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lenten journal: songs for the road

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
lenten journal: songs for the road

Today has been grey and damp here along the Shoreline, as they call this  part of Connecticut. As I lave been reading and writing, I have also been listening to songs that have been a part of my soundtrack this winter–some old, some new; each one providing a necessary note in the melody of my winter and, now, my lenten journey. So, I thought I would share some of them with you.

Rhiannon Giddens has an amazing new record called Freedom’s Highway, which I only listened to for the first time this week. One of the songs is about the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the four little girls killed there. It is an old song written by Richard Fariña, but it, too, was new to me. Since we worshipped in that church only a couple of weeks ago, the song has a particular poignancy.

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

Over the course of the winter, I have made a point of going back to records I love that I haven’t listened to in a long time. The next two selections come from that stack. The first is Tracy Chapman’s “All That You Have Is Your Soul.”

Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
‘Cause all that you have is your soul

The second is one of my favorites from Ellis Paul that looks at some of the same stuff from a different melodic vantage point. It’s called, “Never Lived At All.”

Becky’s playing a piece by Gershwin on her old piano
She’s been playing since her childhood, “Too long to recall . . .”
but the chords that fall from her fingertips, are the same
she played when she could barely sit still, back in `69,
when the keys made her hands look small
And she built her dream around symphonies and concertos
around traveling the country, and playing the music halls
four kids later the dreams been reduced to “what-if” scenarios
but hey, to never dream is to have never lived at all

I am not sure how I came across John Moreland, but I am glad I did. He has been speaking to me through his song, “Gospel.”

I wanna ask all the questions with answers we’ll never know
I wanna find my faith in records from long ago
I wanna set fear on fire, and give dreaming a fair shot
And never give up whether anybody cares or not

I’ll close this set with a song that is never far from my heart, “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The version included here is new to me and I am grateful to have found it. Here;s Mavis Staples.

Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door
Oh hard times come again no more

These are songs to learn and sing.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: living by comparison

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
lenten journal: living by comparison

Howard Thurman was my traveling companion on the train to work this morning, and he greeted me with these words:

It is small wonder that all religions that are ethically sensitive place a great emphasis upon the corrosive effects of pride upon the human spirit. . . . The most obvious basis for pride is in the act of comparing one’s deeds with the deeds of others, one’s achievements with the work of others. (Deep is the Hunger 67)

In the margin of the book I wrote, “pride is comparison,” so I would know where to return. His words reminded me of a quote I’ve seen attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, though I’ve never been able to find the actual source: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” The reason I doubt the source, I suppose, is my image of Roosevelt from studying history doesn’t necessarily fit those words, but I’m willing to be surprised. I think I would love to discover a different side to him.

One of the standard definitions English teachers give for metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things. Teddy makes me want to rethink that as well. A good metaphor creates a relationship between two things or ideas, rather than setting them at odds with each other. It’s informative, not evaluative. And, yes, there can be good metaphors:

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. (Pablo Picasso);

and bad ones:

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. (A high school student) 

The point of a metaphor is to draw a connection, to illustrate; comparison creates a hierarchy, a ranking—and the comparer usually puts themselves on top in the exchange. Thurman calls it sin; Teddy labels it as joyless. And yet, it seems, it is our national pastime. In most any arena, we, as Americans, feel compelled to keep reminding everyone that we are Number One, that we are the greatest nation in the history of the world, that we are the ones who keep the world safe, and we do it relentlessly. Joylessly, too. And I keep wondering why it is necessary in the first place. It’s not an attractive trait.

Thurman references the Jesus’ parable about the two men who came into the Temple to pray. One, a poor man, knelt and prayed silently. The other, a religious leader, prayed aloud, “God, thank you that you didn’t make me like all these other people.” He sounds American to me.

When we first moved to Boston in 1990 to plant a church (a spectacular failure!), I got a job at the Blockbuster Video store in our Charlestown neighborhood. One of things I enjoyed about my job was talking to customers who didn’t have their mind made up and offering some smaller movies they might not have known about, based on our conversation. One night, I asked a woman if she needed help and she replied, “I don’t usually talk to the help in places like this.”

How did Thurman put it: the corrosive effects of pride on the human spirit. The incidental contact was painful for me and, I think, joyless for her. For both of us. And I never got to tell her what a great movie The Year of Living Dangerously was.

