2022.11.13 What? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Be patient and do nothing extraordinary. Oh sure! I’m not that type, but thanks for the advice anyway. I’ll keep on trying till I bust, even when it seems as if I’m failing and flawed.

I have to admit this futility is some of what I have felt lately about our world, our country, our planet. I even stopped watching the news. I prayed and read the Bible over and over until everything looked the same to me, except the Psalms, well known for heart-rending laments. Mostly, I’ve felt dry and dull and edgy. 

I was reading a sentence in some book: “No one knew and no one knows.” I kept reading it over and over. Unexpectedly I suddenly felt real fear—real fear like a stab of lightning in my gut. What if this country stops being my home? What if the whole Earth just dies? I thought these thoughts were irrational, but there was nothing irrational about the knot of terror in my gut.

*  *  *  *

Then came Election Day, 2022. I went to bed without waiting up to see at least the first results. Strangely, I slept. 

Not until the evening did I listen to some news. Shocking! The American people went to the polls in record numbers. There was no youthful apathy. They voted. There was no violence. No one got shot. Political predictions of doom did not come true. Yes, the outcomes were according to my own hopes and party, but that wasn’t the point, just as winning is not always the point of a well run race. The point is that something very big had happened: WE happened. 

The American people, we the people, actually voted for our lives together and for our democracy. No one knew and no one knows exactly how or why this happened, despite many theories, stats, and pundits. And no one can predict the future, though many will try anyway.

Jonathan Capehart, PBS News Hour commentator, said “The American people proved they can walk and chew gum at the same time.”  The electorate chose Democracy, period. This could be the emergence of an anti-authoritarian move—proof that we actually know how to get things done without violence or noisy political bullying. 

My gut fear has been replaced by gratitude without reservation for being American.

Jesus told his panicky followers during apocalyptic times: Sit tight. Do nothing extreme. Trust the process. “By patient endurance you will save your lives.” (Luke 20:19) 

2021.10.17 Divine Immanence

Leaves fall down and die, and so do souls. Not to be moribund about divinity here, but I am thinking about theology. How important it is to stay aware—and pray aware—like the biblical Job did, of life’s shadowy sides, and God's role in the life of a faithful servant. God didn’t attack Job. Job discovered, or uncovered, God in the hollows of his own pain— the context of near-death dying when he could see nothing but darkness. God offered no explanation but only the divine Presence—up close and personal. It was enough for Job.   

Bumper sticker wisdom informs us: “Shit happens”.  Another bumper sticker carries another wisdom: “Grace happens.” But you never see this latter one, do you? The point is that both of these are true, and God is in both the bright and the shady, both the gloomy and the happy—and everything in between, the liminal area where most of us live most of the time. 

I get seduced easily by the happy joy-bomb, the happily-ever-after parade. People want to follow such pied pipers out of town, taking the rats with them. That’s what they thought they were doing I suspect when the early Jews followed Jesus. He tried to warn them, saying wet blanket things, such as: I’ve come to serve not to be served. OR I’ve come to die, not to live happily ever after. Yet they keep on following and asking. So do I.

A rewrite of an old Methodist hymn text popped into my mind recently, in part because I have been praying with someone who is going blind and who thinks VERY little of God. “Why did He make all this great world and then let it be so ugly and full of bad people?” she asks. I make all the obvious arguments for freedom’ed love, but I too wonder. Then these words came:  

Lead me, Lord, lead me in thy righteousness

Make thy way plain, within my heart.

Love me, Lord, love me in my weariness.

Love all my fears. Take me within your heart. 

Tune, 1861:Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley.

Text: The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021

Within these words, I retrieved and, dare I say, resurrected, the early theological doctrine defining the divine nature as Immanent—oh so close. We, both church and culture, in America, are dancing and dashing after the Transcendent God who we assume makes everything better by a sleight of divine magic, simple as kissing a “boo boo” all better. We have betrayed the doctrine of Immanence. We have created God in our own image.

The father of poet E.E Cummings, Edward Cummings, a cleric of vigor and punch, preached from the pulpit of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. He scared his listeners half to death, saying: 

“The kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden, it’s inside you!” 

The poet and son, Edward Estlin, was devastated when his father died in a car accident in the 1930s. He paid homage to his father in the poem, entitled, “my father moved through dooms of love.” 

Dooms of love.

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021  

2021.01.24 'Dom Ring

Today, the third Sunday of Epiphany for Christians, the New Testament Gospel tells the story of Jesus’s choosing his disciples, those he would train for a renewed way of being with God, self and neighbors. It was a Kairos time for his ministry on earth. It is now a Kairos time for us earthlings as we choose new leaders and plot new courses.
                                             *  *  *  *
The Greek language give us two words for time: chronos for clock-measurable time and Kairos for time that, for a variety of reasons, many unforeseeable, is simply opportune or favorable. Kairos time is neither measurable nor predictable, yet it is discernible— a time made special by a sense of one’s presence to oneself, all creation, and to the creator. Kairos is God’s time. It knows no bounds, has no measure, and is available to all Creation.

