Home Blog Page 92

advent journal: a hand of kindness

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8
advent journal: a hand of kindness

One of the things that helped me today was a blog post by a woman named Katherine that made the rounds on a couple of Facebook feeds that I follow offering ways to respond to the mess of a world we live in these days. Here are some of the suggestions that stuck out to me.

3. Google a small-business florist near the site of any recent tragedy. Call and explain that you’d like to pay for flowers to be sent to, say, the staff of the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (3480 Centennial Boulevard, Colorado Springs, CO 80907), or to Hope Church (5740 Academy Blvd N, Colorado Springs, CO 80918), where slain police officer Garrett Swasey and his family were members. When you leave a note, don’t make it about you, or your political or religious beliefs. Leave it anonymous, or simply say, “From a stranger who thought you might be sad today.”

5. There are several Dunkin’ Donuts within the general area of Sullivan House High School, the alternative school in Chicago’s South Side where Laquan MacDonald was enrolled. It’s probably a tough week for teachers and students both. Buy an e-gift card. Send the link to the faculty. Tell them a stranger bought them coffee.

6. Leave a copy of your favorite book in a public place. Trust that the right person will find it. 

8. Here’s a link to Amazon, where you can buy a ten-pack of socks for $9.99. Click the link. When you are asked for your shipping address, find the address of a homeless shelter in your community. If you don’t have a homeless shelter in your community, here’s mine. 

12. Go to a diner. Order a milkshake. Tip ten dollars.

13. Get a pile of index cards and a sharpie. Write down, “You are Important,” or “Breathe.”  Carry them with you as you go about your day, leaving them in waiting room magazines, on car windshields, in elevators, in bathroom stalls. Keep one for yourself. We all need the reminder sometimes, too.

What I love about the list is how handmade it is, how incarnational. Words made flesh. Here’s what kindness and compassion and even justice look like with skin on: flowers, socks, coffee, affirmation, and extravagant tips. And it is what takes me to Bethlehem every year, and then on into the stories of how Jesus interacted with people, fleshing out love and joy and hope and compassion and forgiveness with his words and his hands. He never held a national convention, developed a global marketing strategy, lobbied for his position, or hired consultants. He thought he could change the world with a meal, a touch, and a kind word. Even when he talked about things in a more eternal sense it came down to

I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. (Matt. 25:34-36, Common Bible)

Jesus noticed people others had chosen to allow to become invisible. He noticed things in people others missed. He saw beyond anger and responded to the woundedness that lay behind it. He chose belonging over blaming at every turn, and acceptance over accusation.

I know I’m not saying anything new, but then again, there’s nothing new to say, so I’m going to go back over the old, old stories and remind myself that kindness and love and forgiveness and hope are older than violence and death. I’m going back to remember the way I have felt love has been hand to hand and face to face far more than any grand gestures. I may not be able to do much for anyone in Syria or San Bernardino tonight, but I can do something for the homeless people on the New Haven Green as I walk to work from the train station, and to make sure the kindness I wish to show the world pours out first within the walls of our home and covers those closest to me. The Kindness that Became Flesh in Bethlehem calls me to do the same with every motion, every word.

My friend Bob Bennett wrote a song some time ago called “Hand of Kindness,” which you can find on this great collection, A Very Blue Rock Christmas. It feels like a good closing hymn tonight.

I have no need to be reminded of all my failures and my sins
or I can write my own indictment of who I am and who I’ve been
I know that grace by definition is something I can never earn
but for all the things that I may have missed
there’s a lesson I believe that I have learned

there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

forgiveness comes in just a moment
sometimes the consequences last
and it’s hard to walk inside that mercy
when the present is so tied up to the past
and this crucible of cause and effect
I walk the wire without a net
and I wonder if I’ll ever fall too far
that day has not happened yet

‘cause there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

and in the raven dark
shines a distant light
it seems to point at me
it burns away the night
familiar figure on the horizon
moving closer now I see
his heart is shining like the sun
he’s reaching out for me

there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding me
there is a hand of kindness
holding me, holding on to me

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: perspective

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3
advent journal: perspective

Perspective

I feel small in the face of
overwhelming violence:
another killing, another
killing, another killing . . .
it’s as hard to be hopeful
as it is to be poetic.
How can our kindness
afford to be random when
the violence is intentional?
This can’t be the last word.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: how dark is it?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8
advent journal: how dark is it?

