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finding an old friend

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

On the way to work yesterday I found an old friend, thanks to Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday.

Back in the mid-eighties, a couple of the guys in my youth group in Fort Worth showed up with Billy Bragg’s record, Talking With the Taxman About Poetry. Bragg is an English folk singer with punk roots who has been a prophetic and progressive voice for twenty-five years. We even got to see him one night at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas (where you can still hear some great music). One of the songs that stuck with me from that album was “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” an amazingly sad song about the power of music to help us name our loneliness:

With the money from her accident
She bought herself a mobile home
So at least she could get some enjoyment
Out of being alone
No one could say that she was left up on the shelf
It’s you and me against the World kid she mumbled to herself

When the world falls apart some things stay in place
Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face

The next record I bought was Back to Basics, which contained a tune called “The Milkman of Human Kindness.”

If you’re lonely, I will call –
If you’re poorly, I will send poetry

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

If you are falling, I’ll put out my hands
If you feel bitter, I will understand

I love you
I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint

In the interview, Simon referenced a song I didn’t know called “The Space Race is Over,” which Bragg wrote for his son whose first word besides “Mommy” and “Daddy” was “moon.” For Bragg, the space race was a metaphor for our decreasing ability to dream.

Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone and I’ll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can’t help but feel we’ve all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

I was twelve when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. I can remember standing in my yard in Lusaka, Zambia and staring up at the sky on that July night, lost in wonder that people just like me were standing on the moon shining down at me. The possibilities seemed limitless. I never imagined that would be as far as we would go, or that “space travel” would reduce rockets to the equivalent of astronomic eighteen-wheelers. Somewhere we lost sight of the possibilities.

Billy Bragg has never given up being a dreamer and an activist; he still sings about what’s possible. Much of his music has a strong political edge. He makes no bones about coming from the Left, and he is determined to speak hopefully. When Scott Simon asked him to describe what it meant to him to be a songwriter, Bragg said:

You have to kind of discern issues that other people might not be talking about that you might have something to say about and write about those things . . . You have to learn to overcome your cynicism and believe in humanity and the ability of people working together to make the world a better place. Cynicism is the enemy of that – not capitalism, not conservativism, but cynicism — and to do this job you have to be able to overcome your own to help people overcome theirs.

Today at Church Council, one of the folks handed out a sheet from our State Conference office that did not do much for me other than this quote from the late columnist Sydney Harris:

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

We had some friends over for dinner tonight and the talk turned, at least for a while, to politics. The consensus around the table was our elected officials are directed by polls and lobbyists for the big corporations and not by their own integrity or the people they supposedly represent. When it comes to our national leaders, I am prematurely disappointed in the future. I want desperately to be able to trust someone we have elected to office and I’m not sure I think that is possible anymore.

I hate feeling that way.

The November election is drawing closer. As it does, our gubernatorial race is descending into the ditches. As much as I would like to see the Republicans lose control of Congress, the Democrats have offered little vision more than “we’re not them.” Dreams are not fueled by who we don’t want to be. Ginger preached this morning on Jesus’ encounter with one we’ve come to know as the Rich Young Ruler. Jesus offered him a chance at love, but the young man’s wealth-induced cynicism caused him to turn away.

In the late Nineties, Bragg collaborated with Wilco to record some of Woody Guthrie’s unrecorded lyrics on a project called Mermaid Avenue. One of the songs is called “Christ for President.”

Let’s have Christ for President.
Let us have him for our King.
Cast your vote for the Carpenter
that you call the Nazarene.

The only way we can ever beat
these crooked politician men
Is to run the money changers out of the temple
And put the Carpenter in

O It’s Jesus Christ for president
God above our king
With a job and a pension for young and old
We will make hallelujah ring

Every year we waste enough
to feed the ones who starve
We build our civilization up
and we shoot it down with wars

But with the Carpenter on the seat
away up in the capital town
The USA would be on the way
prosperity bound!

I don’t know much about the song, other than the lyric I found on Bragg’s web site. I know enough about Woody Guthrie to imagine at least some sense of irony in the words; I know he was not writing an anthem for Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed by any stretch. What Woody saw in Jesus was someone who was not beholden to wealth and power and was determined to meet the needs of the poor and oppressed. He saw hope – a reason to move beyond cynicism. Billy Bragg is living in that legacy and doing it well.

I’m glad to find him again.

Peace,
Milton

the terrorists win

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2

The eleven o’clock news started last night with the story of Corey Lidle, the Yankee pitcher who crashed his plane into an apartment building in New York. He was a fairly new pilot who was flying with a friend. Who knows exactly what happened. Since it was late and I don’t like going to bed with heavy stuff on my mind, we listened to the most basic details and then changed over to The Daily Show. When I turned on the news this morning, the spin on the story had moved from being one about a man in a small plane to wondering if it could have been a terrorist attack. Granted, I don’t like the Yankees, but I’ve never thought they were terrorists – except, perhaps for Derek Jeter. Beyond the obvious visual similarities between this incident and the planes going into the Twin Towers, which plays upon our fears (though different by degree, without question), I struggle to find any reason to think an accident in which a small plane crashes into an apartment building would bring us to a point of almost contemplating a change in the color on our national terror alert warning system.