Most days are run by chronos. We are chased by, or chasing, time’s passage, racing against its inevitability as if it were in our control. Some of us run too fast and some too slowly. To accurately asses time and make room to notice Kairos occasions, we have to let go of the dominance of chronos, get conscious of what our own insides and our senses reveal.

What time is it now?
                                             *  *  *  *

When I was a child I begged my mother with annoying persistence: “Sing ‘Dom Ring’. Sing it again, Mommy.”  My mother, not particularly gifted with a singing voice, took a while to figure our what ‘Dom Ring’ meant, and not much longer to say: “Ask Daddy.”

Daddy did have a good voice. I knew this, because I saw pictures of him in lines of singing men dressed in fancy suits called tuxedos. They were called a glee club and named after a famous musician, Mendelssohn. Daddy was famous.   

There were no women in the group, but I was used to such displays of male importance, and besides my Daddy was the handsomest, even though he was mostly too tired to sing ‘Dom Ring’—to me.  ‘Dom Ring came from the British national anthem sung for their Queen, but America stole it, and I made it my personal favorite. Here is the first stanza.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freeDOM RING!

                                              *  *  *  *
Not given to paroxysms of patriotic zeal, episodes of urgent flag-waving or flag-burning, or seizures of praise-cheering in church, I have suddenly just now been twice overtaken by surges of patriotic fervor with echoes of “'Dom ring" flooding my heart. Both brought me to tears.

On the day of Epiphany, January 6, 2021, collective ignorance met collective rage. What appeared in full view was America against itself. The well-planned, presidentially-incited, white supremacist attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. was violent and horrifying. Many of us were asleep to this possibility, entirely unprepared for such an insurrection, operating on chronos time only. There hadn’t been time or will to organize such violence, many thought. Not in America, many said. We’re safe and secure here, politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainline Christians said. Our president wouldn’t allow such a thing, many said. This was unprecedented—and indeed it was. Nevertheless, we did have warning signs—misread, little heeded, and imagined to be isolated. I trembled and wept.

Then on January 20th, the United States inaugurated a new President—not chosen by dissent or the will of a dictator, but by the votes of record turnouts of voters. Many labored together, outside of political preferences, to make sure there was no voter fraud and that all vote counts were accurate. This was a Kairos-driven process—unexpected but crucial. The losing candidate finally left, declaring himself the “real” winner of a “stolen” election. He was deprived of nothing except the dignity of truth with humility. I worried and wept.

Would this inauguration come off free of violence, safely, without foreign or domestic interference, and within the structures of tradition?  For 13 days I’d held my breath and prayed like hell. I still held my breath as I watched Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Kamala Devi Harris, first black and Asian American woman to serve in executive office, swear on huge bibles, using God’s name, promising to uphold the principles of the Constitution as they held its highest office. This was indeed a Kairos within chronos event. This was a ‘Dom Ring moment. I exhaled and wept for joy.
                 
                                               *  *  *  * 

On that same day things came together in Kairos time for me personally:     

    1) My country chose Democracy over politics, Constitution over party, and leaders with integrity and a chronos-time commitment to American diversity truly represented in our government. 
    

    2) My husband and I received our first vaccine shots against a deadly virus.
    

    3)  One of my nephews, a long-time heroin addict, for whom I’d prayed incessantly, finally got clean and was willingly admitted to a local Suboxone clinic for treatment.
    

    4) President Biden proclaimed and embodied empathy and mutual respect for the dignity of all humankind and the whole created order, promises central to the baptismal covenant of The Episcopal Church in which I am a priest. America would UNITE NOT FIGHT! Biden’s “whole soul” was/is in this effort. Mine too.

    5) Amanda Gorman, age 22 and the youngest national youth poet laureate ever in this country, recited her brilliant inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”. (Not a grueling self-defeating hill like Sisyphus’s, nor a hill like Jack & Jill’s, down which Jill came tumbling after Jack, of course.) Besides her natural beauty and verve, Amanda Gorman, like Biden, has had to overcome a stutter. Now she preached a gospel of “right not fight”—irresistibly.  
    
    If we merge mercy with might, and might with right,
    then love becomes our legacy in change, our children’s birthright.

    With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
    we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

Maybe this nation, long enthralled with its own freedom, progress and self-love, is ready to turn itself inside out for the freedom, progress and self-love of others. Is that enough unity? Will freedom ring for us all?  We shall make it so—kairologically and chronologically—as we plot together the daily wonders of Epiphany.  