I know. I’m rambling. I think it’s because me heart hurts in ways I cannot voice when I look at who we are, and we are becoming, as a nation. We have made comparison a way of life at most every level. We are a joyless people. A frightened people. A prideful people. I realize those are broad generalizations, which means, of course, I’m not describing everyone. But a quick trip through news sites and social media make it hard not to see that comparison is our public persona, which means we must tell the small stories of connection that remind us, like a good metaphor, of how we go together.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: a traveler’s tale

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
lenten journal: a traveler’s tale

While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be shared. There isn’t any other tale to tell; its the only light we’ve got in this darkness. (James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” quoted in The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long As It Takes 86-7)

a traveler’s tale

Christopher Columbus
didn’t discover a damn thing;
he simply stumbled on a shore that was new to him.

To arrive in an already populated place
makes you a visitor—an immigrant, perhaps . . .
not a discoverer.

I stumbled into grief like a clueless explorer.
Someone was kind to say, What’s new to you is not new.
All I had discovered was a well-worn path.

There were oceans of sadness before I shed a tear,
whole continents of heartache—joy, as well.
All I can do is learn to belong.

there are motherless children in every country;
fatherless folks on every shore. I am lonely only
if I believe no one knows how I feel.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: finding my place

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
lenten journal: finding my place

A good twenty years ago, I was sitting in my car at a traffic signal on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, waiting for the light to change so I could cross the bridge over the rail yard and back to our home in Charlestown. I looked up to see a billboard that read,

Come see the new Planetarium at the Museum of Science,
You tiny insignificant speck in the universe.

A fleeting moment on a spring afternoon became a defining moment. Ginger and I both have returned to it as a reference point for an understanding of our “appropriate insignificance,” as we came to articulate it: I wrote a poem, which remains one of my favorites, and she referenced it in our Ash Wednesday service this week.

Our sense of who were are in the universe has changed drastically in my lifetime. Though we made the mental shift to understanding the universe didn’t revolve around us several centuries ago, it was not until astronauts got far enough away to take pictures of our little blue ball that we began to experience ourselves differently. Now Hubble and other telescopes continue to reframe who we are in context of all that we can and cannot understand. Just last week, NASA said they found seven planets that look a lot like us. Writing sixty-six years ago, Howard Thurman said,

When one considers that he lives only in the western half of the tiny speck of stardust, in the northern part of the western half of that tiny speck of stardust, the space we occupy is well nigh a vanishing quantity. All of this means that in addition to my own intrinsic worth, I must find some movement or cause or purpose that is more significant than my own life. (Deep is the Hunger 47)

But my thoughts about the universe didn’t start with Thurman this morning. The first one to remind me the metaphor and meaning of our cosmic significance was James Baldwin, in a letter he wrote to his nephew, who was also named after him.

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he loves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken at the foundation. You don’t be afraid. . . . (The Fire Next Time 9)

He wrote those words a little more than a decade after Thurman set his sights on the stars. James Carroll was about ten when Thurman’s book came out, and he was finding his place in the world in relation not as much to the stars as to the church and his brother’s polio. He says when he “knelt before the crucifix at St. Mary’s Church, it was the battered legs of Jesus that transfixed me. God had legs like Joe.” And yet the priest would not let Joe be an altar boy because he limped. Carroll found the rigidity of the Church at odds with the God he saw in the crippled Christ that led him to understand, “God’s love was absolute. . . . But love is tied to suffering.” (Christ Actually 38)

Carroll works to take that childhood understanding of love and let it grow up in the reality of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, which he identifies as the cosmic shifts in our lives, if you will. He quotes a disturbing passage from Elie Wiesel’s Night, in which Wiesel recounts being forced to watch the hanging of a child at Auschwitz. The child hung from the noose,

struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. An.d we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. . . .
Behind me I heard the same man asking,
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” (30)

We heard Bryan Stephenson speak at Yale Divinity School about a month ago. We also got to visit the Equal Justice Initiative, which he founded, in Montgomery on our church’s Civil Rights Tour a couple of weeks ago. At Yale, he ended his talk with four things we needed to do to be a part of the necessary change in our country: we have to gain proximity, change the narrative, stay hopeful, and be willing to do uncomfortable things. I went back to my notes after reading Carroll’s discussion of a post-genocide faith because Stephenson talked about some of the same things when he spoke of changing the narrative in our country.

“Too often,” he said, “the narrative is shaped by fear and anger; fear and anger are the essential ingredients of inequality and injustice.” Then he went on to say we must come to understand we are living in “a post-genocide society.” But he was not speaking of the Holocaust. He was talking about coming to terms with the story of the “settling” of America that includes the slaughter of Native Americans for the sake of land grabbing, the sustained slavery of black people, and the terror of white supremacy manifested in lynchings and segregation.