Perhaps it was the mention of constellations in the quote from Sarah Lewis last night, and the mention of W. S, Merwin’s poem that got me thinking about the dark, which features prominently in both. Perhaps it was a friend who wrote, “I have been to the heart of darkness alitdand found it groundless.” Whatever it was set me thinking again about darkness and stars and poems, all of which have circled around and through each other for centuries.

Darkness is an interesting word. We use it to describe several different things that carry some sense of mystery and unknowing, and often some sense of pain. We are scared of the dark. We get lost in the dark. Darkness is a metaphor for depression, for sin, for the undiscovered, for the hidden, for the mysterious. We listen to the dark. We wait until dark. I went back through old notes and bookmarks to find some of my favorite quotes and poems about darkness. Here is a small sampling.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.”
― Robert Frost, West-Running Brook

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it. ― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

“Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.” ― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

My favorite, however, is the lyric to Guy Clark’s song entitled, “The Dark.”

in the dark you can sometimes hear your own heart beat
or the heart of the one next to you
the house settles down after holding itself up all day
shoulder slumps, gives a big sigh
you hear no one’s foot fall in the hall
that drip in the kitchen sink marking time
june bug on the window screen can’t get in but he keeps on trying
one way or another we’re all in the dark

fireflies, sparks, lightning, stars
campfires, the moon, headlights on cars
the Northern Lights and The Milky Way
you can’t see that stuff in the day
when the earth turns its back on the sun
the stars come out and the planets start to run around
now they call that day is done
but really it’s just getting started
some folks take comfort in that

and how dark is it
it’s too dark for goblins
and how dark is it
it’s so dark you can smell the moon
how dark is it
it’s so dark the wind gets lost
how dark is it
it’s so dark the sky’s on fire
how dark is it
it’s so dark you can see Fort Worth from here

I love the images in the song about the house that has held itself up all day and that one way or another we’re all in the dark, but I think the tune hung with me today because it asks another question: how dark is it?

The sun was up for less than nine and a half hours here in the Shoreline, as this region is called, and it was cloudy and rainy to boot. The days will continue to shrink for another three weeks. The darkness is not yet at high tide. I got up in the dark and rode the train home in the dark—at 4:30. Though I quickly find the romance of now being able to stand in our backyard and see a sky full of stars at night, thanks to the dark, I also know its weight and seemingly unending depth when the darkness stands for depression. I. too, have been one acquainted with the night. And on this night, I found a Mary Oliver poem in the dark that was new to me:

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

The last line of the song unwraps a gift for me: it’s so dark you can see Fort Worth from here. When I look backwards through my life, I can see the seedlings of my depression beginning to grow when I lived there. I didn’t know what it was then. I recognize it now, the way you see foreshadowing in a novel you’re reading for the second or third time. Even so, my memories of Fort Worth are infused with the joy that came from those days as Youth Minister at University Baptist Church, for the young people who taught me how to be a part of a group, and we all learned how to love one another.

Tonight, it’s also dark enough to see Charlestown and Winchester and Marshfield, too; and it’s dark enough to see Durham as well. How dark is it? It’s dark enough to be reminded of the love of friends scattered across the country—even the world, of the hope that continues to catch me by surprise, of the gifts of grief and gratitude and grace.

How dark is it? Dark enough to be thankful.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what’s stopping us?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4
advent journal: what’s stopping us?