‘Dom Ring.
 


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We Voted. WE.

WE, this United States of America,  just voted on its next President, former vice president Joe Biden. We have voted in record numbers—yes, to a man, no, to another man/incumbent; yes, to a Democrat, no to a Republican; yes to the first woman/first black/first daughter of immigrants as vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, no, to an arch-conservative evangelical Christian vice-president/incumbent; yes, to a measured inclusive style of leadership, no to an authoritarian leader of excess. The voting went smoothly and deliberately. Every single vote was counted with care, efficiency, and I’d say with love for democratic process.

This is a lot of change at once—qualitative change. It’s easy to analyze the many whys and evaluate the numbers according to partisan politics and differing cultures. It’s easy to observe all the celebratory festivities on television screens, and easy to feel the general mood of those gathered to celebrate—HAPPY, simply happy. Fringes of discontent were likely present but went unnoticed. It is less easy to discern the larger picture—the deeper meaning of this historic vote—after all the minute statistical details that have provided exactitude are cleared away.

President-elect Joe Biden praised the cheering crowds, saying, as former President Obama did, “Yes, we can!” He added his hope for America now: “Lead by the power of our example not by the example of our power.”  

Further: We are the united States, not the red and blue states. Let us put away harsh rhetoric, marshal the forces of decency. Everyone needs a fair shot, just a fair shot. Let the moral arc of the universe move towards justice. It is now a time to heal, to mend, to love, as the biblical Ecclesiastes says.  Biden promised to be a unifier. He has the experience, the intelligence, the character and the personality to keep that promise. Specific plans are in the works to create teamwork and conversation.  This man knows how to cross the aisles. Good thing, because this was a close election in which Republicans did well and Democrats did well. Good for the whole.

Some of my own thoughts about broader, deeper meanings, especially those with racial implications:  
    -Partisanship itself is racist, because whites historically identify with one party, Republican, and blacks with the other, Democrat. I am not a blue person, and my favorite color is red. Blacks voted in high numbers this year. HOPE.
    -Whites are blind to the racial implications of party politics, mostly because they are concerned with what is happening with their money, taxes, and their classist lifestyle, safely bound to “whiteism”. Paying taxes is one way I contribute to that “fair shot” for all .
    -COVID is also racially tinged, mostly because black people suffer more from poverty and limited access to adequate healthcare benefits or good insurance benefits. This President-elect will immediately set up a diverse task force  just to focus on the best ways to eliminate a killer virus that knows no politics, no race, no gender, no creed.  
    -Reliance by the media on polls that assess political opinion and predict outcomes can also be racially tinged, because white college educated people respond to polls bringing their own biases, and black people are often not poll-responsive. Poll-driven statistics demand instant responses i.e., pick a detail, ask a question, and then expect a brief response.
    -American culture, it has been said, is anti-intellectual. This doesn’t mean that people are not intelligent, but that they are conditioned—by advertising, social media, i-phones, and many social media devices that provide instant stimulation and instant communications—to expect, if not demand, instantaneity. Deep and broad thinking accompanied by much conversation, listening, and exchange of ideas, is not a high cultural value. We live in a Skinnerian world of stimulus and response.
    -Religious fundamentalism contributes to this mindset. It is very selective about which texts one should live by in order to please God—and the local congregation. It discourages individual spirituality and exploration of biblical texts through prayer and the gentle guidance of spiritual direction.

The late Dorothy Day (1897-1980), convert to Roman Catholicism, activist, and founder of The Catholic Worker Movement, speaks of a politics for going forward in this Beatitude Kingdom we here call the United States of America. Day in 1934.

 

“What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute — the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words — we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

Dorothy Day admired America's efforts to take responsibility through the government, but ultimately felt that charitable works were personal decisions that needed the warmth of an individual. I’d say we need the best of both at work together. Day said: “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the Psalms.”

So does my own. Today’s morning prayer Psalm 96 (translated by Pamela Greenberg) begins:

“Sing out to God a new song
sing to God, all the earth.

And ends:

You will judge all people of the world justly,
all nations with steadfast truth.

By this I remember to honor each day with a new song—or mood—and to remember that there is only ONE JUST JUDGE—and it’s not me, or you, or even us.

2020.07.05 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Four. America?

We weren’t Catholic. I knew that because my mother said Catholics weren’t really American. Who was American? Was Carol Lee? Did she feel not American?  Is racism an American problem? 

July 4th was Independence Day. Americans were celebrating—with flag-waving and fireworks—our independence, our formation as a nation, a democracy.  How ironic it is for me to be writing about my own racism in 2020 when “Independence” the very definition of  our “dream” is NOT fully enjoyed by every American. I have no choice but to observe my world today and reflect on it in the light of my experience.  Am I American?