Yes, the accident happened in New York City.
Yes, it involved a plane and a building.
Yes, it is frightening to see the video of the aftermath.
And have we so capitulated to the way in which our leaders and our media play to our fears that we jump like lemmings into the sea at the assumption that terrorists have struck again?

Who is a terrorist, anyway?

The dictionary says it’s “a person who terrorizes or frightens others.” In the darkness last night cranes razed the Amish schoolhouse where the girls were executed by Charles Carl Roberts IV last week. He was described as a troubled man and a murderer. The media even used all three of his names, as they do with serial killers. But no one called him a terrorist. Why not? Have we loaded that word with so much power that it explodes our capacity for thoughtfulness most every time it’s detonated? We have been conditioned to run scared and to think of it as a euphemism for Muslim extremists. We don’t even talk about Timothy McVeigh in the same context as Osama bin Laden or Mohammed Atta.

If a terrorist’s intent is to incite terror in the hearts and minds of his or her victims, then those we do call terrorists are quite successful: we are a frightened, frightened nation. How can we see ourselves as The World Power and cower in fear at the same time? I think the biggest reason is we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that violence is the only language worth speaking in these days.

The British medical journal The Lancet released the findings of an estimate on the death toll in Iraq since the US invasion began. Their estimate is 2.5% of the population – 655,000 people – has been killed. If 2.5% of our population were exterminated, we would lose 7.5 million people. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon this week and has everyone clamoring to respond. Iran keeps trying to develop its own weapon. Pakistan is talking about a nuclear test, which means India will not be far behind. We keep telling them to stop, but we lead the race. We tell them not to fight, and we invade. We tell them human rights are important, and we keep folks locked up at Guantanamo. Then, when a small plane crashes into a building, we are frightened before we are saddened.

Before anyone writes to tell me I’m being idealistic, I understand the realities of the world. One of those realities, which we are seeing lived out everyday, is violence breeds violence. Another is responding to violence with violence only destroys; it solves nothing. Then there’s this reality: since we first invaded Iraq, we have spent almost 340 billion dollars. (That number will be quickly outdated.) What if we had spent that money in nonviolent ways, eradicating disease, providing education, or building homes? Most of the world doesn’t have potable water. One in four people on the planet have never talked on a telephone, much less checked email. What if we had used that money to pay living wages to the people who make most of the stuff we use and wear?

One more question: why is that money available for war and not for these other things?

Fear makes us do foolish things. As long as we choose not to learn that lesson as a nation, the terrorists win.

Peace,
Milton

what we don’t know

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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8

Today was a rather normal day at work for me except for one finger and one toe. For whatever reason, I both digits are swollen and painful. I’ve kept them slathered in Neosporin and covered, but nothing’s changed for a couple of days. Tomorrow I’m going to the doctor to she what she can do. The unusual circumstance has been ample fuel for my imagination. I begin to think there’s some sort of infection in my system that only works its way out through my fingers and toes. Ginger looked at them tonight and said, “They don’t look like leprosy.” I was grateful for her humor. It doesn’t look like the Plague either.

But it’s what we don’t know that makes it difficult.

Friday night Ginger left a message at the restaurant for me to call her when I had a moment. Things slowed down around eight, so I called home. She wanted to pass on news my parents had left on my voice mail, so I didn’t have to hear it by recording: my father has bladder cancer. On October 14, my dad will celebrate the tenth anniversary of his heart surgery. The big irony is my mother is a bladder cancer survivor, after having dealt with it off and on for almost fifteem years. Her experience — and our experience with her — helped temper the news somewhat and it’s what we don’t know that’s difficult.

The pathology reports were supposed to come back today, but because of the holiday on Monday, it looks like we will not know the details of what is going on with my dad until Friday. What we need to know is how aggresive the cancer is, because that will have a great deal to do with the treatment options. I know they removed the tumor they found and it had not broken through the bladder wall. I know this is a treatable form of cance. I also know the treatment takes its toll. We don’t know much else.

I will call on my way home from work in Friday and hope we know more.

I’m not up to being philosophical or even creative in my writing about this tonight. Thanks for your prayers.

Peace,
Milton

where the street has a name

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4

Since Ginger and I don’t share a day off, we’re working hard to take advantage of any chance we have to hang out together. Since I was not working today, I rode into Boston with her because she had a couple of meetings to attend. We ate lunch together and I stayed in the booth at Cambridge Common while she went to her appointment. The pub brings back good memories of days at Winchester High because this was one of the watering holes we frequented after a day slaving over a hot grade book.

I miss living in the city.

Boston and Cambridge are residential and pedestrian: people live downtown and people walk from place to place. If we ever move somewhere else, I will need to learn quickly that drivers in most cities don’t stop to let people cross the street. In Dallas, they think those crossing the street are the human equivalent of ducks in a shooting gallery. You’re supposed to hit them.

