DANGEROUS TERRITORY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 9/21/25

Honestly, I despise some of the impossible choices this supposedly “good” Divinity imposed on the starving people of ancient Israel: choose money/wealth or me. It’s a merciless, manipulative, and dizzying choice. I would definitely, like Abraham, try to bargain. I’m very good at nagging, and less good at trusting God to provide as promised.

* * * *

The retirement community where I now live showed the movie “Barbie” recently. I wanted to go. I wanted to go enough that I debated trying to reschedule my appointment for physical therapy to strengthen my legs and spine. My husband said he’d buy the movie so we could view it at home together. Then I thought, What the hell are you thinking, girl? You’re back in junior high school! 

NEVERTHELESS……………..

In the Old Testament there is a story of old Abraham’s relentless bargaining trying to get God to say just exactly how far one could carry on with sin before encountering divine wrath.  The scene in Genesis is hilarious as Abraham pursues Yahweh relentlessly. Would the Great Divine Creator actually break the covenant and abandon Israel to their own devices?

I actually felt sorry for God with Abraham’s nagging. As a parent of course I identify. You’d do anything, even indulge in sin yourself,  just to shut this or that kid up. 

I had made a solemn vow never to allow the latest doll creation into our house. I remember that I’d banned this best selling “toy” from our house.  I don’t even recall being nagged about the latest specimen of doll. All I recall is that I despised this latest icon of how I should look. 

ENVY!  

ENVY is one of the seven deadly sins. Within ten years I’d birthed four children and my flesh sagged and bagged—no perky boobs or waspish waist—ever.  But did I really want to look like this doll? 

DAMN! Am I still plagued by the sin of ENVY, a green-eyed monster or a small slim icon from the 50’s?  I felt foolish, tears forming in my eyes. Still, I am sure of one thing, and that is that the man to whom I have plighted my troth in marriage would just give me a hug and, yes, call me silly without joshing me—much.

2025.08.03 SPIRITUALITY 101, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

As I look out my window and stare at the natural beauty all around us, I wonder how much the divine Creator appreciates this particular piece of art?

The way many of us treat our beloved earth, the way we too often treat each other with scorn or neglect, and our financial excesses, all cause me to wonder.  If I could I would sign up for yet one more academic class in Art 101, Music 101, or World Literature 101. AND I would start a new course called Spirituality 101. 

Oh, how unbearably trite, and yet…………….what is it that makes your very soul ache or your mind go blank even as you feel  surges of joy?  ALL AT ONCE!

The entire display of Creation is at risk, and it is the most beautiful gift Divinity ever gave us. Do you know this? The Earth all by itself is at risk, and it is the most beautiful gift Divinity gave us. Do we know this? The Earth all by itself has charisma—grounded charisma. Charisma derives from a Latin word for kharis which means favor or grace.

In ancient biblical tradition, the patriarch of all things spiritual, Abraham, asks, then begs the Creator for this gift—a better understanding of the divine mind. God ignores Abraham’s begging as a good parent ignores a child’s pleading for just one more cookie—pleeze, puleeze.

This is how I feel these days when I pray and get confused between what I want, what someone else wants, what supposed experts say they want, and what I THINK God might want. Then I create a prayer and make a choice—with hope. 

2023.07.02 NO! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

A child, about six or seven, once asked me after church, after hearing the grim story in Genesis 22 of Abraham preparing to make a burnt offering of his only beloved son, Isaac.

“Did this really happen?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then why do we read it in church?”

“The biblical readings are meant to teach us something about God.”

“I learned that God was a really bad Dad.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t you listen? God told Abraham to burn up his own son.

“But Abraham didn’t do it, did he?”

“No, but it was close.”

“Why didn’t Abraham do it?” I asked this delightfully inquisitive child. 

I waited and wondered what the child would say next. There was a long, long pause. I stayed quiet. The child was waiting for me to solve this problem for him. I waited. Maybe five minutes passed before the child said anything. He looked up at me before he finally said.

“Because God finally said NO Way?

I nodded.

“Still it took God waaaay too long, right?”

“Yes,” I said.  

