2026.05.25 AN INVOCATION TO FORGET? Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

2026.05.31    An Invocation to Forget!?

As a resident at Mclean Care Retirement Community and retired from my professional life, I was invited this year to deliver the Memorial Day Invocation.  An Invocation is a short prayer, simply calling on Divinity to listen in as we gather to remember the painful deaths of all those who served to assure the survival of us all and our nation.  Grateful for the sturdy podium, I waited for silence then prayed:

"We gather today to honor and offer thanks to and for all those men, women and children who lost their loves and  loves to serve in any way to assure the survival of our country and its vision. THANK YOU ALL.

WE GATHER AS WELL NOW IN HOPE TO PRAY FOR A FUTURE FOCUS AWAY FROM WAGING WAR TOWARDS WAGING PEACE. . . while keeping alive appropriate military defenses and our CONSTITUTION that defines us as a nation.

AMEN

OPEN WIDE. Lyn Brakeman, blog post, Hartford Symphony Orchestra Concert

Have you ever seen a grand piano miked up—that is with its lid wide open and not one but two microphones hanging down suspended from somewhere high above the vulnerable open-lidded piano?

It almost reminded me of being at the dentist, all bibbed up and feeling apprehensive about the little tray of sharp picks and tools you have spied. Any minute now, the dentist will approach at your right, lean in with a smile, and say OPEN WIDE. 

I do because I’m a good girl. A treat awaits me for good behavior. At the dentist in NYC where I grew up that meant a brand new tooth brush in a small bag accompanied by a small tube of toothpaste, tied with red ribbon and, of course a good mother who I know will take me to the nearby Schraffts for a sweet treat.

This is self-defeating of course but a ritual to be admired. So it was with the Hartford Symphony concert on April 12, 2024. BUT here the treat paid off! 

*  * *  *

First, we heard the pre-concert talk, organized and offered by Carolyn Kuan, the Music Director. She is personable, fun and smart. Usually there is some history about the players, soloists, and composers, yet it’s not heady. If there is a concerto featuring one of the instruments or its soloist that player is invited to the stage to talk about her or his instrument. One I most remember of course is the tuba, and what I remember about that is how very heavy a tuba is, how little it is featured in most pieces, and that the player sometimes polishes it, raising a shine bright enough to reflect his own grinning face. If the tubist were a woman I imagine she could put on a fresh coat of mascara and grin. The line between beauty and vanity is never absolutely clear anyway! And the tuba is always part of a symphony orchestra.

*  * *  *

But back to the yawning piano, all primped and ready for pianist and composer, Brazil-American, Clarice Assad, often known as a musical polyglot. She played the piano inside and out, once even crawling inside to pluck some strings with her fingers to illustrate the theme of connectivity in her musical piece, FLOW.  She wrote the music with the Erie 

canal in mind. 

Geographically, the Erie Canal, was built in 1825 to facilitate commerce between Albany and Buffalo. Simultaneously, it facilitated the “flow of ideas”—what people thought and felt about life itself, their cultures, religions, and the exchange of ideas and feelings—almost like a memoir would.  

Divinity, in its many expressions, must also flow along,  just like the canal, always thrumming the flow of my own heart, and facilitating the divine connective presence in all things. In short, let’s go with the flow. I wonder who will serenade the Strait of Hormuz?  

GO WITH THE FLOW. EMBRACE THE CRAZINESS.  YES, WE DID! 

2026.04.19 AH, SUCH FOOLS WE CAN BE! Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Do we live now in an age in which the search for authority figures to help us thrive happens in a world almost too swiftly changing to read? 

*  * *  *

The Holy Bible, frankly, remains my own best source of truth, imaginative or factual. It has been around for centuries, and has many writers and multiple ideas, and many translations, revisions.  It starts: “In the beginning……” and I hold my breath. Do I want a version of truth or do I want a vision of possible truth?  Or am I just too old at 87  and a retired Episcopal priest? My husband loves me but he has all the same quests and questions, as do my relatives and colleagues. Tears blur my eyes and, yes, clutch at my heart.

Without reason or thought, the prophet Ezekiel comes vividly to my mind. I’ve always loved those elderly, aka ageless, prophets who speak with fierce authority. I imagine an ancient old guy in flowing robes who stands in the wind and rants. He’s a lunatic everyone says, and yet crowds gather, just to see, in case. . .  