One of the ways EJI is changing the story is through the Community Remembrance Project, which they say “is part of our campaign to recognize the victims of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites and creating a memorial that acknowledges the horrors of racial injustice. Community members are invited to join EJI staff to collect soil from sites throughout Alabama.” They go on to say:

Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West in the first half of the 20th century. Lynching created a fearful environment in which racial subordination and segregation were maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America.

Public acknowledgment of mass violence is essential not only for victims and survivors, but also for perpetrators and bystanders who suffer from trauma and damage related to their participation in systematic violence and dehumanization. Yet most lynchings, and their victims, have never been publicly recognized.

There is a wall filled wth jars of soil from all over the state. Ginger found one jar from Irondale, her hometown. A man was lynched there in the 1890s. Ginger had never heard the story. The constellation of containers called us to take another look at our place in this world.

When Baldwin wrote to his nephew, he spoke of white people as “innocents,” in the sense of those who have not yet come to understand who they are. And he said,

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that we must accept them. And I mean this very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. . . . [T}hese men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. (8-10)

The psalmist stood out under the heavens and prayed,

When I gaze into the night sky
and see the wonders of your hands,
who do I think I am to imagine you think of me? (my paraphrase)

Even as they call me to a more expanded universe, I am aware as I read the exclusive male language of both Thurman and Baldwin that everyone has vistas that are not yet visible. And I keep hearing Bryan Stephenson’s call to stay hopeful, even if it is as challenging to find my place in the crush of humanity as it is under the not-so-sheltering sky. If love is tied to suffering, then I need to draw close and listen to those who know more of suffering than I do, and offer the comfort of my attentiveness and my presence: the presence of one tiny significant speck.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the will to understand

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
lenten journal: the will to understand

My day started with jolts from both my morning coffee and, then, these words from Howard Thurman:

The will to understand other people is a most important part of the personal equipment of those who would share in the unfolding idea of human fellowship. It is not enough merely to be sincere, to be conscientious. This is not to underestimate the profound necessity for sincerity in human relationships, but it is to point out the fact that sincerity is no substitute for intelligent understanding. (Deep is the Hunger 30)

I’m going to give you the full quote in pieces because I kept stopping to jot down things as I read. And when I read the sentence that said, “It is not enough merely to be sincere,” an image of my father preaching popped to my mind. I could see him standing in the pulpit at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston, where he pastored for seventeen years, describing a Peanuts cartoon with Charlie Brown walking, hit baseball bat over his shoulder and his head hanging low and saying, “One hundred and eighty-four to nothing, and we were so sincere.” His point was we can be sincerely wrong. Sincerity, on its own, isn’t worth much.

I did a Google search and found the cartoon. Dad was pretty close on the quote, as you can see, but Charlie Brown’s actual question hit me even more directly: “How can we lose when we are so sincere?” For Thurman, the answer to that question appears to be an act of will. To connect with one another across whatever lines we might perceive requires more than meaning well; it requires a choice, or, as he puts it, an act of will.

The will to understand requires an authentic sense of fact with references to as many areas of human life as possible. This means that we must use the materials of accurate knowledge of others to give strength and direction to the will to understand. . . . It is easy to say that we understand other persons whose culture and background are different than ours, merely because we are kind to them or willing to make personal sacrifices on their behalf. (30)

The will to understand. The phrase challenges me to ask myself if it is a choice I am willing to make indiscriminately. To choose to understand means to do a lot of work to learn, rather than assuming we know much about anything. Stacey D’Erasmo describes intimacy—which feels, to me, like the incarnation of the will to understand—as, “Making visible what, without you, I would perhaps never have seen.” (The Art of Intimacy 121) At another place in her book, she says,

Intimacy redraws the characters’ map of the world and their place within it. Intimacy snatches you out of yourself, shows you how small you are in relation to the rest of the universe. . . . Intimacy brings a liberating knowledge of the foreign, the beyond, of the limits of the self in a much bigger universe. (34, 37)

Though she is talking about the ways in which writers create worlds and relationships in fiction, I can’t help but feel she is talking about reality as well—or, at least, that is how I am choosing to read her words. To choose to do what it takes to truly understand each other means to choose to be vulnerable: to choose to admit I am not self-contained, that I am not the star of this movie. We are an ensemble cast. Back to Thurman:

