortunate person to have been able to sit in that room tonight, breathing in the love that filled it, and being offered words of healing and hope.

I worked lunch today at the restaurant, which means I got there about ten and left around six. I arrived to find Robert in the kitchen and all burners blazing; there was a brunch that no one had told him about until Sunday evening. He was on his own trying to feed about twenty five people everything from Eggs Benedict to pancakes to raspberry danishes — and all at a time of day he does not usually see. When breakfast was over, he and the servers who helped stacked all their dishes and pans in the dishroom and left. Usually on a Monday, Joe (the other cook) and I fill up the dishroom on our own because Monday is a prep day: everything was used up over the weekend and we have to restock. Today we made clam chowder, lentil vegetable soup, crab cakes, lobster salad, cole slaw, along with all the dressings and other little things that have to be done.

Pedro, the dishwasher, usually comes in around five or five-thirty, after working all day on a construction site. We have a running joke. He comes in and looks at everything we have piled up and says, “Why you no like me?” Then he smiles. Around two o’clock, Joe and I took some time to try and make some order of all the dirty dishes that were strewn around the dishroom. We stacked plates, put the silverware in the soaking tray, and tried to collect the pots and pans in a way that would at least make the huge collection of stuff to be washed a little more manageable. Pedro came in, looked at the stuff stacked up and dropped the Portugese equivalent of an F Bomb.

“Why nobody call for two dishwashers?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer. He felt disregarded and taken for granted. No one ever gets the staff together in a circle around Pedro in the dishroom and tells him how he has helped. They don’t do it at his construction job either, I’m sure. A couple of our servers say “Thank you, Milton” everytime they pick up an order to take to the table. I also hear them say thanks to Pedro when they take their dirty dishes to him. In a lot of circles, that’s as good as it gets.

None of us can ever get too much of some saying, “Here’s what I like about you.” Go ahead — sing along.

Peace,
Milton

the sound of solidarity

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

I heard two things today at church I want to pass along.

After our ten o’clock service, Bob, who is a fellow NPR listener, asked me if I had heard this week’s SoundClips: Audio Experiences on All Things Considered. They have asked people to send in audio clips of meaningful or unusual sounds and then they do a short piece on what the sound is and what it means. This week’s feature was the sound of glass Communion cups being put in the cup holders after Communion at the Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City. Vicky Werneke, who sent in the sound clip, said her pastor likes to refer to the sound as “the clicking sound of solidarity.”

Tonight at Senior High Fellowship, Tom, who is a fellow lover of odd movies, brought The Brave Little Toaster for us to watch together. Last week I mentioned we would do a movie night and Tom jumped at the chance to bring his favorite movie. I had never heard of it before I heard him talk about it. I don’t know why that’s the case because it is a wonderful piece of work. The story follows five appliances – a desk lamp called, Lampy, a small electric blanket called Blanky, a vacuum cleaner called Kirby, an old-fashioned radio who is nameless, and the Toaster (who is affectionately known as “Slot Head”). They live in a cabin that was the summer home for a child whom they love and think of as master. He hasn’t been back in a long time, so they decide to go to the city and find him. At some point in the story, each of the group has to do something sacrificial to help the others and to keep them going on their journey. Though the toaster’s bravery gets him the marquis billing, everyone in the group made an essential contribution in one way or another. They, too, understood the sound of solidarity.

I heard it in the way Bob and Tom brought something to me they knew would help us connect. What wonderful news it is when someone says, “I heard something the other day and it made me think of you.” Sometimes solidarity clicks as the cup hits the holder. Sometimes it sings in a song that carries a memory in its melody. Sometimes it whispers in a word of encouragement or connection. Sometimes it travels silently in a touch or an act of hopeful sacrifice. However it comes, it’s a great word.

I don’t hear the word without thinking of Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Worker’s Union in Poland, whose uprising in the summer of 1980 led to the overthrow of the Communist government there and contributed to the dissolution of Soviet control in Eastern Europe. They stood together and changed the world. I thought of them this week as crowds have begun to gather in Hungary to demand a more honest government. Walesa said, “The thing that lies at the foundation of positive change, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being.” He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

Most of the noise in our world these days is divisive: we are labeled Red or Blue, black or white, right or left, right or wrong, us or them. War has become our primary metaphor for living. But listen – listen to the strain of hope underneath the cacophony of chaos. You can hear it in the clink of a cup or the word of a friend, in the bold marching of an earnest throng and the small gathering of people coming together to create a memory. It infuses life in everything from Communion cups to small appliances, youth groups to labor movements.

The sound of solidarity keeps on clicking.

Peace,
Milton

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