Scene X.  Phineas, Hairy Legs, and Mr. Fitz

There is probably no culture more cruel and life-threatening than that of a junior high school bus—that long orange monster that rolls around town and picks up strays who gather at a designated SCHOOL BUS STOP.

Unless you were totally normal you were a target for torturous humor. For girls, normal meant cute, perky, flirty, in a cashmere sweater with obvious upper body endowments and a waist, ripe for “slutdom”. For boys, normal meant swaggering and strutting and punching as if they had something no one else did, panting to create “sluts”.

I shifted from side to side, pulling at my skirt or trying to puff up my hair without upsetting the overweight pile of books shoulder-strapped together and poised on one hip.

Phineas failed the normalcy profile—catastrophically. He didn’t strut, he galumphed. He played the violin which he carried with him onto the bus. He wore thick glasses. He was borderline obese. Every day when Phineas thudded onto the bus the boys cooed and wooed him to the back of the bus where they’d gathered for the massacre. They forced  Phineas down onto the floor. They took his violin, removed it from its case and played it till it squeaked in protest; they called him names; they spit on him, and removed his glasses; they held him down so he could not get off at his stop. Every day he walked home. Phineas, to his eternal junior high school shame, cried.

I will never forget Phineas. I felt nauseous. I cried. I prayed. I said nothing. I was learning to be a coward. I tried recently to look him up on Google, which despite its near-divine status, failed on Phineas. Please God, let him have lost weight, ditched his Mayflower-like family name, wear contact lenses, and be a brilliant violinist in some symphony orchestra. 

There was a female version of this horror show. She was overweight like Phineas but with a “normal” name—until she earned the nickname of “Hairy Legs”.  Girls are just as mean as boys but less physical. We relentlessly teased her, because her unshaved legs were, well, totally abnormal. She said that her mother wouldn’t let her shave her legs, and back then girls did not wear pants. I cursed her mother.

She suffered for something she could do nothing about. This made me think, once again, of Carol Lee. This bullying behavior was racist BUT all these students were white. And so was I.

The school bus driver, Mr. Fitz, was the owner of the bus franchise, Fitzgeralds. He was obese, so fat that there was no space between the lower edge of the steering wheel and his paunch. I stared at him to see if I could somehow get him to stop the boys and rescue Phineas. He did nothing. In fact, once I saw him smirking. He could have at least intervened to make sure Phineas got off at his stop.

I felt tortured myself. My way of dealing with my horror was to demand that my mother drive me to school. I would never ride the bus again—never.

These people were all white just like everyone else in Darien, but I was beginning to wonder if racist behavior had broad applications. White-Against-White?  I wished I could talk with Carol Lee about all this.


Scene XI. Gunnar Myrdal

Throughout junior and senior high school there was a required course called Problems of Democracy. Some schools called it Civics. It was to help students understand how our government was structured, how it worked—or didn’t. Our teacher was Mr. Beckwith. I liked him, and I liked the course. I don’t remember what texts we read, but I do remember that Mr. Beckwith talked a lot, in just about every class, about this one book by Gunnar Myrdal. It was on racism. Why was he teaching that when we all were white, and the book was not the assigned reading for the class? Were we even a race? Of course none of us read it, but I have never forgotten that name: Gunnar Myrdal.

I looked up Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987). He was a sociologist and economist and a Swedish Nobel laureate, a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, and, according to record, openly anti-Nazi. Myrdal’s major work was An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. Here is Gunnar Myrdal at about the time he published the book I never read.

Myrdal's book was a study of race relations in America. The “dilemma” was the perceived conflict between high ideals embodied in what Myrdal called the “American Creed” on the one hand and poor performance on the other. Democracy in America was unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for African Americans, one tenth of our population. Myrdal had planned a similar study on gender inequality, but he couldn’t get funding for it.

If Mr. Beckwith was so hot for this book why wasn’t it on the curriculum? 

I was learning about censorship in school curricula. People behind closed doors decided what texts students could read, and believe me the lily white town where I lived would not want to stir up trouble. Taxes fund public education. White people pay high taxes. Money controls learning, controls what is taught and how. I learn best when I’m stirred up. I felt sorry for Mr. Beckwith.

I learned something, a take-away they now call it, from Myrdal’s thesis: when I don’t perform well it’s usually because I don’t like what I’m doing. I’m not invested in the endeavor. America wasn’t invested in its own “dream.”  Was I?  Was I American?  Am I?  Was the Bible?

I don’t know. I didn’t know then either.  First I’d get a boyfriend, handsome if possible.

To be continued.