Unless there is a constant heightening of the sense of fact to give guidance to our will to understand, we are apt to substitute sentimentality for understanding, softness for tenderness, and weakness for strength in human relations. (30-31)

His words remind me of a story I heard from a black pastor in Durham who worked in a part of town that has not experienced much benefit from the city’s economic resurgence. A group from a predominantly white church in town came to spend a week helping in the neighborhood, which is made up, predominantly, of people of color. The folks from the church wanted to make a difference. They wore t-shirts with the name of their church on the front. On the back were Jesus’ words from Matthew 25:40: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

We are apt to substitute sentimentality for understanding, yes. And sometimes we choose anger or indifference, or we choose not to do the work it takes to see more than our point of view. None of those choices is a once-and-for-all kind of deal. When Ginger and I perform weddings, we often say that the promises made in the ceremony have to be kept everyday; that’s how you keep a promise: over and over and over. So it is with the promises we make to each other, and to God. We have to keep them on a daily basis, and reinterpret what it means to keep them as we learn more about each other. Meaning well is not enough.

Somewhere in writing all of this, I began to hear Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” in my head. The second verse says,

and as I walked on through troubled times,
my spirit gets so downhearted sometimes,
so where are the strong?,
and who are the trusted?,
and where is the harmony?
sweet harmony

’cause each time I feel it slipping away, just makes me wanna cry,
what’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?,
what’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?

I don’t choose to understand if I decide who you are first. If I am going to be able to see things I can’t see without you, I have to choose to see you, first. And choose to be seen. I’ll let Nick sing us out . . .

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: it’s not finished

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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6
lenten journal: it’s not finished

I was a history major in college because of the professor who taught my Western Civilization course my first semester at Baylor. I’ve told this story before. I walked into Wallace Daniel’s classroom expecting to be told, once again, who won what war and what it meant for the rest of us and, instead, was handed a reading list that consisted of novels. I think I took every class Dr. Daniel taught—or at least that’s the way I remember it, looking back on a life that was changed by how I learned to read novels and tell stories in my history classes.

I started reading another book on time today: The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long As It Takes by Joan Silber. She starts off by saying that meaning is the reason we tell the story (6), and then, a couple of pages later, she says meaning “is determined by where a story ends” (8), and then she points to the luxury afforded the fiction writer: he or she can end they story wherever they choose. In life, however, that vantage point is harder to come by. She leans into Kierkegaard to make her point:

It is quite true what Philosophy says that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

And what is the story? We circle through the liturgical calendar, saying we are once again walking with Jesus to the cross, but our journey this Lent is not the same on he walked anymore than it is the same walk we made last year or the year before that. Life has not stopped since Jesus carried his cross up the hill. Humanity has stayed in continuous motion. What our story means is hard to determine, sometimes, because the story has not ended. The meaning is still in the making.

Today marks sixty-one years since my parents married. Dad has missed the last four anniversaries; Mom, the last two. As I live with the presence of their absence, i find new meaning in the story of our lives together, but based on the tears that were my cheeks as I looked at their wedding picture this morning, our story together is far from ended. They are dead, but they are not finished with me.

Finished: that word makes me jump ahead in our Lenten journey. I’ve always wanted to know exactly what the antecedent was to Jesus’ cry from the cross, “It is finished.” What was “it”? Bill Gaither wrote a song by that title that my father loved. I can see both his chin and his fist tighten with confident resolve when he heard them sing,

it is finished, the battle is over
it is finished, there’ll be no more war
it is finished, the end of the conflict
it is finished, and Jesus is Lord

The harmonies are amazing. The melody is wonderful. I love the song, too, though my favorite part is the second verse, which begins,

in my heart, the battle was still raging
not all prisoners of war had come home . . .

(I searched back on my blog and I have written posts about that very sentence here, here, and here—along with referencing the song in two of them.)

For me, then and now, it is unfinished. And it is the story of my life and my faith. In the sentences that precede the quote I used yesterday, James Carroll writes,

I have outgrown a childish faith in Jesus, but he remains the one to whom my heart first opened when I became aware. What I grasped of him on my small knees before the crucifix in St. Mary’s Church, stripped by now by the dross of dogmatism, remains the pulse of my faith. This book is my attempt to say why Jesus has this hold on me, but the attempt requires a certain historical sweep, a theological scope.

