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lenten journal: tone

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5
lenten journal: tone

⋅I have been working on a sermon for this coming Sunday. I get to preach at our church for the first time. My text is Matthew 5:21-43 that contains the story of Jesus’ healing of the woman who had hemorrhaged for twelve years, which is sandwiched between the account of Jairus coming to ask Jesus to heal his daughter. Reading and studying the text has gotten me back to thinking about how we read the gospels and how we understand what’s there and what isn’t. The stories are remarkably sparse, when it comes to most details. Events move quickly and, as I have said before, inferring tone into what is being said is akin to doing the same in an email or text message.

The account of the wedding at Cana is one of my favorite examples. Here are the opening verses of John 2 from the Common English Bible.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the celebration. When the wine ran out, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They don’t have any wine.”

Jesus replied, “Woman, what does that have to do with me? My time hasn’t come yet.”

As many times as I have read those verses, I am pressed to imagine the tone with which Jesus might have delivered that question to his mother in a manner that would have allowed him to live beyond that moment. And yet, not only did he live, but he became the life of the party.

I have similar questions about Jesus’s words to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane as the world began closing in on them. He asked them to stay awake while he went alone to pray; he anguished in prayer and they dozed off like children. When he returned, he woke them said, “Couldn’t you stay alert one hour with me?” Was he angry, hurt, disappointed? How did it feel to be on the receiving end of the question?

Jesus asked another question to the man at the pool of Siloam who had been trying to be the first one in the water for thirty-eight years so he could be healed. Jesus heard his story and asked, “Do you want to get well?” It’s a question worthy of the best counselor, but we have no indication of the tone of his delivery.

And it’s all in the delivery. Try these:

You look great.
Where have you been?
Why did you do that?

The tone is crucial to the meaning, and the understanding of what is being said.

There in one time where we are given more than just a hint of how Jesus delivered his words: Jesus’s encounter with the one we call the Rich Young Ruler. After they had gone back and forth and the young man appeared to feel like he was doing pretty well at keeping the Jewish laws (though we don’t know the tone of his voice), Jesus tells him to go and sell everything—a devastating blow to the young man. But before Jesus’s admonition to the man to rid himself of his possessions, the narrative says, “Jesus looked at him and he loved him.” That sentence makes me think Jesus was not throwing a knockout punch; he was issuing an invitation.

There is more to language than just the words. As we work to communicate with one another, we let loose our feelings as we speak, both consciously and unconsciously, and they land on another field of feelings with everything from the force of an air raid to the soft landing of a butterfly. Even though the gospel writers don’t fill in all the details, I can infer something of the way in which Jesus spoke to people by the way they respond to him. He spoke the truth in love.

Would that all our words would land in such fashion.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: missing

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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4
lenten journal: missing

Today has been a day of missing for me.

I began by posting this picture of my mother’s recipe box, which now resides here in Guilford. She has stayed on my mind ever since. My brother and sister-in-law left today for Cambodia , which they have done before, but somehow it matters more this time. I spent the afternoon preparing for dinner for those who would gather around our Guilford table and missing those who ate with us in Durham. And now it’s late and my heart is awash in feelings that I don’t know how to articulate in any way that make a coherent blog post.

Dag Hammarskjöld prayed, “For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.” Tonight, that is my prayer.

Peace
Milton

lenten journal: garlic

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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11
lenten journal: garlic

Our church has a gathering each Wednesday night during Lent and they asked me to prepare the meals. I spent the day working on soups and bread and dessert for sixty and, after sitting here at the computer for some time now trying to keep my promise, I have found the words elusive, other than having the word garlic stuck in my head, even as the house still smells like it. So I found my way to a poem, once I gave in to the aroma of the evening.

garlic

I have spent the day
working with my hands,
and not with words.
I have chopped and sliced,
measured and stirred,
sautéed and simmered,
all on my way to soup.
The church supper is long
over, and my kitchen
still smells like garlic.
I have spent the last two
hours staring at a screen,
typing lost drafts, trying
to force ideas to ripen.
I should have something
profound to offer and
I do not, other than to
say I wish I knew words
that smelled like garlic.
That would be enough.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: weather

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5
lenten journal: weather

weather report

yes, there’s a certain sadness
in the tears of a late night rain,
the showers of memories, now
caught in tiny sidewalk ponds—
and I’m stepping around them,
wishing you would call to say
you saw the storm on the news,
them ask about the weather
as if our lives depended on it.
four or five storms have come
and gone since you quit calling,
and I have no one to tell how
the big flakes failed to freeze,
or the big storm never came,
and I’m walking to my car . . .
yes, there’s a certain sadness—
call it the weather of my heart:
an empty wind on a rainy night
trusting that spring will come.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: soul music

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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7
lenten journal: soul music

When I asked for words to ponder during Lent, one friend offered two: soul music.