Ezekiel talks about a valley of bones, brittle, dry and useless in death. But this prophet remained sure that all these dry bones would suddenly spring into life. I listen into the silence of my imagination. I stand up and grab my walker, walk about the room, look out the window. Everywhere there is no one. Suddenly the ranting of the prophet tells their bones to live. Is he also talking to my osteoporotic old bones? 

It doesn’t matter. I’m crying. I feel my elbows, my knuckles, wrists, fingers, on down to my ankles, feet and toes. I’m too old to kneel but I do kneel anyway, right down in front of my home altar table. I’m facing an aging crucifix. Jesus is on a cross, just hanging there like a jerk, one hand gone, the other limp. Nevertheless, Ezekiel’s words ring loud, screeching. My tears fall, until I sob. Save me.

*  *  *  *

Years ago when I went regularly on silent retreats at Mercy Center, I would visit their chapel late at night. I would kneel there, pour out my heart-prayers, and stare up at a large non-traditional crucifix created over twenty years ago by Sister of Mercy, Mary Daly. Instead of the drooping crucified dead body of Jesus, there is a huge and beautiful rose. How lovely, and loving, and beautiful.

*  *  *  * 

Time shifts and I’m back at my computer. I glance upward and there, taped to the wall, my own version of that crucified rose—thorns of my own life’s journey and all my hopes in one image with one message: I am a rose. You are too. We two rise.

 

2026.04.05 JESUS WEPT? Lyn G Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Do you ever wonder whether you wonder—maybe too much?

My maternal grandmother often said of me: “What is the matter with that child? She always asks too many questions. It’s plain rude!”  She would say such things as she herself stood up on the bed screeching for her daughter, my mother: “Peggeeeee, get the broom there’s a mouse in here!!

If I were a cartoonist, I would add the correct caption: EEEEEEEK!   

*  *  *  *  

I admit that as I read the Holy Bible I often feel like screeching EEEEK!— especially at ironically comic scenes like the one described by the prophet Ezekiel.  In my mind’s eye appears a scene in which the people of ancient Israel all gather around, faces upturned, to listen to one of the great biblical prophets tell them good news of hope—all about a valley of dried up brittle bones that suddenly leap up, find their proper attachment bones and joints, ready for their God to breathe LIFE into the buried hopes of ancient Israel. My own heart beat faster as I envisioned myself at the scene. Then suddenly I’m humming a Negro Spiritual: “Dem bones, dem bones dem dry bones. Now hear the Word of the Lord!”

My own mother used to hold me in her arms when I was an infant/toddler as she danced about the room singing about dem bones. 

Is that not how ancient words come to life and lift our hearts thousands of years later?  The circumstances are different, the enlivening spirit the same. 

*  *  *  * 

Yes, but that’s in the OLD testament, some people, especially airtight Christians, would say. What about Jesus? He was an itinerant Jew living in ancient Israel who taught his people how to understand and to live the Torah, the historical story of Jewish identity and teachings, all their laws, and much more. Jesus was called “Rabbi” and was itinerant. He traveled on foot all over these ancient lands we call Israel. People followed—longing for wonders, begging for healing, desperate for belonging with security.  

Jesus had to be a fascinating interpreter and inspirational speaker, because everywhere he went, people of many languages, creeds, fears, and plain need, listened and followed, eager to know more and more about what?  THEMSELVES.

Many followers came away healed of diseases of all kinds, yet no one knew how that happened.  

You can read all about it in god knows how many different interpretations of Scriptures, and rules, and religions—all claiming the truth, none possessing all of it, and few daring to admit ignorance!  In fact, the more we insist we know, the more ignorant and foolish we actually become, imagining we can tie down Mystery itself.

Be wary of experts who boast, yet heed the witness of people who have been healed and avoid bragging.

  *  *  *  *

I’d say no one knows in the sure and factual way for which we clamor. When I read the fourth gospel I always think it’s too wordy. And this John wrote much later in chronological time than the other three New Testament gospel writers. Are they ALL right?  Some are? Which ones? Scholars have written much wisdom about all this, and yet here I am at 87 years old, with many years of good education, ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, etc.etc.—and  still I’m not sure I know just how Divinity works. 