Then, he goes on to say,

I will return to the New Testament, but, fully attuned to our contemporary struggles, I will read those texts through the lens of centuries of total war and corrupted power, trying to see how violence, contempt for women, and, above all, hatred of Jews distorted the faith of the Church I still love. (Christ Actually 11)

Both Carroll and Howard Thurman, one of my other Lenten companions, pay attention to the impact of World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima as a break in human history: we proved ourselves capable of unparalleled destruction of life. Thurman wrote, in 1951,

This meant, and continues to mean, that no one may claim detachment. The result is deep strains and stresses in the should of a people, for which they had no preparation and from which there seems to be no sure basis for recovery. . . . Many persons are sure not only that the development of the bomb marked the initiation of a new era for [humanity] but that it also killed something precious in the life of the race. (Deep is the Hunger 4)

I was intrigued to read this sentence in a later essay in the same book:

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to determine whether or not a single act was a mistake or not. (8)

It has been seventy years since we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty years since Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, and fifty years since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. None of those events was the ending to a story, but perhaps the distance of time affords us the chance, if we are willing to take it, to see what is still unfinished, and what has been left undone; to see what we do next.

Wait. That last paragraph sounds as though we would be doing a new thing. There are people who are way ahead of me asking these questions. I am not saying anything new. What I am seeing in ways I have not before is that instead of talking about the Holocaust in a roomful of Christians, I need to listen to the voices of those who know the stories by heart, who are informed by grief. Instead of talking about what to do about race in a roomful of white people, I need to listen to conversations that have gone on for years and years, like those we brushed up against in Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery.

We may not be able to find a completely quiet moment to look backwards, but even in midst of the noise of the present tense, we can look back and see that straight white people have done a lot of damage in Jesus’ name for a long time. That’s the story that needs to be finished. “All the events of our world must be placed in a context of incident that reveals their profound interrelatedness,” Thurman says. (2)

I was five years old when I gave my heart to Jesus, as they say in Baptist life. That language made sense to me then, and it still does now. If it’s not about the heart, then something’s missing. The Jesus I pictured then was nothing but love, or, at least, when I look back that’s what I see. I did get up from praying with my parents and turned to my three-year old brother and said, “Miller, if you don’t give your heart Jesus you’re going straight to hell,” so I must have had some sort of judgment theology lurking in my little mind.

The Jesus I have grown up with and into is Love, with a capital L. He is not, as Carroll described, stripped by the “dross of dogmatism.” He is clothed in love with his arms wide open, but he is not sentimental. He is the Love that carried those people across the bridge in Selma. He is the Love of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, of Gene Robinson and Sarah Miles, of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan, of Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr, to name a few, along with a list of names that have crossed my heart and mind as I write—names of friends and loved ones who keep inviting me into The Story of The Love That Will Not Let Us Go.

And it’s not finished.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: i love to tell the stories

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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9
lenten journal: i love to tell the stories

I have been reading a lot about stories lately: how we tell them, how we hear them, how we live them. Telling a story is more than recounting events. In his book, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, Sven Birkets writes:

There is in fact no faster way to smother the core meaning of a life . . . than with the heavy blanket of narrated event. Even the juiciest scandals and revelations topple before the drone of, ‘And then . . . and then . . .’ . . . Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning–with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story. (3-4)

“The chaos of contingency.” What a great phrase. We tell the story of our lives as a way to make meaning out of circumstances. Edna St.Vincent Millay said, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.” Though I totally get what she is saying, maybe there’s more to the story.

One of the powerful things about following the liturgical calendar is it offers the church year in a narrative, if you will: from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost to Ordinary Time. The string of stained-glass words offer us the chance to tell the story of our faith in the light of what we remember, what has happened since, and what is happening now. As the old hymn says, I love to tell the story.

My favorite lines in the song are:

I love to tell the story, for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.

Still, those of us who know it best often run the risk of letting if become as static as stained glass. In The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, Christopher Castellani, references a passage from “A Conversation with My Father” by Grace Paley,

in which a man expresses frustration with his daughter’s refusal or inability to write a traditional narrative [about] “what happened to them next.” . . . [She] thinks . . . that she would indeed like to tell that kind of story, except that it requires a plot, “the absolute line between two points which [she’s] always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

“What’s despicable about the absolute line between two points,” Castellani concludes, “is its danger of becoming a single story.” (111)

Jesus didn’t walk in a straight line; he didn’t take the shortest route from the manger to the cross to the tomb anymore than the story—or, I should say, stories—of those of us who have followed him can be told in a straight line. I find myself asking the question: what is the story? The answer is not so obvious. As James Carroll points out in Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, we must

read [the Gospels] through the lens of centuries of total war and corrupted power, trying to see how violence, contempt for women, and, above all, hatred of Jews distorted the faith of the Church I still love. Yet Jesus is elusive. If he were not, he would be useless to us. (11-12)