As I started thinking about it, I began to think of songs, though not necessarily Motown. I began to think of songs that have spoken to me in recent times–some old, some new. Tonight, then, I offer a Lenten soundtrack of sorts. The first is from Kris Kristofferson: “Feeling Mortal.” The chorus says,

God Almighty here I am
am I where I ought to be
I’ve begun to soon descend
like the sun into the sea
and I thank my lucky stars
from here to eternity
for the artist that you are
and the man you made of me

The next is from Sarah Jarosz and it’s a cover of a Tom Waits song called “Come On Up to the House.”

well the moon is broken
and the sky is cracked
come on up to the house
the only things that you can see
is all that you lack
come on up to the house

all your cryin don’t do no good
come on up to the house
come down off the cross
we can use the wood
come on up to the house

 

Peter Mayer is a singer-songwriter whom I have come to appreciate in recent years, though he has been around for awhile. His song “Holy Now” is a call to look at life in wonder.

when holy water was rare at best
it barely wet my fingertips
but now I have to hold my breath
like I m swimming in a sea of it
it used to be a world half there
heaven s second rate hand-me-down
but I walk it with a reverent air
cause everything is holy now

Mavis Staples is a prophet of a singer, and this song speaks of the love that will not let us go: “You Are Not Alone.”

a broken home, a broken heart
isolated and afraid
open up this is a raid
I wanna get it through to you
you’re not alone

Our closing hymn is a song Paul Simon wrote in the mid-seventies, and yet it sings as though it were written yesterday. Here is “American Tune.”

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
for lived so well so long
still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Sing to the night, my friends. We don’t sing alone.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: brother

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
lenten journal: brother

For all of my life in church I have noticed that Jesus’ basic formula for the parables was to begin with, “A certain man had two sons . . . ‘“ and, almost inevitably, the story had to do with how the brothers responded differently, and, on occasion, how they responded to each other. The Old Testament is built around brother stories as well, including Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau, all stories of sibling struggle in one way or another. They are on my mind because of my continued reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow, which is a series of reflections on Jacob.

I am the eldest of two brothers. My brother Miller is twenty-one months younger than I am. We share a great deal in common, like most siblings, I suppose, and we have our distinctions as well. The last two months have been pivotal in our finding each other in new ways because since our mother died we are the family we have left.

I suppose that is dropping the punch line for the post a bit early, but in reading L’Engle today, as she talked about Jacob wrestling with the angel and then preparing to meet his brother whom he had betrayed, and as she noticed that Isaac and Ishmael had come together to bury their father after spending a lifetime alienated from one another, I have thought a great deal about what has happened between my brother and I over the last several weeks.

Our story is not a direct comparison to the ones listed above. Neither of us had betrayed the other, or stolen a birthright, or anything quite so drastic. We spoke from time to time and tried to keep up. At this point, I won’t speak for him. I will say for myself that I allowed the physical distance between us—we haven’t lived in the same town since we were in seminary—to be more than a metaphor. There was no bad blood. Though we share many similarities, we are different in many ways and I allowed the differences to define how I related to him. In my book, I said we were not essential to each other. What I meant was we didn’t know much about the details of one another’s lives, and so we lived with old images of who the other really was.

My mother’s time in hospice gave Miller and I time together we have not had in many,many years. We took advantage of it and did the work we needed to do to find each other. The breakthrough for me was realizing if I had worked as hard to be kind to my brother—to trust him, to hope for him, to reach out to him—as I had in other relationships, he would have been essential to me. The roadmap to reconciliation is pretty straightforward: he’s my brother, my only brother; be kind.