One of the things the move from Durham to Guilford precipitated is my transferring from the computer store there to the one in New Haven. With the transfer also came a change in role because the position I held in Durham was not open here, which also meant a couple of weeks of training to learn my new job, which is dealing with people whose phones are broken and shattered, for the most part. They come into the store in some stage of questioning or crisis and I am charged with helping them sort it out.

We spent a good deal of time in the training talking about “stop words”—those words that stop a conversation or end the search for options: no, I can’t, I won’t, unfortunately . . . . What I realize in practice is my search for vocabulary that keeps the conversation going and presents the possibility of something other than the worse case scenario is more than semantics or retail strategy. It is humanizing, even healing, and it carries beyond my shift at work. I can stop myself with words as well.

In our new world, I ride the train from Guilford to New Haven most days, which means I have time to read rather than watch the road. My recent bound companion is The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis. The book takes on a few stop words of its own, including failure and fear. In the closing pages she writes,

The moment we designate the used or maligned as a state with generative capacity, our reality expands. President John F. Kennedy once mentioned an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Failure is an orphan until we give it a narrative. Then it is palatable because it comes in the contc570514a529442be8b4b85afa313339e_19ext of story, as stars within a beloved constellation. (198)

One of the ways her words hit me is to say we become family to one another in our stories. Failure in an orphan until there is a narrative, the connective tissue of words that bind us to one another. When I tell you my story and you tell me yours we see more than the pieces of dreams that lay on the floor around us. We see that we are not alone, that failure is not the last word.

When I opened my journal to write down the quote, I found things I had jotted down from an old TED Radio Hour episode on being grateful that focused on a Benedictine monk named David Steindl-Rast. As I read through it again I realized he even takes the stop out of the word stop. Listen.

How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful . . . . It’s a very simple method. It’s so simple that it’s actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. Stop, look, go. That’s all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don’t stop. We miss the opportunity because we don’t stop. We have to stop, we have to get quiet and we have to build stop signs into our lives. When we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is what ever life offers to you in that present moment. Mostly, it’s the opportunity in joy.

If you take this opportunity, go with it and that little stop, look, go is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world because we are, at the present moment, in the middle of a change of consciousness. There’s a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware of how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful. And if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not from a sense of scarcity, and you’re willing to share.

I am moved by both Lewis and Steindl-Rast because they take the words failure and fear seriously, but not ultimately because they also take the words hope and gratitude seriously. The former will not be the last words. Steindl-Rast’s progression haunts me in the best way: if we are grateful, we are not fearful; if we are not fearful, we are not violent. Violence, at its root, is fear incarnate, not power. Though the powerful may wield the weapons, they attack out of fear. Terrorists act out of fear as much as they try to foment it in others. As we know from the stories of folks like Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Aun San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela true power, even authority, lies in those who know responding to violence with violence doesn’t solve or change anything; it only deepens the wounds and feeds the fear. Their call to us is to say yes, to live in gratitude, open our hearts to one another, and incarnate hope. (Insert favorite W. S. Merwin poem here.)

The tenor of what passes for discourse in our country will not be changed by someone shouting louder or expressing more extreme ideas of hatred and bigotry. The level of violence in the world will not be lowered by someone dropping a bigger bomb. (Wow—talk about a paragraph full of stop words.) Blessed are the peacemakers—remember? Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the orphans. And the refugees. And the grateful.

As I wrote last night, I landed on a question. I appear to have done the same tonight, though I don’t know that means a new question every night on the road to Bethlehem. But for this night, I ask another: what’s stopping us?

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: what are we waiting for?

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
8
advent journal: what are we waiting for?