2020.06.07 Trinity Sunday

Today, for Christians, is Trinity Sunday. To keep it simple, Trinity means Diversity within Unity, neither compromising the other— all of it divine.

The Trinity is a vision to emulate, especially at this time in the United States of America—a time when we are struggling to be united and free of our original and ongoing sin of rank-ordering our common humanity according to skin color, sexuality, social class, ability, political leanings, mental health, or religious preferences. We are murdering each other, thanks to this sin-sick practice.

I do not need to rehearse the events in history or just last week; nor do I need once again to remind us all about the purposeful misinterpretation of the Creator’s charge to humanity to care for all creation. Dominion does not mean domination, unless rank-ordering is the ethic, a practice that destroys Oneness, Diversity and Goodness.

As a therapist and spiritual director and priest I know that deep wounds interrupt the flow of Life itself. There are many ideas out there about what America’s wounds are. Racial injustice tops the list right now. I agree, yet I think the deeper wound is that we Americans are afraid.
    -afraid of ourselves
    -afraid of each other
    -afraid not to be great
    -afraid to be great
    -afraid to weep rather than shout,
    -afraid even to touch our wound.

Slowly, yet deliberately,
I touch the painful place.
I don’t know why;
I just need to.

Is there a strange kind of comfort in acknowledging the
pain?
The wound?

Strangely, the rollercoaster slows.
I hear the words,
“Pay attention. This is your life. This is Sacred.”

                                     
Mary Ann Bigelow, Spiritual Director, above words first published in 
Presence, International Journal of Spiritual Direction, March, 2020

To heal our wound we—together— must touch it, hallow it, give it belonging, a voice, bless it, talk about it in conversation, pray it, make it holy.  This is spiritual intelligence. This is Trinity.

P.S. Happy 86th Wedding Anniversary, Mom and Dad. 

2019.07.07 Are We Free Yet?

America has just celebrated its big National Holiday. I hear the echoes of firecrackers and take in all the flags that suddenly popped out everywhere. We think it’s our birthday as a nation, the time we gained our precious national independence and identity. I celebrated with cookouts, friends, sitting by a pool, thinking of my children, loving the world, and feeling thankful and free. This flag image is rigid. I chose it for that reason.

Now that fireworks and celebrity have died down, I wonder: have we celebrated with integrity the spirituality of this great holiday/holy day? What IS the spirituality of independence anyway? How do we live it? Does it mean independence FROM one another? Or does it mean independence TO make local decisions that guarantee state’s rights. OR maybe it means that we have lost sight of our INTERdependence? Have we forgotten how to be ONE nation indivisible yet supple?

At a high school graduation we attended recently we all stood to sing the national anthem, and I wept—yes for the sheer sentimentality of it, but also with grief over our self image. Have we lived up to our song’s vision?  Or have we used it to justify making one more war somewhere? Are we the land of the free and the home of the brave of which we sing? Are we free to be who we say we are and want to be according to our national vision?

I think this holiday is stuck in its original historical context: winning the war and getting rid of Brit rule. We thought we were free. By proxy right now, we are cleansing ourselves of other foreigners and strangers in our midst, especially those who might threaten our political and legal stability, deplete our resources, and present a moral and spiritual challenge we do not have the courage to confront. 

We are stuck, it seems to me, in a rigid habit of thought. We think in opposites, personally and globally. Our mentality, reflexively, is oppositional, frozen-in-place. Whoever we imagine to be our opposite has power over us. We could think appositely. We could ask: what stance, position, or way of thinking is apt in the realization of our vision of collective freedom?

Here’s a word I just ran across: misandry.  It means dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men (ie the male sex). It’s pronounced MISS-andree from the Greek miso- (hating) + aner,  andr man—on the pattern of misogyny.  Hey, there’s a word I bet we all recognize: misogyny, the opposite of misandry. Misogyny is recognizably popular right now in church and state.

I’ve been tempted at times to nurture a bitter misandry, especially in this patriarchal world and church. But I don’t hate men. I love them, well, most of them. And I need them to compliment and to enrich my femaleness. Some of Dick's and my best marital moments grow out of our spats, which, ironically, serve to boot us from opposition to apposition. Really!

Whenever I’ve expended too much energy on hating men, using patriarchy as my cover, I’m not free to be FOR much of anything, including my self. Still, I admit the men I know and love are apposite to my religion and politics, not opposite. I hang out with the proverbial “choir”—appositely aligned.  Am I too afraid to find real opposites? Sometimes. 

America does not feel free to me right now, fireworks aside. Americans are stuck in spat mode, either FOR or AGAINST our current president. That’s how we think. It’s how we talk. It’s in the air and on the air. People talk about how to “cope.” Many opt out of the fray. Others fight. Some pray. Some get lost in cotton candy positivity. But few honestly pretend this is not going on.