I know. My post is, as one of my professors once critiqued a paper, quoteful, and the stuff that has stuck to me as I have been reading is heavy and disquieting. As our political discourse devolves into a poor imitation of middle school recess (with apologies to middle schoolers), I have chosen to turn my ears to those who have to fight to be heard. Folks Bryan Stephenson, William Barber, Tim Tyson, Willie Jennings, and Michelle Alexander have opened my eyes and heart to new levels of understanding and grief as they tell the stories of race in our country that we, as white people, have chosen, too often, not to hear. The Christ of Conquest is a strain of stories across centuries that breaks my heart. As Don Henley sings,

we satisfy our endless needs
and justify our bloody deeds
in the name of destiny
in the name of God

But the Christ of Conquest is not the only story. While those who stand in that lineage from Constantine to Franklin Graham continue to value power over people and think it matters more to be right than to be love, there are the stories of Jesus that have been told in the lives of Rosa Parks, Dorothy Day, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, to name a few, as well as the stories of those whose names are known in their towns, and on the streets where they incarnate love in the same way Jesus did as he walked the dusty roads in Palestine, on the way to nowhere in particular other than whoever was in front of him.

Last week, I walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the base of the bridge on the other side of the river, where so many were beaten on Bloody Sunday, was a rock monument inscribed with the words from Joshua 4:21-22:

When your children shall ask you in times to come, saying,
“What mean these stones?”
Then you shall tell them how you made it over.

I found myself wondering how we will explain the stones we are stacking in these days, what stories we will tell. What stories will be told about us? How will the way we live out our faith affect the ways people will tell the stories of Jesus in years to come?

A friend wrote this week and asked me to write a prayer for their service this Sunday. I think it’s a good way to end this post and begin my Lenten story this year.

God of Flesh and Blood,

We gather to be reminded that you are
a God who deals in relationships, not in rhetoric;
a God who is hip-deep in humanity, not hypotheticals.

As we follow Jesus to the Cross once again,
let us see in ways we have not seen
that when Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,”
he knew them by name;
when Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn,”
he wept with them;
when Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,”
he waged peace alongside them.

We gather to be reminded that you call us
to love as unflinchingly as you have loved us:
face to face, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart. 
May those we encounter see your love in our lives. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

this is not normal

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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this is not normal

The past few days I have been captured by James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, in which Carroll articulates what faith in Christ looks like in the light of the Holocaust. He begins with a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend: “What keeps gnawing at me is this question, . . . who is Christ actually for us today?” (2)

This post will not be the last time I quote from his book. Today he set me thinking with these words about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

The imitation of Christ was for Dorothy Day a matter of the biblical reversal—seeing the story of power not from the winner’s point of view but from the loser’s. (261)

My mind went two directions. First, of course, to a soundtrack and I could hear Steely Dan singing,

they’ve got a name for the winners in the world
and I want a name when I lose . . . .

Then I went back to my childhood and my father’s belief that sports was the best metaphor to learn about life, which meant learning about winning (and losing). Losing was parenthetical, because winning was what mattered. I remember him quoting Vince Lombardi:

Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

As someone who has been an amazingly average athlete my whole life, my dad’s leading metaphor taught me something he wasn’t expecting: how to lose, for which I am grateful.

But I don’t want be too hard on him. More than anything else, he wanted us to learn how to work hard, to try hard, and to play hard. And, when it comes to games, I like to win as much as the next person, I suppose. I am not without a competitive streak. But Dorothy Day was talking about a different kind of winning and losing, as was Jesus. Life is not a game, neither is it a competition.

The tenor of our current cultural conversation in America contradicts that perspective. In the most recent presidential inaugural address, the speaker said,

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. . . .
America will start winning again, winning like never before.

Throughout his campaign and what I have seen of his public life, he is obsessed with winning. He has the best of this, the largest crowd. America First is a restatement of what appears to be his own mantra: Me First.

Me First has nothing to do with the gospel Jesus called us to follow. The winner-loser dichotomy is the language of conquest and division, not relationship and community. Jesus said, “Love one another,” not “Love better than anyone else.”

I was writing something this week that required the date and it struck me, as I wrote 2017, that those born after September 11, 2001 will finish their first year of high school this spring. This fall they will get driver’s licenses. They have lived their whole lives in the context of war. Those of us born in the last century moved from one where the wars had names and numbers to one where we have normalized the ongoing nature of conflict such that it hardly makes the news.