Somewhere in one of The Boxes Yet To Be Unpacked is my copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, which is the book that first taught me how the church marks time by the liturgical calendar. It starts and ends with essays on Advent, beginning with the words from Romans, “The night is far gone; the day is at hand.” (Romans 13:12) For all but four days of this man-waiting-on-benchseason, the days will be growing shorter. Here in our new home in Connecticut we are far enough north that the sun sets before 4:30; a cloudy day means we never turn the lights off. Though I’m not sure the early Christians were thinking about the short days when the repurposed the Roman celebration of Saturnalia to tell their Core Story, as the church moved into Europe and the bleak midwinters the promise that it would not always keep getting darker became a central metaphor, it seems.

So we light candles and we wait.

Sitting in church this morning, it struck me that not all waiting is the same. Waiting for a diagnosis from a biopsy is not the same as my waiting for the train in the morning to go to New Haven. Waiting for a pizza is different from waiting for the world to change. Somewhere in the course of the afternoon I remembered a blog post from six years ago when I was cooking in the restaurant at Duke and I wrote about learning the Spanish word for wait—espera—because our dishwasher, whom I was training to cook, didn’t speak very much English. And I wrote:

If I can go back to the kitchen for a minute, when the ticket prints, telling me someone wants the chicken for dinner, I make a choice. I can choose to let my sense of time be controlled by the little piece of paper saying they want dinner NOW, which leads me to rush the dish; or I can see the ticket as an invitation to take the time I need to prepare the dish well: taking a minute or two to get the pan hot, and more time for the oil to warm, and more time for the chicken to brown, and the sauce to reduce, until the dish that goes to the table does so with, well, timefulness.

As much as the latter choice seems the obvious one, I’m well aware of how hard it is for me to live timefully. Espera doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s the dinner rush or some other self-imposed deadline, I can quickly become consumed with The Task at Hand, and push time and everyone else around with the pugnacious impatience of a conductor determined for the train to leave on time at all costs. I know what needs to happen and I want it to happen now.

Time too easily becomes a force, rather than a friend.

The ways languages work sometimes fascinates me. The sounds of words make things possible regardless of their meaning. In English, we get to rhyme heart and art, for example. Not everyone gets that poetic possibility. In Spanish, espera and esperanza sound like relatives—wait and hope—that give us a vocabulary for Advent: here in the dark we wait and hope the day is at hand.

Searching for the blog post led me to another one with this quote from Annie Dillard:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return. (Teaching a Stone to Talk)

There is something beautiful about the circling seasons of our faith and the reenactment of the Incarnation again and again, connecting us with our brothers and sisters in Christ down all the days, and we come back to the Manger year after year and we could also say not much has changed. We begin this season in the gathering dark as refugees from Syria struggle to find shelter, as the tenor of our political discourse has degenerated into the screaming of playground bullies, as fear has become the primary currency or our country begging the question: what are we waiting for?

One of the quotes I come back to most every year is from Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth century monk, who wrote: “What good is it for me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago and I don’t give birth to God’s son in my person and my culture and my times?” What would it look like for us to be waiting to go into labor, for us to wait to be the carriers of God’s love rather than just the recipients? We are not waiting for Christ to come to us, but for Christ to come through us. Crash helmets, indeed.

Though this post feels as disjointed as these days we are living, the talk of labor pains makes me think of one of the synonyms we use for pregnancy: expecting—another way of saying hope. In these days of noise and confusion, we wait, we hope, we hurt, and we expect. We trust that the trajectory of existence is not destined for darkness, nor the curve of life pointed toward cynicism. We wait, we hope, we hurt, and we are expecting to give birth to the Love of God in our time and in our culture.