My Christian faith helps me. Christ’s compassion has no borders—no borders on the human heart. Divine generosity is limitless, its signature vast. The spirituality of freedom and true independence is scandalous open-heartedness.

Yes, I know this spiritual vision is extremely demanding. I also know that we have no right to give God a nationality—ours.  Nor do we have a right to give God a gender—anyone's.

What do we dare to want for our birthday, America? What will be apposite to freedom?  How can we soften our flag, our souls, and our borders? With what gift?

Today I saw a small boy with his pregnant mom and another woman perhaps a grandmother. He was restless, shifting his weight around and clutching a towel and a set of goggles. I smiled at him and said: "Hi, you ready to go swimming?" "Yes, I've been waiting to come to this pool for years. This is my big moment."

2018.07.08 The Real American Dream. Do Not Let It Die.

Most people think the “American dream” is that every American family will own their own home equipped with picket fence and other trimmings. Proprietorship is our dream and our downfall. Private property is our desire. Mine. Mine. Mine.

No, the American vision is far more extraordinary and far less selfish than a selfie. In a moving essay, “Mr. Lincoln,” published in a 2018 commemorative collection, Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher, the late Brian Doyle boldly proclaims: “He (Lincoln) gave his life for the extraordinary American idea. Do not let that idea die.”  
 
 That’s my prayer every day now. On July 4 it was my firecracker.

When I was in seventh grade a teacher asked us to identify someone we thought was the greatest human who ever lived—our hero. I immediately wrote Abraham Lincoln and felt quite sure of myself. I was thinking about ending slavery, winning a war for our side. Soon I was stricken with guilt because I had not identified Jesus as the greatest man. My guilt doubled when I realized that I’d never even thought of a woman—an unimaginable idea back in 1950. If I’d known enough I would have nominated Eleanor Roosevelt (below) even though my parents detested FDR.

Now I wonder: was I so wrong in seventh grade?  Lincoln, yes, had something to do with the Civil War, a war he grieved every day of his life, but his vision went far beyond my narrow idea. Lincoln, like Jesus and Eleanor, had a gospel, a vision of Union—American oneness. Beloved fools such as these often die for their ideas. Christ’s was not restricted to one country, or just to humanity, or even to one religion, but I wasn’t so far off when at twelve I nominated Abraham Lincoln—that we all may be one. Jesus (an artist's portrait below, left) was remembered for drumming this home—over and over. And Brian Doyle, a Jesus look-alike (below right) kept the vision going.

Doyle wrote of Lincoln:   “. . . he could not stand the idea of Americans not walking hand in hand toward the extraordinary country we could be, a country unlike any other that ever was, a country where all citizens are free to speak their hearts, and gather as they like, and worship whatever shape of holiness they perceive or imagine, and offer their love to whom they like. He would not allow his beloved country to fly apart because of greed and lies, and for that he was murdered by a man whose greatest wish was to tear America in half.”

Lincoln was a complicated man and had many quirks to say the least. A friend who knew him well once wrote of Lincoln: "He was the only man I ever knew the foundation of whose spirit was love." That’s crazy; that’s only for God, right?  Or is it?

“It is a foul and evil lie of the mind and the heart and the mouth and the soul to account someone less because of his or her color or religion or gender or preference in lovers. That is a squirming lie, no matter how often, and at what volume, it is repeated and God willing it will be quelled and squelched and forgotten in the years to come. It will be squelched not by laws and regulations, not by political or religious or judicial powers, but by shivers of dawning light in the hearts of men and women and children in this country who begin to dimly understand that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest of Americans not because he won a war, not because he gave his blood and his life for justice and freedom, but because the foundation of his spirit was love and he acted that way.”

Lincoln was devout but practiced no one religion. His speeches were concise and brought people to silence. His ideas and parabolic stories, without a lot of advice or legislative patter, riveted the attention of his colleagues and branded the American soul forever. To our peril we let this dream die. This isn’t about Mr. Trump or any party or governance, it is about WE the people standing for the freedom for which we stand. 

Doyle writes, dare I say prays, it best: “ . . . that we will, by the grace of the profligate gifts granted us as Americans, stand for and speak for and defend and protect freedom anywhere and everywhere it is savaged; that we will continue to, as we have for centuries, open our golden door for the tired and the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched of the world, and here let them breath free; and that difference in color and gender and religion and preference in love matter not at all when it comes to treating each other with respect and reverence. Those who fan and foment differences murder the revolutionary American idea, and ought to cower and gibber in shame in the vast shadow cast by Mr. Abraham Lincoln, Republican of Kentucky, who gave his life for that idea.”

I guess I wasn’t too far off in seventh grade. Do not let this idea die. Do not.