Even Jesus had no answer that satisfied, so he cried. Yes, he shed tears when he heard the news that his best friend Lazarus was near-death. Also, in part because he had chosen to fit just one more healing miracle in before he rushed on to save the life of his very best friend, Lazarus. In that moment of delay/procrastination, Lazarus died AND Jesus wept. BOTH—one and the same. It’s laughable, no?

I don’t pretend to comprehend this fierce union—this bond between GRACE AND GRIT. I also love the truth that Jesus like me is BOTH saint and sinner at once—ALL incarnate in human flesh, NONE restricted to a single religion or perspective.   

Today in Jerusalem there is atop the Western slope of the Mount of Olives a church, named Dominus Flevit (The Lord Wept) shaped like a teardrop. No/YES.

2022.02.22 TRADITION? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

When we returned from an HSO (Hartford Symphony Orchestra) Concert) I fell into the sleep of heavenly rest, some churches actually identify with such a tom- fool idea!

The concert was so beautifully orchestrated as to be mesmeric—hypnotic enough for us to pause for breath, then rush over to our favorite Asian food restaurant to be spoiled by good food and better wine. Now quite besotted, I fell into deep sleep— enough to awaken my soul to dream impossibilities alive.

I now understand the experience of near-death experiences. When we arrived   home later in the cold, all we could do was fiddle with the TV to naught, then roll into bed where I slept the sleep of insatiability, a sleep of such vulnerability, a sleep from which only LOVE will arise.

*  * *  *

Yes, some will oversleep!

* *  * *

So do lovers when enchanted by the music of Prokofiev—cold, precise, and alluring all at once.  A “theatrical concert” this one was called—an art form as delicate and fierce as a memoir in which the author/star is born into a world of family dysfunction, fierce enough to be life-threatening to young lovers/LOVE itself. You know them well: Romeo and Juliet…..

The full symphony orchestra posed as the “backdrop” for a young black-skinned lover/tenor, Romeo no less. And Juliet, a slim, barefoot, tremblingly childlike ashen-white woman, desperately racing about in hide-and-seek fashion as she appeared suddenly in a balcony, then tucked into an onstage bed, moved according to the storyline. I froze waiting/hoping for the familiar lines: “Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

The musical story of a romance between two lovers so hypnotically attracted that they shocked to life an entire culture, not to mention erupting the slumber of  dysfunctional families, even whole societies struggling to be/stay fully awake like these two frantic young lovers grasping at embodied love within the context of acutely rigidified familial and cultural dysfunctions. 

*  *  *  *

I tell you it’s more difficult than trying to find your own identity —not through another but within another.  And yet unflinchingly we reach, and fail, and reach again, for this is LOVE. 

2026.02.08 WHAT TO DO NOW? Spiritual Lemons blog post, Lyn Brakeman

I don’t know about you, but I often emit an internal howl!!  

No one but me can hear me, unless of course the HEAVENLY HOST have ears as all good choruses do. Their vocabulary of course is limited to words like ALLELUIA—or alternatively HOSANNA.

I am old by traditional measures, that is 87. I’ve had spinal surgery to strengthen my spine and protect it from more deterioration thanks to osteoporosis, that too a gift of genetics + AGING. I have nagged and kvetched to the top administrative staff of the residence where I live whose mission is to provide ALL levels of care for elderly folks to “age in place–independently.”   

Aging I am. BUT I will LOSE my independence at a rate I do not control, despite fantasies to the contrary. 

In short, I tell you a mystery I cannot solve with even the best of rational  acrobatics. BUT I do talk every day to those who travel this way with me, especially my beloved husband, my own adult children and grandchildren, and friends, both old and new.  AND when I can I continue to act as the listening chaplain I used to be in hospitals, and the one I lobby-in-place for here now among aging people. 

Oddly, one of the most important aspects of a chaplain’s job anywhere is MOBILITY–moving about, taking in the many scenes, using all senses, taking in the world of Being itself all around me. I am free to follow the quiet breath sounds, even gentle snoring.  I don’t mean being free to follow a job geographically, but rather free to listen and accompany the breath of souls.

I’m an introvert. Some would call me shy and others would say I’m nosy. I’ve always had one, or maybe 2-3 close trusted friends, with whom I travel. You could call me a snob—or a born chaplain. 