Come, let us wait together. The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

Peace,
Milton

take one last look

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
12
take one last look

As David Letterman was finishing up his years on late night television, one of his last guests was Tom Waits, who wrote a new song for Dave called “Take One Last Look.” I wept as I listened because Waits captured the mixture of feelings that flow as we move from one chapter of life to the next. Little did I know Ginger and I were about to make a move of our own. Here is the lyric:

let’s watch the sun come up in another town
try our luck a little further down
leave the cards on the table
leave the bread on the plate
put your hand on the gearshift
put your foot off the brake

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

I’ll bet we’re something that the wind can carry
the arrow points a way across the waiting prairie
this car looks like it could give us a good run
our choice to leave was a good one

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

let’s look forward to the lights that are new
the world is a ribbon of road for you
all towns have churches and tire shops
they put up speed limit signs and they hire cops
I love to see the wind in your hair
all we ever need we can get anywhere

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

When we decided to move to Guilford, Connecticut the song came back to my mind. I asked Phil Cook, a songwriter/musician and all around good guy, to help me record the song, which he did—and played guitar as well. My intention was to have this project completed before we left town, or at least soon after, but that was not to be. I finished tonight, and am very aware of how much I miss the friends and chosen family we left behind. I have said many times Durham is the most encouraging city I know. Tonight, I feel the ties that bind and am grateful we got to live there for eight years.

Peace,
Milton

incidental contact

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
13
incidental contact

IMG_0066Packing up a house is an archaeological expedition through the layers of a life in one place, not only because of the collections of things that have to be sorted and assigned a destination, but also because of the stories that get unearthed.

One that came to the surface is a favorite from my days as the youth minister at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth. One Wednesday evening I was walking down the hall of the building getting ready for the night’s activities when I passed Hazel, one of the young people, coming the other way. For no particular reason other than to greet her, I said, “Hey—I like you and I tell people that even when you’re not around,” and we smiled at each other and both kept going in our set directions.

A couple of days later, I received a card from her in which she took the time to tell me she had had a really bad day at school and my passing comment in the hall had reminded her she was loved. “You made my day,” she said. I can remember sitting at my desk with the card and thinking I needed to mark the moment. Incidental contact had lasting implications. I meant what I said to Hazel, but I wasn’t aiming for a life changing encounter, yet the things we set in motion with our words and actions—however small they might seem—are out of our control in some sense.

As Ginger was digging through the layers of life here on West Trinity, she found a letter my father had written to me in August 2006. We were still in Marshfield in those days, and my depression was still heavy. I had started writing about it on this blog in December of the previous year. The public nature of my disclosure was new to me and to my family. My dad was not one who easily spoke about his feelings; when he needed to get to something, he wrote it down. The letter is full of compassion and empathy. He was working hard to connect with me, telling me about times in his own life when he found the darkness visible. He reminded me that his best friend battled depression most of his life. And then in the last paragraphs he wrote:

What I pray you will get from this letter is the understanding that you are loved, accepted, and prayed for. To express to you how proud I am of you would be impossible. You are the most multi-gifted person I have ever known. My heart overflows with memories of joy and excitement in watching you grow and develop.

In reading some of your blogs it seems that I am the source of some of your heartache. If so, I am saying to you I am very sorry. I can say in all honesty that not in any way did I intend to create problems for you. You are the pride and joy of my life—I love you.

Sincerely, Dad

As I read and reread the letter through my tears, I thought about Hazel walking down the hall that night because I realized that, in some ways, my incidental contact with my father along the way had left him with the impression that it was his fault. That was not my intention. I am grateful to look back and be able to say that in the time between the letter and my father’s death I had the chance to let him know my depression was not his fault and we both got better at forgiving one another. Still, I keep looking at the letter . . .

. . . and what I see is how hard a time I had understanding how much he loved me. I read what I have quoted here and on some level I can’t describe I feel almost surprised, not because of Dad but because of the layer of my being that has to be reminded again and again that I, too, am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. We have talked so much about random acts of kindness that it has become somewhat of a cliché, yet it matters that we look up and offer regard to those with whom we encounter in our billiard ball world. When I look at the letter and I think about Hazel there in the hallway, I pray my kindness is more than random. Incidental contact can be intentional, even in a passing moment. It’s worth remembering that, in the more consistent relationships in our lives, the layers of incidental contact stack up into patterns and rituals that either build pathways to our hearts or walls around them.