2018.02.18 Anger

I’m so enraged, so angry, so downright outraged. I think there must be fear underneath this anger, but by God I simply can’t find it in my heart right now. And I am furious that I am so powerless.

Oh yes, I’ve wallowed in detachment-with-love and all that wisdom, but right now I’m attached in anger to the terrible FACT of the regular slaughter of young children in schools. Statistics are helpful but boring. You can easily find them.

How many children have to die because our nation, our government is too damn paralyzed to legislate gun control?  What prohibits gun control? Piggishness I’d say. I believe that the well-being of the whole is the responsibility of us all. I also believe that children have an edge— little children face down on beaches just trying to get to safety, teens hugging and wailing because their classmates are dead and they are alive, one more time a parent having to explain that this won’t happen here and your school is secure and protected, and no, I don’t know why this happens or why this unstable person could or would buy such a weapon. One young child asked: How come anyone can have big guns? Only soldiers or police have those. The answer: I don’t know. And a kiss. 

Please don’t speak spiritual/religious platitudes like Fear not. I’m done with that. Yes, I know it’s all over the Bible, but I simply can not swallow or follow that wisdom right now. Mea culpa, maybe. But just now it packs no wallop.  

What is the gun mania in this country?

It’s not just about National Rifle Association money, or is it? It’s not just so we can protect big gun manufacturing companies, or is it? It’s not just because we have a president, our national leader, who expresses tearlessly impotent sympathy, or is it?  It’s not just because all those Republicans worry about wallets, or all those Democrats simper along about progressive ideals and have no strong politics right now, or is it? It’s not just because America thinks it’s so great and is just discovering that it has deceived itself and followed its own privileged swollen ego, or is it?  It’s not just because so many voices from pulpits and bimahs lack courage to encourage the fires of anger, the only adequate fuel for transformative change, or is it? It’s not just because of patriarchy, or is it? 

If this list imposed a forced choice on me I’d vote for the centuries-old demonic idea that has been perpetuated in every culture: “The powerful and the privileged have the right to bend the lives, bodies and wills of the powerless to serve their own needs and desires and wants.” (Quote taken from a sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday 2/14/18 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street by the Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche, Bishop of New York)

The poor and the powerless are expendable. This same idea means that the powerful and privileged own even the freedom of others!   

I’m a religious person. Should I not feel compassion? Should I not be consumed with love for all these shooting victims and even the deranged shooters? Should I not be praying feverishly for God to intervene? I don’t believe in such a God. I believe God gave us, created and equipped us all, with hearts, minds and wills to mend the broken world. 

I believe God right now does weep with those who weep. I think God by now has consumed that old bush that caught Moses’s eye because it burned without being consumed, and moved on. Who will lead us out of this inferno of gun violence, flashes of gunfire exploding in children’s faces? Who? Will it be the wrath of God within us?

The only sacrifice I need is your gratitude. So speaks God in Psalm 50.

America instead sacrifices children on the altar of GUN-worship. This gun-empowered nation apparently does want children sacrificed, is that it?  In guns we trust?  The idolatry of salvation by guns, is that it? Hope in guns?  America IS a gun. 

All I can do is write and preach and sign every petition I can, call every politician I can, vote in every poll and every election. I’m too old and breath-limited to march and rally, but I can gnash my own teeth to no good end. And I can offer gratitude, very selfishly, because my own grandchildren are not dead in these recurring American shooting sprees in schools—yet.

I am a fervent believer in Hope. Right now I find hope in my anger.

As to thoughts and prayers? Yes!— that enough outrage will overcome American lassitude and selfish sloth to help Godde heal our souls, blast us for Christ’s sake out of torpor and turpitude into (insert any good C-word: communion, community, cooperation, collaboration, common good.) 

Be angry and sin not. Do not let the sun go down on our anger. (Ephesians 4: 26.)  I will be angry. I will not sin by buying a gun, just in case. But by Godde I want to. I want to. As to the sun: it’s already down.

Today we heard Mark’s story of how the heavens were “torn” apart to reveal Jesus as Beloved Son. Then Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted to reject that identity and its heft.  Torn and driven are strong verbs, angry verbs.

The greatest temptation for me right now would be to dress the sacrifice of my anger in more acceptably prissy theological language, like “righteous indignation." To hell with that!
                                             *  *  * *
Yet as priest I consecrate the holy meal, inviting communicants to give thanks to God who brings us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” (BCP, p. 368)
                                            Is that it?

2017.01.22 Breakdown/Breakthrough?

Often a breakdown is a necessary precursor to a breakthrough.

We know this in personal experience, and we see it in the Biblical stories, in which there is a regular pattern of breakdown and breakthrough. Remember Peter, the putative “pope”?  He denied knowing Jesus, let alone following him. Jesus predicted this,  signaled by the old cock crow, cock-a-doodle-do times three. At the cock crowed Peter broke down. Peter was a disciple who thought he had solid faith and did not.