A chaplain wanders, roams, listens for loneliness, yearning, leans into the silence of divine quietude, beckoning or simply being present.  

2026.02.25 THE INTIMATE ULTIMATE VALUE OF CHAPLAINCY. Spiritual Lemons, Lyn Brakeman blog post

I was a chaplain in big city hospitals, including a treatment center for recovering addicts. I had to self-advocate with the Director of the center. Yes, I will organize counselors and groups for all kinds of issues and will supervise staff on request. No, chaplains do not sell any single religion; instead we acknowledge, advocate, and serve as a presence on staff to acknowledge and care for and about spiritual health—connectedness to a Higher Power, the intimate value of Soul, and Prayerfulness.  

I impressed myself!

“But these people often feel lost and angry at the church or alienated. They don’t want any religion!” the Director said.  

Imagine having to lobby for God? But lobby I did, and LO! The Center magically found the money to hire me as a part-time chaplain, and even make room for a small private office—no, not a closet—with a nameplate on the door, saying CHAPLAIN. I was only part-time, so I had to make sure that I honored the self-definition I’d designed with such jaunty bravado.

*  *  *  *  

My very first patient was a young girl in her late twenties. She didn’t knock but barged into my small office, sat down, crossed her arms, frowned, and did not respond to my gushingly friendly greeting. I idiotically asked her why she was here, and she exploded.”I don’t need any goddamn god shoved down my throat!!”  I said a quiet little prayer to this “goddamn god” and pushed back: “What do you need?”  “Nothing from you, you goddamn religious freak!” 

Well okay then . . . 

I ushered her out, resisting my urge to kick her butt.  Then I went to the bathroom for a private cry all my own. God, help me! I thought to quit. I was inadequate. I cannot do this job. Why did I ASK to be called chaplain!  I straightened up and said to myself, “Well, fuck her, too!”  Then I went to see the Director to resign and and failed at that, too. On the way home I felt my spine tighten up and I cursed God as I drove. “Dammit, where were you when I needed you?” 

Hearing nothing from God, receiving lots of love and loving from the omnipresent stuffed fluffy owl-of-my-soul. I regained strength enough to stay on, to be a chaplain, to become what my first patient hated, and even to wear my favorite necklace, a gold cross with an empty space where the crucified body of Jesus usually was. I learned to say the F word when absolutely necessary. Such an opportunity arose during my Spirituality talk.  A young black man blasted God with the F word, and I returned the favor: “Shut up and sit down, Sir. I’ve listened to your bullshit. Now it’s time for you to sit down, shut the f**k up, and listen to mine!”  He sat down and grinned. Sometimes, you just have to use language—the kind we still bowderlize with * * as if that worked!                                                                                                        

*  *  *  *

Chaplain Margaret Kibben, now acting chaplain of the House of Representatives, has spent much of her long career as a U.S. Navy chaplain in camouflage. Often it has been the sailors and Marines she has ministered to who haven’t always known how to decipher exactly who they are meeting. 

In a recent interview, Kibben recalled a day in the late 1990s at Camp LeJeune, in North Carolina, when she overheard a Marine ask a comrade, “Who the * * * *was that?” Later in the day, after learning that Kibben was a chaplain, he asked, “Hey chaplain, got a minute?” It led to a chance for them to speak privately about his personal challenges.

“For me, that is quintessential chaplaincy,” said the Presbyterian Church (USA) minister and former chief of chaplains of the Navy, the 26th person and the first woman to fill the role. “You are where it matters, when it matters, with what matters. And sometimes the ‘when’ goes over a whole day, sometimes the ‘where’ takes you on a hike and into a camp post, but wherever or whenever you are, you’re there with what matters, and that’s an ear and a safe place and an opportunity to let that person be who they are and to be received with love and grace and mercy in those moments.”  (from Religious News Services RNS)

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This is why I advocate for chaplaincy services for ALL people, aging or drunks or teens or kindergarteners. It is omni-important to use the title Chaplain, because it indicates that this person has religious training and identity alongside psychological training. 

I am now aging. I live with people in a community for all people who are aging in place—independently. I know that there are many challenges for this group, and I know how proud they/we are about NEVER needing as much help as they/we really do and admitting that trifold care for body, mind and spirit is non-denominationally religious. 

Aging with grace is our last job on this earth. So let’s do it with both grit and grace and without fear!