2025.03.30 A Famous Story—Now and Forever. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Last night I dreamed about the parable called The Prodigal Son. When I woke up I had this sentence at the front of my mind:  Let go of your prideful ego and discover your famished soul. 

My first feeling was annoyance, and then I began to wonder if the sentence itself was prodigal, that is wasteful or extravagant especially with pride?  My mother was amazingly prodigal with my father’s hard-earned salary. Once I saw Dad cry about money, and once he cried prodigal tears over the dog he loved who obviously failed to look both ways before he raced across the road and was killed by a prodigal car that never even stopped! My little sister could easily have done the same thing, and it would have mysteriously been my fault for not watching her, because I was engrossed in my favorite book—prodigally!

You see what I mean about the many and varied complications this very prodigal parable invites. This is why so many preachers glibly blame Divinity itself, because of course Jesus had just told them about it all. Puffed up with pride, the disciples went forth, forgetting Jesus’s own favorite words: FEAR NOT.

*  *  *  * 

As I age I feel proud of myself even though I cannot mobilize like I once did. After all, I have survived. I remember my name. I still can lobby for all kinds of good things. My husband and I still love each other……. prodigally. I can laugh even at myself tottering along at 86. I pray that my adult children forgive me some of my own prodigality as they enjoy their own. 

*  *  *  * 

I’m not really starving, and yet when I die, God, please fill my famished soul. I suppose there’s one of those paradoxes often found in biblical story: the less you strive for pride the more you discover you have.  In fact I can read the entire Holy Communion/Eucharist as a paradox: we pray hard for the salvation we also acknowledge that we already have!   

I’m not really starving, yet when I die, God, please feed my famished soul anyway.  Thanks! 

FIGS ALMIGHTY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 3/23/25

Have you ever eaten a fig?  I have, and honestly, it wasn’t very delicious—too sweet. overloaded with seeds and with a tough consistency, not unlike the skin of an aging person, like me. Downright seedy!  (Luke 13:1-13)

I pinched the skin on the top of my hand  just to test this figgy metaphor, and LO!—my skin did NOT pop right back to smoothness. It actually waited in an ornery way for me to move my hand or touch it to make it smooth again. With horror, I imagined a day when I might not be able to re-smooth my aging hand, and it would be figgy and seedy forever.

Irritated with Jesus and his dumb parabolic analogies, I repeated my skin-pinching several times. It just made me annoyed, furious, to be honest. I felt like the disciples might have felt. They were committed to following him, because he just might be THE Messiah God promised Jews and everyone. Raw deal! Damn!  

I didn’t get the parabolic lesson. I hated it! What the bejesus IS the point anyway? I pinched my hands until they hurt, so I kissed them. Only then did my tears squeeze out. 

How beautiful is the fig tree that ripens and bears fruit in its time—in its time. Annoyed as it gets me, I do love the subtle wisdom of Jesus’s pace in life—steady and sure and patient all the way to Jerusalem, trial, death, and risen life. I always want to push it, hurry it. 

When I do I usually “trip”.   

MIRACLE. MUDDLE. MYSTERY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 2025.03.18

We are still in the midst of wearing green and celebrating St. Patrick who wasn’t really Irish. But you know these things happen, don’t you? 

Back in the sixth century Patrick traveled to Ireland on assignment: Convert these pagans to Christianity. What Patrick did, however, was to endear the Irish people to himself and he to them. Rather than confront them with an agenda to convert, he got to know them. He familiarized himself with their pagan ways and rituals. These pagans always used the sun as an image of Divinity. Patrick therefore incorporated that bright roundness onto the Christian cross.  To the people he was saintly simply because he respected them and their local traditions. 

If only we all could behave like Patrick and simply listen to each other with respect not agenda. DO NOT try to convert anyone to your own ways. Listen. Take the relational way, the way of letting-be. Patrick honored the pagan ways and used their own imagery. Here, for example, is a Celtic Cross with the round sun, favorite pagan symbol, superimposed onto it. 

Poet and devout Roman Catholic, the late Brian Doyle, demonstrates this way in his prayers, addressing Divinity as Coherent Mercy. Doyle minces no words in his prayer-talk. 

Prayer of Spitting Inchoate Rage That You Allow Such Things & People to Inflict Such Horrendous Pain & Agony, Especially on Little Kids, How Could You Let That Happen? Most of us secretly wonder about such mysteries but few of us let God know as directly as Brian Doyle does. I usually quiet my rage by reminding myself that God, after all, gave us freedom. Doyle knows all about this freedom, too, but he goes directly to God with his prayer-complaint: “How could You have given us such freedom? But you did; and so my prayer must be finally for me, to work harder against the dark, to sing louder, is that right? Your silence is eloquent again ‘as always’ as always. And so: amen. 

2025.03.09 BIG TENT/LENT SERENITY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

The Serenity Prayer—all of  it, written in 1951 and still so needed!

God, give me grace to accept with serenity 

the things that cannot be changed, 

Courage to change the things which should be changed, 

and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. 

Living one day at a time, 

Enjoying one moment at a time, 

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, 

Taking, as Jesus did, 

This sinful world as it is, 

Not as I would have it, 

Trusting that You will make all things right, 

If I surrender to Your will, 

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, 

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.

Noted American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was born over in Wright City, MO on June 21, 1892. He graduated from Eden Seminary in 1913 and also earned degrees from Yale Divinity School (1914, 1915). At Eden, Professor (later President) Samuel Press, who is the namesake of the school’s main building, particularly influenced Niebuhr. Ordained in the Evangelical Synod in 1915, Niebuhr was a pastor in Detroit and went on to teach at Union Theological Seminary. He authored books like "The Nature and Destiny of Man" and "Moral Man and Immoral Society."

2025.03.02 IT IS WELL WITH MY SOUL, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll—

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know

It is well, it is well with my soul.

This old hymn rings inside me. It is both as grand as an operatic tenor in full voice, and as minuscule as the flutter of one wing of one tiny lady bug making her way slowly across the carpet going nowhere or other.

I am supposed to prepare myself for the somber season of Lent. I am supposed to notice transfigurations. And yet what seizes my soul is sound— voices and sounds all around me‚ all within me, some timid and hushed and some booming with rage and frustration. I listen to all these voices. I hear the sounds of silence, my late first husband’s favorite song. I sorrow his tears, my heart cries too. 

The lyricist of this old hymn, Horatio Spafford, lost all his real estate investments in the Chicago fire of 1871. His toddler son died of scarlet fever, and his four daughters died in a collision at sea while crossing the Atlantic. His wife survived and wrote to her husband, “Saved alone. What shall I do?” Horatio set sail to go to her and, while crossing, the ship’s captain told him they were just passing over the spot where the shipwreck had occurred. 

These words flooded Spafford’s soul. Mine too, the tears and fears of all the years.   

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll—

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know

It is well, it is well with my soul.