In an earlier chapter, L’Engle says, “It is not frivolous to say that sin is discourtesy,” which at sound a bit understated at first. She continued:

Sin, then, is discourtesy pushed to an extreme, and discourtesy is lack of at-one-ment. If you drive your car without thought for the other drivers on the road, you are separating yourself. To be discourteous is to think only of yourself, and not of anybody else.

Discourtesy. The antithesis of kindness and compassion. Love, at its core, is about thinking of someone else before yourself, to understand life is lived in relationship, not solitude. To choose to disregard the connections is discourteous. Sinful. I read her definition and understand I was discourteous to my brother. For far too long, I evaluated the relationship on what I was getting out of it first, and I missed out on some good stuff. When I got home after the funeral, I sent him a poem I had read on the Writer’s Almanac on Christmas Day—the day my mother first went into the hospital. It is “Brothers Playing Catch on Christmas Day” by Gary Short.

Only a little light remains.
The new football feels heavy
and our throws are awkward
like the conversation of brothers
who see each other occasionally.
After a few exchanges,
confidence grows,
the passing and catching
feels natural and good.
Gradually, we move farther apart,
out in the field,
the space between us
filling with darkness.

He leads me,
lofting perfect spirals
into the night. My eyes
find the clean white laces of the ball.
I let fly a deep pass
to his silhouette.
The return throw
cannot be seen,
yet the ball
falls into my hands, as if
we have established a code
that only brothers know.

The poem reminded me of an afternoon in the yard of our home in Nairobi, Kenya, when I was in ninth grade and Miller was in seventh. We were throwing the football back and forth, as we did many afternoons, but that day I started asking questions: Who first thought up the shape of the football? How many sizes did they try before they got to the one that worked? Who made the first ones? Miller listened for a while, as we kept the rhythm of throw and catch, and then he said, “Why do you ask so many questions? Just throw the ball.” We both laughed.

The certain man and woman who had two sons are both gone now. My brother and I are now orphans together. We are what’s left of our family of origin, as they say. I am thankful that I am his brother.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: forensic

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5
lenten journal: forensic

I spent the better part of yesterday and all of this morning cooking with friends in order to serve lunch for Stigma and Mercy: Prison Re-Entry and Restorative Justice Conference, which was held at our church today. One hundred and fifty people showed up to talk about how we help folks get back into society after they have served time in prison. And they ate a lot of soup.

As we prepared for the meal, we could hear snippets of the speakers over the speakers in the Parish Hall, but I didn’t get to take in much of what happened, other than to overhear people talk about what stirred them as they shared lunch together and to hear some of the reflections from the steering committee who came by the house after it was all over. It did take me back to something I read several days ago in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow because it wouldn’t officially be Lent if I wasn’t reading something by Madeleine L’Engle. She was talking about going for jury duty and taking Nicholas Berdayev’s Revelation and Truth to read as she waited to see if she would be chosen to serve.

I opened the book, surrounded by my fellow jurors who were reading, chatting, doing needlework or crossword puzzles. There couldn’t have been a better place than a criminal court in which to read Berdayev’s words telling me that one of the greatest problems in the Western world today is that we have taken a forensic view of God.

The first image that jumped to mind for me was God on one of the investigative crime shows on television, and L’Engle, in the next sentence, confirmed my definition:

Forensic: having to do with crime . . . . And there I was in a criminal court, being warned by a Russian theologian that God is not like a judge sentencing a criminal. Yet far too often we view God as an angry judge assumes that we are guilty unless we can placate divine ire and establish our innocence.

As I listened to the folks who had worked so hard on the conference as they sat around our table this afternoon, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind is how little our justice system is aimed at helping people change. It focuses, instead, on punishment: making people “pay for their crimes,” which has an-eye-for-an-eye subtext. We have convinced ourselves that sort of payback is important, even though it doesn’t appear to work, which is why I am moved by the growing number of people who are working to promote restorative justice within our system where the point is to humanize and redeem. To make substantive changes in both our system and our hearts means not allowing things to stay the way they are. The same is true of our theology—back to Madeleine:

The human being’s attempt to understand the Creator is never static: it is constantly in motion. If we let our concept of God become static, and we have done so over and over again throughout history, we inevitably blunder into a forensic interpretation that does not work.