The archaeological dig here in our house in Durham is days away from completion and we will pack up the plans in the rented moving vans and head north. They don’t make a truck big enough to carry the memories of the incidental contact that reminds me of a love that will not let me go.

Peace
Milton

 

all things are possible

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2
all things are possible

I found it a wonderful example of spiritual synchronicity to discover that the Gospel reading for World Communion Sunday was the story of Jesus’ encounter with the one we call “the rich young ruler.” For those who don’t know the story, a wealthy young man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to have eternal life. Jesus says, “You know the commandments,” and then proceeds to rattle off a few of the Thou Shalt Nots, which the young man quickly claims to have kept since he was a child. Jesus cuts to the chase: “Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor—that will do it.” The Gospel account says the man went away sad. He just couldn’t do it.

Jesus doesn’t call out to him or go after him. He turns to his disciples—whom, Mark says, were shocked—and tells them it was easier for a camel to get through one of the narrow gates in the city called the Needle’s Eye than it was for a rich person to walk away from his or her privilege. When they wondered out loud who could be saved if the rich and privileged could not, Jesus added, “With God, all things are possible.”

Say it with me: with God, all things are possible.

In a world that has more displaced people than at any time in our history, that knows more about war than anything else, and in a country addicted to violence and self-absorbed protectionism, the recklessly hopeful celebration of World Communion Sunday matters deeply. I look forward to this first Sunday in October when we are intentional about noticing the tether of grace that binds us together across boundaries and biases, theologies and denominations, personalities and politics. (And yes, I understand, as my wonderful Episcopalian editor once told me, for those who observe the Eucharist every week, every Sunday is World Communion Sunday.) Together at the Table we affirm that grace matters most, which is most difficult for those of us who are people of privilege—and that’s pretty much everyone who stumbles across this post.

As Ginger unpacked the passage in her sermon, she reminded us we were not free to regard the young man as someone unlike ourselves. “Everyone in this room would have somewhere to go if we lost everything; we could find a couch to sleep on for the night.” In my notes, I jotted down, “Grace is for rich people, too.” It’s not that our compassion is invalid. The problem lies in that when we see the homeless person on the corner, or the masses of refugees fleeing conflicts in their countries, or people in our own land being harassed, arrested, and even killed because of their skin color, ethnicity, or religion, we do not see ourselves. We don’t think they are one of us. We don’t understand how our sense of privilege separates us. As Jason Isbell sings:

you should know compared
to people on a global scale
our kind has had it relatively easy

When Jesus began the Beatitudes with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” I think he meant those who are hopeless, or downtrodden, or marginalized, or desperate have a better grasp of grace than those of us who, as Ann Richards once said of George W. Bush, were born on third base and think we hit a triple. The reason, for example, that the killings on our country are not going to stop is because the discussion begins with our rights to own guns rather than our calling to protect one another. Jesus’ call to the young man was to see himself as part of humanity rather than seeing everyone else as the cast in a movie about him.

Over the past few weeks, a couple of friends have posted a picture on my Facebook page of a long 12002122_1177002882313533_3894262632842587557_ntable full of people that looks a bit like our dinners on the porch the last few weeks with the caption, “When you have more than you need, you build a longer table not a higher fence.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The reality of my life is I have more than I need—even in the months when we have not been sure how all the bills would be paid. Beyond the economics, I am a straight white male. I am a person of profound privilege. For me to understand what it means to be hopeless and desperate—to be poor in spirit—means I must do way more listening and learning than preaching or pontificating. It means when I do speak, I need to speak up for someone other than myself. I need to give up being right, or in charge, or in control. I need to let go of assuming life will always allow me to be comfortable. I need to let go of what I have and trust that God’s grace covers me as well; I need to come to the Table to be fed, to feel connected, and to be reminded that grief, grace, and gratitude are inextricably bound to one another.

With God, all things are possible.

Peace,
Milton

the long road

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
7
the long road

Most any aspect of my life demands a soundtrack.