But war is not normal. War is the ultimate myopia: we can’t see beyond the conflict. Our language is reduced to Us vs. Them. We use fewer words. We see fewer choices because war’s primary fuel is fear: fear of the enemy, the unknown; fear of losing. War justifies violence as a means to an end, as a means of punishment, and then we too easily begin to see it as a means of existence. War destroys our sense of ourselves, our connectedness.

How have we allowed the vocabulary of fear to become normal?

In New York City during the 1950s, civil defense drills were mandatory exercises—practice runs fore the dreaded nuclear attack. All citizens were required, once the sirens rang out, to huddle in designated fallout shelters until the all-clear blew. The requirement was essential to the American people’s acquiescence in a runaway nuclear arms race, and in the government’s campaign to make nuclear war thinkable. On June 15, 1955, when the sirens sounded, Dorothy Day and a few other Catholic workers saw on the sidewalk in front of New York’s City Hall. They refused to take shelter, and they refused to leave the sidewalk. Their leaflet read, “In the name of Jesus, who is God, who is love, we will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. We will not be drilled into fear. We do not have faith in God if we depend on the atom bomb.” . . . She was arrested. Every time the sirens sounded after that,s he returned for the demonstration—not sheltering, not leaving the sidewalk. She was arrested repeatedly. (Carroll 264)

After a week of fear-mongering by executive order and dare I say evil justification of prejudice and hatred by a self-proclaimed Christian spokesperson, I think it is fair to say the gnawing question is, once again, who is Christ actually to us in these days? The corollary question is who are we as Christ’s followers?

Jesus’ refusal to engage in the language and behaviors of war was not in a vacuum. He lived his whole life under Roman occupation. The Romans killed him when he became too big a threat. So, turn the other cheek is more than a quote that made for cute Palestinian needlepoint. The Jesus that stood up for the poor, the women, the outcasts, and was willing to sit down and eat with everyone on the economic and political spectrum is the one who actually calls us to follow. To follow Christ in these days is to widen our vocabulary; to articulate that violence against anyone is wounding or killing a loved one; to make a place at the table, or the border, or the boardroom, for everyone; to choose our words so we find ways to protest that do not attack or foment verbal violence; and to let love be our common currency rather than fear.

The story of creation says we were created in love, that we might love God and one another, and that we will return to love. Our world at war and our nation governed by fear are not normal. Let us not get used to it. Let us not run for cover. Let us not pretend, or evacuate, or hide. Let us not be drilled into fear.

Let us not be quiet.

Peace,
Milton

inherited responsibility

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
inherited responsibility

I spent part of my day working from a window seat at The Marketplace, a wonderful coffee shop-café-grocery store that sits on the edge of the Guilford Town Green, which is renowned as the largest town green in New England (almost eight acres) and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed Central Park and Boston Common.

I have been reading Mary Oliver’s recent collection of essays, Upstream, in which she talks about hearing a lecture about the Whitney family by one of the granddaughters of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who established the Whitney Museum in New York City. Oliver said the woman used a phrase that stuck with her: inherited responsibility; she goes on to talk about it in relation to the writers who inspired her.

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground–and inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question–never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may or may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me–to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly. (56-7)

Once upon a not-s0-long-ago time, our church building and our house (which was then a school building) were
on what is now the Guilford Town Green, as was the cemetery. I don’t know how people decided, or who decided, but Mr. Olmstead’s plan required moving all of them, and that is what they did. They built a new church building, moved our house down the block with a team of oxen, opened a new cemetery not so far away and moved the grave markers there. Without moving the graves. The Green is alive with activity most days–even in the cold weather. It is truly the heart of our little town. As I watch people move around, I wonder who knows the story of how the Green got here. On a thoughtful, rainy afternoon like this one, I find myself asking, who died for me to get here? Who was killed? Who lost so I could win my place of privilege?

I’ll never learn all the answers. Someone’s name will get left out. Yet part of the story of my life is working to understand and appreciate the context in which I live it out: those who came before me, those with whom I share these days, and those who will come after me. To live as Oliver suggests–to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly–is to live, as I like to say, with a sense of appropriate insignificance: it matters that I am here, but not more than anyone else. However I come to understand my place in this world, I must begin by embracing the truth that I am neither the center of nor the reason for the map. I am not the headliner. I find my place by looking at the whole map, not just my coordinates.