In a vain attempt to make people see God as an avenging judge, theologians have even altered the meaning of words. Atonement, for instance, a bad word if taken forensically.

Our journey of Lent takes us to the Cross, to the death of Jesus, and I struggle with the journey, in part, because I was taught a forensic view of God and the atonement growing up: Jesus died to pay the debt, to serve the sentence for my sin, for all of our sins. Since I was a kid I have never been able to figure out who was getting paid off. It made no sense that Satan was collecting the debt because that put him on a par with God that didn’t add up. If God was getting paid, it created a, well, forensic view of a God who had to kill Jesus to even deal with us. I find power and meaning in the Crucifixion in that Jesus blew the doors off of death and came out of the tomb. I also found resonance with L’Engle.

In forensic terms, the atonement means that Jesus had to die for us in order to atone for all our awful sins, so that God could forgive us. In forensic terms, it means that God cannot forgive us unless Jesus is crucified and by this sacrifice atones for all our wrongdoing.

But that is not what the word means! I went to an etymological dictionary and looked it up. It means exactly what it says, at-one-ment. I double-checked it in a second dictionary. There is nothing about crime and punishment in the makeup of that word. It simply means to be at one with God. Jesus on the cross was so at-one with God that death died there on Golgotha, and was followed by the glorious celebration of the Resurrection.

I am well aware that I could fill up my house with books written about the atonement and that I am not going to cover the scope of the discussion in a couple of paragraphs, and I find hope in L’Engle’s reminder that God is Love. This journey of Lent goes from Love to Love. Jesus’ death is a statement of who he is, and act of solidarity with both God and us: at-one-ment. Yes. Yes. Yes.

were the whole realm of nature mine
that were a present far too small
love so amazing so divine
demands my soul, my life, my all

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: love song

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: love song

Yes, I know it’s two words tonight, but they go together like one. Bear with me.

There are times in life where nothing happens other than daily life and yet it feels somehow crucial and important. These are those days for me. My days have been full of everyday things, and those things have taken up some of the hours normally given for sleeping, which means I’m up late searching for words to keep my promises. Everyone else in the house is upstairs, and I’m sitting at my computer with my headphones on in the corner of this 1785 house that probably spent close to the first two hundred years of its existence without hosting a wifi network.

I have a wide collection of music, but there are certain records and certain songs that find their way to most every playlist. As I sat here staring at the blank page on the screen in front of me, one of those standards began to play: Jason Isbell’s “Flagship,” which ranks among the best love songs I know.

I realize it may not have much to do with Lent, but tonight his words and music are my offering, and these are the lines that get me every time:

you gotta try and keep yourself naive
in spite of all the evidence believed
and volunteer to lose touch with the world
and focus on one solitary girl

Yes. Every. Day.

there’s a few too many years on this hotel
she used to be a beauty you can tell
the lights down in the lobby they don’t shine
they just flicker while the elevator winds

and the couple in the corner of the bar
have traveled light and clearly traveled far
she’s got nothing left to learn about his heart
they’re sitting there a thousand miles apart

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

there’s a lady shining shoes up by the door
and cowboy boots for seven dollars more
and I remember how you loved to see them shine
so I run upstairs and get a pair of mine

and there’s a painting on the wall beside the bed
the watercolor sky at Hilton Head
then I see you in that summer when we met
and that boy you left in tears in his Corvette

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

ou gotta try and keep yourself naive
in spite of all the evidence believed
and volunteer to lose touch with the world
and focus on one solitary girl

baby let’s not ever get that way
I’ll say whatever words I need to say
I’ll throw rocks at your window from the street
and we’ll call ourselves the flagship of the fleet

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: baseball

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
lenten journal: baseball

One of the realities—and wonders—of American life is Lent and Spring Training move side by side on the calendar. Red Sox fans observe Truck Day, which marks the trucks leaving Fenway Park with all the Spring Training equipment. This year it fell on Ash Wednesday, so I have been mindful of this tandem spiritual journey this year in particular.