*  *  *  *

Back in the late 1980s, it took me a long time to say NO to significant pressure I thought was from God but which really was from the diocesan bishop’s expectation that, after ordination, I would go into full-time parish ministry to help with the shortage of parish clergy. I tried. The parishes I served were authentically appreciative of my ministry with them. I wasn’t bad at the task of managing a small business on volunteer giving the Church calls “stewardship.” I felt as if every sermon secretly functioned like a report card. Whether that was true or not, I knew parish ministry was not for me. I only wanted to be a priest of Word and Sacrament, not a rector. So I said NO. When I left that parish and parish ministry, they presented me with a white stole, hand sewn and delicately embroidered with dates and gratitude for my ministry with them and blessings for my future. 

*  *  *  *

When you go against traditional expectations as Charles Darwin did, you take huge risks. Darwin published his 1859 book On The Origin of Species, saying NO to scientific and religious declarations about his sanity, and NO to the theology of his day that insisted on the omnipotence of God, Creation being the evidence of the same. Darwin went as an unpaid companion on an expedition with Robert Fitzroy, Captain of the HMS Beagle. On the journey to South America, they landed in Rio and stayed till June, 1832. Darwin became ill in sweltering 103-degree temperatures in the tropics but was cured by “cinnamon and port wine.”  This remedy still works I’m told!

On the trip he sampled all kinds of animals, even iguanas, armadillos and agouti rodents, proving that his species could survive and evolve, alongside all kinds of others evolving by natural selection. Darwin’s theory has been misconstrued to mean the survival of the fittest, but he wrote about naturally evolved ingenuity, the development of new traits, and the willingness of the human species to ask questions, take chances, observe closely, and realize that the ONE God created and blessed ALL of it to co-exist. (I confess to swatting mosquitoes, trapping mice, and squishing some wee crawling bugs. I notice they all seem to increase and multiply anyway.)   

When Darwin came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar, to be eaten alive by the grubs after hatching, the event alone challenged his belief in God. He wrote:  “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” 

So Darwin said NO to this omnipotent Divinity and YES to the God who chooses Love over Control. Darwin risked prison time when his theory was published. Was it denying God as THE Creator? NO, it advocated the growth of ALL creation. I, centuries later as a 21st century woman, believe that the one God delights in the evolving of all Life including its risks and uncertainties.  

Apparently, so did the Buddha. Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877, took a trip in 1911 to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published. He wrote: "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.”  I said YES.

As a parent I learned this lesson early. If I prevented every fall a toddler took while she or he was learning to walk, he or she would never have learned to walk or how to fall and then get up. I also learned how hard it is to love and let go, hard to say NO. I made many mistakes trying to balance the two. I often erred on the side of permissiveness. In time, I said NO to over-mothering, did plenty of under-mothering and exercised my own God-given freedom to evolve.

*  *  *  *

P.S. No God in His Almighty right mind OR heart, would ever authorize the kind of stupid parenting Abraham tried to exercise by sacrificing Isaac. 

God said NO! 

 

My "Racism"—Anecdotal History. Part Sixteen. Living Into Immanence.

Today is Sunday, and we priest spouses read and prayed and broke bread together. When I read aloud yet without a congregation, I sink into the text. I envision and dramatize it. Today I read the familiar story in II Kings about the Shunammite widow and the prophet Elisha. In short, the wealthy widow who had often offered the wandering prophet hospitality, now all but scoffed at the idea that she might need something to repay her generosity. I’m fine, she said. (How many times do we say that when we know it is not quite true?)

Elisha, however, is compulsive and insists on recompense. She is cheeky, calls Elisha’s prophetic bluff, and boldly tells him not to mess with her In God’s name, Elisha pushes his luck. The women gets pregnant, bears a son, loves him like crazy and of course he dies. (I say "of course" because biblical stories always take treacherous turns.) The mother, in a raging sorrow, chases after Elisha. “Did I ask you for a son, O prophet? Did I not tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?’ ”

You would think Elisha being a bit of an amateur, would give up, but no, he carries it to extremes. He ends up stretching his warm body onto the son’s cold dead body—twice. Like any good miracle it works out against all odds. The story shot me back to a time in my life when I felt like the Shunammite.