I’ve spent the afternoon getting cookie batter ready to bake tonight and the music played right along with me. As I came up to write, I procrastinated a bit by putting together a playlist full of rain songs for us to bake by this evening, since we are almost through our ninth or tenth day of precipitation and awaiting Joachin’s arrival. I also thumbed back through old blog posts from the fall of 2007 as we were preparing to move to Durham from Marshfield, Massachusetts and I came across some of the songs that scored those days. One of those was Cliff Eberhardt’s “The Long Road.”

I first found the song because David Wilcox covered it in a concert. On the album, Cliff sang it with Richie Havens, whom I knew, first, from listening to the Woodstock soundtrack as a ninth grade kid. A few years back, Cliff’s song came back into view because he rerecorded it when he did an album at Blue Rock Studios with my friend Billy Crockett.

The first verse always gets me:

there are the ones that you call friends.
there are the ones that you call late at night.
there are the ones who sweep away your past
with one wave of their hand.

We ate dinner on the porch again last night, as we have for the past few Thursdays, enjoying the cool breeze that was the prelude to the storm that arrived a bit later. Up and down the table were friends old and new, eating and drinking and talking and laughing. “Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist prayed; I am far too conscious of the numbers these days: we drive out November 1, following the long road to New England. It is the right move for us, and it’s really hard to leave.

Later in the song, Eberhardt sings,

I can hear your voice in the wind.
are you calling to me, down the long road?
do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
down the long road.

Those may be the lines that first attached me to the song: I have lived my whole life down the long road. Because I grew up moving all over the place, I have pictured myself as one who keeps moving, yet as an adult I have lived for long stretches in Charlestown, Marshfield, and now Durham. I have memories in these places, stories, friends, chosen family. I have roots. I am not just passing through.

Yesterday, I called my friend Burt in Texas. He and I are one year shy of it being forty years since we first met. He was beginning his first year at Baylor and I was in my third. In the fall of 1986 I called him to mark the fact that he was the first friend of mine whom I had known for ten years and known where they were all of those ten years. I was almost twenty-nine. Now we have shared almost four decades. As I look back down the long road that has led me from Waco to Dallas to Fort Worth to Boston to Marshfield to Durham and now to Guilford, I feel as I did walking the Camino de Santiago last year: I am not alone. This long road is filled with connections.

I gotta find you tonight.
are you waiting for me, down the long road?
do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
down the long road.

I am pulled by the two questions he asks in the song:

do you really think there’s an end?
are you waiting for me?

Ginger and I have spoken often of the ways in which life is often like a Saturday Night Live skit: it starts with a good idea, but no one is sure how to end it. I hear the first question and wonder if he is asking about death, or about the travel, or about the road itself. I hear the second and wonder if the person is waiting to begin, or waiting for the other to arrive. And then I see there’s one more question:

I can hear your voice in the wind.
are you calling to me, down the long road?

Waiting and calling, like the call and response of a gospel song. You call me and I will call you in return as we move and stay up and down this long road we call life. I can hear the voices in the winds of my memory, in the breeze on the porch, in the hope that lies ahead. I have lived my whole life down the long road. And I am grateful for all the hearts that have made room.

Peace,
Milton

famous

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
18
famous

Two months. I know. That’s how long it’s been since I last wrote here. I have looked hard at why I have been absent. Some of it was finishing up my next book (which comes out in November); some has been schedule; I think the main reason is as I work to deal with the grief of leaving Durham in about four weeks staying silent has allowed me to keep some of the feelings at bay. To write down what is going on requires me to engage my life on a different level. And it is time to do so. I promise to show up here more regularly in the days ahead. There is much to say.

I want to start with a story I have intended to tell for some time.