Massachusetts Avenue, or Mass Ave. to the locals, is the artery that runs from the most southern part of Boston to the northern end of Cambridge, past Symphony Hall & the Berklee College of Music, between Copley and Kenmore Squares, across the Charles River, past MIT and then Harvard, through Porter Square, and on into Arlington center and beyond. It’s an important street to both cities and one that is full of landmarks for both Ginger and me.

The first summer after I started teaching, I worked for one of the other teachers who had a small business cleaning up abandoned and repossessed houses to get them ready for auction. Everyday we were in a different part of the city going through what people had left behind and putting it into garbage bags. It was hard work. One week, he had a different job for us. We were to clean around an building on the far south end of Mass Ave. that was going to be used by the city for some municipal offices. My job was to take the Weedeater That Ate Cleveland and whack down a small jungle of growth on one side of the building. By the time I was finished that afternoon, I was sweaty and covered in dust, which meant I was muddy, too. Since we were a one-car family at the time, my ride home was the T, Boston’s public transportation. I got on the 39 bus to Copley, where I could catch the Orange Line train home to Charlestown.

Since we were so far south of downtown, the bus was almost empty when I got on, so I got a seat. As the bus continued the route, the bus filled up, but no one ever sat down next to me. No one even looked at me. I was invisible. I realized I was getting a serendipitous look into what it felt like to be one of the homeless people in our city. When I got off the bus in Copley Square, I had about a five or six block walk to get to Back Bay Station to catch the train. Copley is one of the places many of the homeless folks hang out because there’s a small park there and the public library will let them use the bathrooms. I continued to remain invisible to most of the people, but every one of the street folks talked to me – not asking for anything; they talked to me. I became visible to a whole different layer of humanity.

On another day, at the other end of Mass Ave., I was in Harvard Square and passed a guy leaning up against the side of a church holding an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup.

“Got any change?” he asked.

Ginger and I made it a practice not to give cash to people on the street, but to offer food instead. So I said, “I’d be happy to buy you a coffee and a muffin.”

He paused and then replied, “Coke and a brownie?”

I thought to myself, “Everyone deserves a Coke and a brownie,” so I said I’d do it. When I got inside the coffee shop, the brownies looked so good I got two. When I delivered his order, I sat down on the curb next to him and we ate together.

Mass Ave. used to house the most wonderful Tower Records store. The Berklee Performance Center, where I got to see Emmylou Harris on my birthday is on that street. So are Pearl Art Supply, the Middle East, Daddy’s Junky Music, Mr. and Mrs. Bartley’s Hamburgers, Joie de Vivre, and Paper Source.

The B. U. Bridge takes Mass Ave. from Boston to Cambridge, and vice versa. We walk that bridge every year as part of the Walk for Hunger, Project Bread’s wonderful annual fundraiser. Walking across the bridge, you see green marks that measure the span in “Smoots.” Many years back, MIT students measured the bridge using one of their own, a guy named Smoots, as the measuring stick. Right before we moved here, the bridge was completely renovated and the original measurements were lost. They wanted to measure the new bridge, but by that time Smoots’ grandson was a student at MIT. There was some discussion about which one should be the standard. Since the old man was still living, they brought him back to do it all over again.

1369 Coffee House is on Mass Ave. So is the Harvard Coop, the Plough and Stars, and the Elephant Walk. It’s where Jake, my acupuncturist, used to have his office. There’s also a Korean church I have never attended. Oh – and the Friendly Eating Establishment.

Moving up and down Mass Ave. is like moving through the layers of civilization in an archaeological dig, or moving up and down the most amazing buffet table you have ever seen trying to figure out how to taste a little of all of it. From the worn down row houses in Roxbury to the high dollar brownstones of the Back Bay, to the mixture of humanity that congregates in Central Square, to the the young people trying so hard to be alternative in Harvard Square, and the funky shops just beyond it. I have walked there, eaten there, laughed and listened and wandered there; I have shopped and sat and sojourned.

Today, I remembered.

Peace,
Milton

company for dinner

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

It’s late. Today was a long and good day at the restaurant. The weekend was busy, which meant Joe (the other cook on Monday) and I had lots of prep work to do. Since it was Columbus Day, it was also quite busy tonight, so I stayed busy all of my twelve hour shift. And I had a blast.

Some church friends came in for dinner tonight. They called earlier in the day to ask if I was cooking, which made the receptionist think I was building a following. One of the nice things about friends is they can make you appear more important than you are. When they got to the restaurant, they told the server they were friends of mine and had a Guinness sent to the kitchen, (Yet another good thing about friends.) At this point, I still didn’t know who was out there. When I finished cooking their dinners, I helped the server take the plates out so I could see who was there. The Flemings were my mystery guests, along with some of their friends and relatives. I loved that they took the time to drive up from Marshfield for dinner when they knew I was cooking.

They made my day. Now I’m going to go sleep through what’s left of the night.

Peace,
Milton

a little lower than the agents

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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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

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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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

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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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

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

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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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

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