The rhythm of her words–to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly– carry the same cadence as Micah 6:8:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? (NRSV)

It strikes me that a big part of what makes Donald Trump’s public posturing possible is that he is a manifestation of a culture who has forgotten who is buried under the Green, if you will. We are a culture who finds little value in our inherited responsibility, our legacy, our history, not to mention our regard for one another. We have chosen to become our own frame of reference: we owe nothing to anyone, put little value in remembering, and are content to tweet and rant rather than “to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”

We can’t do that in one hundred and forty characters.

Today marks what would have been my mother’s eighty-fifth birthday. Last year, we were with her in hospice in Waco to celebrate the day, and to say goodbye. She died three days later, leaving behind a legacy of love and tenacity. One of the things born in the midst of her dying was a newfound relationship between my brother and me. With the prospect of both our parents being dead, we struggled with how we would find each other, having allowed obstacles to stack up between us. We didn’t have bad blood between us as much as we had learned to live comfortably with the distance. As we shared the days around her death together, we decided to make ourselves uncomfortable instead. I realized I could find my brother if were willing to offer him the same grace and forgiveness I offer others in my life. We both realized, I suppose, that we had our own inherited responsibility to one another, and we have made the best of it.

When I accept that Trump’s words and actions are less an aberration and more of a manifestation of our culture, I find hope in the possibility of resistance, looking once again at Oliver’s words, and Micah’s as well:

to enjoy, to question–never to assume, or trample;
to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly;
to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.

Our best conversations will not happen at full volume or at full speed. Let us meet on the Green for coffee, or wherever we can, and remember the stories handed down to us, and those being told around us, that we might remember the great value of our inherited responsibility and the wealth we have to share.

Peace,
Milton

may these words become flesh . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
may these words become flesh . . .

As Christmastide comes to a close, I come offering a collection of thoughts and words that have found their way to me over the past couple of weeks, mostly through my reading.

John begins his gospel saying, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This year, his words have called me to try and listen more than speak, to see how the Word has inhabited life around me. I have also been thinking about what words I might “make flesh” in this new year. Listen is one of them. The cacophony of voices that make up our social soundscape these days leave very little space for silence, much less sense. The impetus is on being heard, rather than hearing. But if everybody is talking . . . .

One of the good things that happened to me in 2016 was I got to share a meal with Eric Folkerth, a pastor and writer and all around good guy who lives in Dallas. We have been Facebook friends for years, but had never met. He has written a couple of pieces on his blog, When EF Talks, during this season that have been words I needed to hear. In one of them, he quoted a poem by Stephen King and Bridgett Carpenter and used in the television miniseries 11.22.63:

We did not ask for this room or this music.
We were invited in.
Therefore, because the dark surrounds us,
let us turn our faces to the light.
Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty.
We have been given pain to be astounded by joy.
We have been given life to deny death.
We did not ask for this room or this music.
But because we are here, let us dance.

To dance you have to listen to the music, to feel the beat. I suppose it’s up to us to decide whether hear a melody of hope or a dirge, but we have to listen nonetheless. We have to listen for a song we can sing together–at least that is what I heard when I moved from Eric’s words to those of Marilynne Robinson in her challenging book of essays, The Givenness of Things:

If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility towards many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. . . . [I]t is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism–exactly the same grounds, in fact–that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. . . . To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error. ( 29)

The same idea found its way to me through the words of another Facebook friend, musician Justin McRoberts, whom I got to meet once several years ago:

A thing I’ve learned about life together with others: Circumstance puts us in proximity. Intentionality binds us together. Forgiveness keeps us from falling apart.

And, if you are willing to read just one more quote, I kept this sentence from poet Donald Hall’s Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, where he talked about how he approached teaching:

My gifts to my students was not information but demonstration of engagement. (126)

The demonstration of engagement. Isn’t that be another way of saying the Word became flesh? The risk of the Incarnation is not just that God became human, but that God became human the way all humans come into being, through the risk of birth. The Word that became flesh was not information, but a story, an engagement. We sing that “Love Came Down at Christmas,” but that was not all. This year, I am struck by the courage of Christmas. By the demonstration of God’s intentional engagment. What if the innkeeper had not offered the barn? What if Mary had gone into labor on the rocky road to Bethlehem? What if the Magi had chosen to capitulate to Herod, rather than going home by another way?

I want courage to be another word I incarnate in the year to come. Yes. Listen. Courage. Ah–but it’s almost Epiphany; shouldn’t I have three words to offer? And it’s in Justin’s words: forgiveness keeps us from falling apart.

Listen. Courage. Forgive. May these words become flesh . . .

Peace,
Milton

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