Scene XLVIII.  Sinking In

I’d experienced the thrill of pushing life into the world with the force of my uterus—my womb alive/creating. Childbirth had reconnected me with God in my flesh—immanent in a forceful, profoundly painful, fruitful way. I had children to love. The sprawling blossoming lives of my four children kept me alive as I pursued the God I knew as a child, in my children, and now I needed more—for myself.

I entered a decade of death—my youngest sister died in 1979; the parish priest and my chief supporter left; Dad died in 1983; my divorce from my husband of twenty years was finalized in 1983; I had suffered rejection in the ordination process in the Episcopal church in 1978 and 1981.

My chosen vocational course was left in a shambles of doubt, my self-love dwindling, and my soul trembling with fear and rage. I had no idea who I was, where I would go, who I could love. Many people in grief lose their grip on their connection with faith or God or theology, but— paradoxically or ironically or both—mine strengthened. I continued to pursue God’s identity with foolish yet honest greed as if I could contain, possess, ground, or at least secure Divinity.  

How odd that my frantic search for God would be my anti-racism training—or part of it anyway.

Scene XLIX. Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit

“The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God . . .”  (I Cor. 2:10b)  This phrase leapt off the thin crinkly page of my overused Bible. It was a phrase from  St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. I engaged with this passage because it was central to a course I was taking,  and because it contained a spirituality that ran deep—as deep as the very soul of God Godself. Paul’s teaching went on and on as Paul does, but my grabby soul latched onto this one phrase as salvation.  

The course was offered by a favorite professor, Luke Johnson. It was  a journal course on experiential theology with no required reading, so students flocked to it. “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit” based its premise on the biblical phrase that had hooked me. I was ready to let the Spirit run wild. I was running wild by then, too. Was I led by the Spirit or was the Spirit leading me? To me these felt different. I never found out—exactly.

We heard lectures on big, fat, unmanageable theological words— grace, holy, faith, sin, idolatry, prayer, possessions, sexuality and gender, anger, freedom, truth—then wrote our own experiences of these ideas.

I had to let go of the tyranny of my intellect. I couldn’t think my way out of this, so I wrote and it hurt.

Scene L. The Organizing Power of the Holy: Life Narrative.

“God is in me from my beginning.” That was my first sentence. I elaborated a bit on  immanence, but then I suddenly wrote: “I am early aware that God in me is hard on me.” What? If this Spirit searched into the depths of God as if by torch and searchlight, then there seemed no escape from this Spirit—even for God. I wanted such intimacy and distrusted my worth. I wanted to know once again that I mattered in the flesh. Where was Holy? Luke said that the Holy had organizing power. Organizing? I needed internal organization. I just hadn’t counted on such a right-brain process.

Without warning I wrote about black Carol Lee and the painful compromise I’d made to exclude her from my birthday party, because I wanted it to be at our racist white beach club. Was that holy? I wrote: “Part of the little-girl-God in me dies. Is God black?”  

Memory: My second daughter Jill had a horrifying sledding accident when she was about eight. I had left the three oldest children with my parents and taken the baby to visit friends in lower Connecticut. Jill and her cousin were thrilled with the snow. Jill slid on an ice patch and ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. Screaming and covered with blood, she ran back to the house for help, her frightened cousin right behind her, calling, “Jill, are you all right?” Jill was not all right. When she got to the house Ether opened the door and sprang into action at the sight. She grabbed Jill up into her strong arms, got towels, yelled for my father who came running. He drove as fast as he dared to the hospital, and Ether sat in the back seat holding Jill . She pressed her head to stanch the bleeding. Jill later told me: “She held my head so hard against her body, like she was holding me together.” At the hospital a brilliant plastic surgeon named Dr. Platt stitched Jill’s face up and saved her eyes.

Ether was black. Dr. Platt was a woman. Is God black and female? Yes.

The memory about Jill’s accident came to me when I was writing my journal chapter on Faith: Obedience and Creative Fidelity. We were supposed to focus on Jesus, but Abraham came to mind. In the story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac in order to prove his faith God stopped Abraham from faithful obedience—just in time. God loved Abraham more than his obedient faith, and Abraham loved God unlimitd by obediential demands.