I never played organized baseball. Some church softball along the way, though I would hesitate to claim any sort of expertise based on those games. Growing up in Africa I had an unexplainable attachment to the Boston Red Sox, which has both stayed with and grown in me over the years, but I have not always been a student of the game, nor one who counted the days until Spring. I grew into that, and the older I get the more important the dusting off of the diamond becomes. Today is the day, at least as a Sox fan, I get to hear one of my favorite sentences: “Pitchers and catchers, report.” Those rank among the most beautiful words in the English language. Spring is on the way. Baseball is coming back. It’s next year.

I’m not the first to wax philosophical about the game by any stretch. Perhaps my favorite comes from George Carlin and his comparison of baseball and football. I spent a good bit of time this afternoon reading different articles and stories. I wish, on this day of hope and promise, I had had the time to watch The Sandlot and Bull Durham and The Natural and Field of Dreams back to back to back to back.

Part of the reason I love this game its sense of time and space. The baseball diamond goes on forever. The foul lines are specific, but there is no back line. The batter can hit it out of the park, but it’s still a fair ball. The grandstands are not a boundary, they are seats in the middle of everything. Whatever lies beyond the diamond is still part of the game. Baseball is also the one sport where the clock doesn’t matter. Vince Lombardi said of football that he never lost a game, he just ran out of time. Innings mean we mark time in baseball by failures rather than second hands. Three outs, and in between the failures fall the successes, the near misses, the things hoped for. You play until someone wins, not until the clock runs out, but not sudden death. Both teams get their turn at the plate. And you play everyday.

Baseball is the only sport with the space to keep ridiculous statistics. We can know the probability of the success of a left handed batter who switch hits on Tuesday nights when it’s raining in Baltimore. Beyond the minutiae, the seemingly minuscule and meaningless numbers offer the chance of the long shot, even feed our hope in lost causes, not with the randomness of a lottery ticket, but with the trust that the impossible is probable. It really could happen, so don’t leave early.

The game also has a crucial mix of team work and individual performance. Baseball, at its core, is about what it means to work together. The baserunner has to watch the batter to know when the hit and run is on; a successful double play means three or four folks did what it took to make it happen. It is a team game even as it all rides, from time to time, on one person making the play or missing it—then we all win, or we all lose. Lent reminds me that my journey is personal, but not individual. I am walking well traveled roads, the grandstands filled with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before me. It matters that I am one on the road, and life will go on without me; both things are true.

Lent and baseball share a sense of faith and failure. The journey from here to the cross and then the empty tomb call me once again to trust the impossible is probable. I do not choose to be a Christian because it offers me safety or security in my existence any more than I have been a lifelong Red Sox fan because I expect them to win every year.

David Bentley Hart writes,

These—and I shall close on this thought—are the great moral lessons that only a game with baseball’s long season and long history and dramatic intensity can impress on the soul: humility, long-suffering, dauntless love, and inexhaustible faith in the face of invincible misfortune. I could no more abandon my Orioles than I could repudiate my family, or my native heath, or my own childhood—even though I know it is a devotion that can now bring only grief. I know, I know: Orioles fans have not yet suffered what Boston fans suffered for more than twice the term of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, or what Cubs fans have suffered for more than a century; but we have every reason to expect that we will. And yet we go on. The time of tribulation is upon us, and we now must make our way through its darkness, guided only by the waning lights of memory and the flickering flame of hope, not knowing when the night will end but sustained by the sacred assurance that whosoever perseveres to the end shall be saved.

Amen. Play ball.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: homemade

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5
lenten journal: homemade

When I was crowdsourcing words for my Lenten practice, my friend David sent, “homemade (pimento cheese).” I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

homemade (pimento cheese)

turn the gas burner on high
and lay the peppers on the flame
till they blister and turn black;
put them in a bowl, cover it
with plastic wrap so they sweat;

grab an old box grater and all
the cheddar cheese you can find
in the fridge; press the block
against the holes and be careful
not to include any fingertips;

unwrap the peppers and rub
the burnt peel away, then
pull them open and wipe out
the seeds; cut them into thin
strips and add to the cheese;

spoon in the Duke’s mayonnaise
(accept no substitutes), some
black pepper, a couple of shots
of Tabasco sauce, and, of course,
a friendly splash of bourbon;

late tonight invite a friend over,  
pull the cheese out of the fridge,   
put on some John Prine, pull out
the bourbon again, and open a 
fresh tube of Ritz crackers; enjoy.

Peace,
Milton

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