In the early nineties I was teaching English at Charlestown High School in Boston and had the good fortune to be doing so when Bill Moyers did his first PBS poetry series, The Language of Life. I was mesmerized by the words and the wordsmiths he interviewed: Coleman Barks reading Rumi, Sekou Soundiata, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Robert Bly, and Naomi Shihab Nye. One of Nye’s poems stuck to me and has never really let go, becoming a personal scripture in a way, a text that has helped me remember who I am and who I want to be. The poem is called “Famous.” If you have read this blog over the years, then you have read it several times, but here it is once more.

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Leave the poem for a moment and come with me to a coffee shop — our coffee shop here in our neighborhood of Old North Durham, which I have also mentioned quite often in my writings here: Cocoa Cinnamon. The repurposed service station at the corner of Foster and West Geer streets is like a participatory art installation brought to life by our friends Areli and Leon who started with a Coffee Bike and worked and dreamed and gathered and invited until the shop came into being. I decided I would make a cookie for their opening day, so I created a Cocoa Cinnamon Cookie: a chocolate chip cookie with espresso powder in the dough and some Heath toffee bits that is then rolled in sugar mixed with coffee, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. I took about four dozen cookies to them to help celebrate the new café and use them however they wished. A couple of days later, Leon asked if I would start baking them so they could sell them at the shop, which is how I became an intentional cookie baker rather than an occasional one. A couple of days later I stopped by the shop to sip and write and saw my cookies in the display case with the label, “Milton’s Famous Cookies.” I smiled and Leon said, “Well, they are famous here.”

And I thought of the poem: the cookie is famous to the hungry person in the coffee shop.

Over time I have worked on other recipes that I have boxed up and taken down to the shop — Milton’s Ginger (ginger-molasses), Double Chocolate Olive Oil and Sea Salt, Curry On (a curried sugar cookie with apricots and coconut), Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip and Sriracha — and then this past spring I made it official and started my own business. When it came time to name it, the choice felt obvious: Milton’s Famous. When you live in The Most Encouraging City In The World, how things come together is a communal act. Mark, one of our Thursday Night Dinner regulars who happens to be a graphic designer, created the logo and helped me learn about branding. Areli and Leon took the big box off the coffee bike and Andrew, another neighbor who happens to be a metal sculptor, built a table so I could be mobile and thus get a place alongside of the food trucks at the Hunt Street Art and Food Market every Saturday (which also happened because of Becky and Mike, who own the Pie Pushers truck). Lindsey and Rob, who own Monuts (our awesome donut shop), rented their kitchen space in off hours so we could do the volume we needed, Laura has baked and sold cookies with me all summer long, and Ginger has been unfailingly supportive and encouraging at every turn.

We were about three Saturdays in to our new adventure when I had to miss a week to with Ginger to Guilford, Connecticut where she was called to be one of the pastors there. Both things have felt like the right things to do. Even as we are packing up and preparing to head North, I’m still baking and riding the bike down to the Market on Saturdays, and I will continue to do so until we leave town. More and more frequently people ask me what is going to happen to the cookies when we leave. What we have figured out is Laura will keep baking and making sure there are cookies at Cocoa Cinnamon. We’re going to take a break from the market starting in November, which will give us time to plan how to be back there next Spring. And I will go to Guilford and find a place to bake there as well. What I love about it is how it makes me feel connected — to the people who have helped make it happen, to the people who buy the cookies — and the way it reminds me who I am and that I am loved.

The other night I had to stop at Whole Foods on my way home from work at the computer store. It was late and I was tired, so I meandered through the store, retracing my steps more than once as I remembered why I had gone in there in the first place. I passed a woman and her two daughters who looked like they were about ten and six. Th
e older one smiled at me, and then smiled again as I passed them on the next aisle, and the next. I wandered to the far end of the store and then came back to the produce section to get something I had forgotten and saw them again. This time, I could feel her tracking me. When our eyes caught each other, she grinned and said in a stage whisper, “I love your cookies.”

“Thank you,” I said, and smiled back.

Peace,
Milton

1...919293...252Page 92 of 252
© Newspaper WordPress Theme by TagDiv