I wrote: “God is going against himself in this request and call. God has asked Abraham to disobey him, to choose against the promise. But God himself is more important to Abraham than God’s promise. How about that? God is not defined by his promise!”  Professor Luke wrote in the margins: “Yes. Good.”

Was I getting God? Did I have the Holy? My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. My daughter Jill helped me again. She by now was seventeen and expressing angry feelings, telling me she did not feel loved. When I asked what she wanted she said she wanted to go see our family therapist with just me. I felt afraid, but we went and Jill blurted out: “I feel second best. You value your church activities more than me.”  

I made explanations.The therapist invited Jill to keep repeating her feelings. I was locked up inside my own fears and wrote: “She was hurt, and I was getting a bandaid. I couldn’t open myself to her wound without sacrificing my faithful obedience to my own “good mother” illusion.” I had made an idol of my motherhood. The ordination committee had told me that I could not be a good mother and a good priest at once. A “dual vocation” they called it. I wrote: “In fact, what blocked me in that process (ordination) was the same thing that was so painfully blocking me with Jill. I had made an idol of my motherhood. . . . I could not be creatively faithful to what was my real love as a parent to Jill, because I was being destructively faithful to my self as a perfectly caring and loving mother.”  
                                   *  *  *  * 

To be a mother is no more or less holy than to be a priest. All I had to do was choose, I thought. To be black or a woman was no more or less holy than to be white. But I couldn’t choose my sex or the color of my skin. Could God? More tears, more years, my search continued, but for today right now, this.
            
    The grace of God cannot be fixed
    or fastened to a sanctioned spot;
    when we move as the Spirit moves,
    there is no place where God is not.  
                 Michael Hudson, text. Doxology/Eighth Tune

2019.07.28 Do You Pray?

Let us pray. Let us pray. Let us pray. Oh God, let’s pray. Do you pray?

A teenage granddaughter once asked me, with a flounce of her head and a challenge in her voice: Grammy why do you pray? I was suddenly stunned and stumped and said the first thing that popped into my mind: I pray because I love. She made no comment but I kept on obsessing. Maybe I should have said I pray because GOD loves. Then I thought: Well, what is the difference? Aren’t we immersed in God’s love all the time? And God in ours? Is all Creation not God’s prayer?

Most prayer is lowly, earthbound, unsteady, even precarious. At the same time it deserves the highest reverence and the greatest praise. Sometimes I wonder if we take it for granted.

All living things pray in particular ways as everything reaches and stretches for love and life. Prayer is paying attention to that desire, noticing its variations, sinking into it, allowing its energy to connect you with what/who really matters to you and to God. 

Prayer, however, can be a touchy topic—loaded you might say. News commentator host of the WGBH’s nightly Greater Boston, Jim Braude, recently commented that to pray, as Speaker Pelosi did for our president and our nation in divisive times, was “smarmy.” Smarmy? I became immediately indignant and fired off a letter telling Braude his comment itself was smarmy and that he knew nothing about prayer.  I heard nothing back of course. Maybe he thought that all such prayer was condescending. How does he know?

Word nerd that I am, I looked up the words. Did you know that the Latin root for prayer is the same as the root of precarious?  Precarious prayer?  If I pray because I love, then it is precarious as hell, because love is precarious. I put my soul on the line when I really care, care enough to pray, to risk exposing my heart. And then what? I never know.

Abraham, for example, checks with God about Sodom and Gomorra. What’s God’s plan here? Is it really to destroy everyone in these putatively evil cities? Is God vengeful, wrathful? Some people today assume this is how God is too? Abraham “comes near” to God with his questions. NOTE: God listens AND responds as Abraham argues his case, over and over he asks: what if not everyone in these cities is sinful as charged? Abraham is assured that the God, who has made covenants of belonging and love, will not destroy everyone if just one measly righteous person is therein alive. We think God tests Abraham? No, it is Abraham who more often tests God.

Abraham’s prayer style is conversational, an inner dialogue. Mine is the same. I, like Abraham, learn something about myself, about love, and about God when I pray this way. Outcomes are rarely exactly as I pray. The same is true for Jesus. He taught his disciples to use the basic structure of the Jewish prayer we call The Lord’s Prayer. He also elaborated about love-on-the-ground: if your child or someone you love asks for fish would you give a snake? No. For the sake of love you’d bend heaven and earth to give what is asked, even if it has to be stale bread or peanut butter because you can’t afford fish. You give in the spirit of love as you pray like crazy.

You know how to work this ethic in your personal life. You know how to work this ethic in your politics. Prayer may be precarious as love is, but it is not loving when energized with the spirit of venom. Listen to Rachel Maddow. Listen to Rush Limbaugh. Their causes and goals differ, but the venom behind their “preaching” is the same.

Prayer is a precarious love song. Ask, incessantly for exactly what you want. Heck, even our  public communal prayers are direct and bold, in manicured language, yes, but still we ask: God save the world, heal the sick, love the sinners, bless the dead. These are down-to-earthly love prayers. Pay attention to what happens, however small and however obvious. 

One of my sons, John, moved recently into a new neighborhood. He has two children Phoebe, 11 and Dylan, 5. They all felt the initial awkwardness of being strangers in a brand new neighborhood. The children sat with TV and their tablets, and Dad wondered and worried. Then the doorbell rang. Phoebe jumped up and ran to open the door, Dylan hot on her heels. There on the front stoop stood a group of young children. They chirped in chorus: “Hi. Do you play?”

Do you pray? Do you let it be precarious, wholly true, bold and direct?  “God, please be with my newly divorced son. He didn’t want this. Now he’s grieving, and trying to be a single dad to two young kids who miss their one-and-only home and so wish their parents were together, and they can’t make it happen.”
  
Who knew God would appear at the door and say: Do you play? 

2011.11.09 God Talk and the Akedah

I don’t know why theology has always fascinated me. I suppose it’s a mystery I can’t grasp and can’t stop trying to, anyway.

Some Christians I imagine think that the idea of grace/free will cooperation for the good started with them, or at least the New Testament Jesus. But it’s more ancient than that.

I’ve been reading Bruce Feiler’s book Abraham, a fascinating and beautiful read. He writes about what I call the story of the gasp heard round the world, the story in Genesis 22 (called the Akedah in Hebrew) about the near-sacrifice or the binding of Isaac, as most Christians call it—and use it to condemn the God of the Old Testament as if there were two Gods.

Abraham heard God ask him to give his son Isaac as a burnt offering apparently to TEST the solidity of Abe’s faith.

There have been many interpretations of this theological horror story. Who would do such a thing? What kind of God is this? Where was the mother? This is Holy Scripture?

My own favorite is that Sarah arranged with God to provide a ram for the burnt offering so Isaac, at the last-gasp minute, would escape unharmed but with a lifelong case of serious post-traumatic stress disorder. Abraham I thought had obviously made an incorrect discernment of God’s will.(My rational was obviously me trying to save God!)It happens all the time, and to the most prayerful of u, I'd say. Poor Abe.

But Feiler points out that in the story God does NOT ask Abe to kill his son but to OFFER him. Early Jews referred to the event as the OFFERING,not sacrifice or binding.

Think of the Offering in Church. Good season to think of what you can offer to help God create peace and justice.

“A potter doesn’t test defective jars, they would break. He only tests sound ones.” Such is the basis for a Talmudic interpretation that suggests that Abraham was testing God,not the reverse, see if "His" promise of continuing and multiplying Abe's line were the real deal.

Now that’s a role reversal.

The consequence of such a flip is that God is brought down to earth rather than Abe being elevated to heaven. Abe is the actor and God the reactor.

The theological boundaries are confused— or are they?

Feiler suggests that ABRAHAM BECOMES GOD’S PARTNER. They belong to each other.

“Their mutual trials completed, their love consummated, Abraham and God have now been irreparably fused.”

This is chilling and thrilling theology, a scandal to some: through trauma, God and Abraham became partners forever—humanity and divinity conjoined and blessed to work together to mend the world.

The New Testament will take that union into the flesh of Jesus.

All of this is POWER WITH, NOT POWER OVER theology—from way back. Talk it up
!