Judas Iscariot, on the other hand, thought he had no faith, abandoned the Jesus movement, and left.  After Jesus died and stories arose of his resurrection, Judas discovered faith. He was a disciple who thought he had no faith at all and did. In one account he took his own life in remorse. 

Both men had a breakdown to have a breakthrough. Both of their stories live on; both  characters live in each one of us; both are integral parts of a whole gospel proclamation of divine love ever-evolving toward cosmic wholeness. 

I am assured that the story of Jesus lives on, and that its message is still heard today by people who think they have faith and don’t AND by those who think they don’t have faith and do.

Peter’s breakthrough took time. He experienced visions, wept himself back to life, and joined with Paul to use his gifts to make sure that what Jesus had envisioned did not die. One could argue that the institutionalization of the gospel was not such a good thing. OR . . . one could grin and realize that that’s the way things are preserved—until the next breakdown and breakthrough.

Are we now living in breakdown/breakthrough times?  The irony is that what looks like breakdown to many feels to others like breakthrough into light.  In the time of discerning directions, I look to my Christian faith. I also look for small lights.  

Our new president in his inaugural address called America a wasteland of carnage —a harsh assessment. Is there anything good here? The speech was a set-up for Trump to step in and offer himself as the savior. What upset me the most however was that he guaranteed that God would protect America (that means North America, note…) ALWAYS—helped by the people and the military, just in case. America first and only as a sign of divine will is idolatrous, painfully exclusive, and a sign of patriotism run wild. Where is humility? Where is grace?

Still, this culture was on the way to such self-idolatry anyway with its consumerism and its win/win/me/win attitudes.

    I did see some bright spots in the inaugural events.
    -I noticed that Melania Trump quietly went over to Hillary Clinton and gave her a small box nicely gift wrapped. I could not help but see this as a woman-to-woman gesture.
    -And then good old W. Bush got Hillary laughing with a hug and a chuckle—a very compassionate in-house gesture.
    -At the luncheon Trump did invite the Clintons to stand, and they got a standing ovation. I just wished he could have said something in his campaign-ish speech.
    -The Rabbi who offered a closing benediction used a phrase that stood out: “Any nation is blessed by its values not its vaults.” Amen. I pray that our “vaults” of corporate wealth will be opened and shared.
    -The January 22 Women’s March was enacted all over the world in cities. It was a massive demonstration of solidarity in favor of equality for ALL. To me it felt like a return of second wave feminism —this time as a tidal wave with potential to sweep away patriarchal assumptions and rank-ordering systems of social organization that defy our constitutional principles. A breakthrough.
                     

Do you remember the movie Awakening?  It was based on a book by Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), a physician who had a deeply traumatic childhood, predictive of many painful physical and emotional effects. The miracle is that there are always sound medical and psychological predictions and some come true, but there are no prescriptions for what the human soul will do. None.

Sacks made schmutz of his medical career as a lab researcher. They told him to get out. “Go see patients. They matter less.”  A breakdown!  He also bumbled at his writing, until the poet W.H Auden suggested to him that he be “metaphorical, mythical, whatever you need.” ( Not such a bad approach to holy scriptures.) Sacks began to see illness as metaphor and myth. It lead to his taking risks with catatonia and a new medication for Parkinson’s disease. The medication gave some life to the all-but-dead. A breakthrough.

Watching the movie, I was entranced at what happened when these zombie-like people awoke. It was resurrection. One scene sticks in my memory. Sacks was tossing a ball to catatonic patients, hoping that someone would wake up to its movement, when suddenly a woman lifted her arm and caught the ball. Sacks tried it over and over and each time the woman caught the ball in her right hand. “Mrs. XX you caught the ball!” Sacks began to dance about with joy. Eventually, so did Mrs. XX.  An apparent near-complete breakdown became the breakthrough for at least partial return to health—new life. For Sacks as well. Resurrection.

What was required was close and careful observation, listening to all the patients first, the ones deemed by the research labs to “matter less.” It took intense empathy,  devotion and creative imagination. It took a passionate awareness of what it was like to feel destitute, terrorized, alone. It took enormous faith, hope and love. And then, as Sacks wrote in 1973: “To use a biblical term, I would ‘bear witness’ to their condition.” Is that not holy scripture? 

All it took was daring to follow a new idea.

What are your own new ideas? Do you voice them or keep silent? Do you deceive yourself about your own worth? About God’s love? Do you give up as Sacks might easily and expectedly have? 
In times of breakdown where are your breakthroughs?  How do you bear witness?
                                                          


I confess to a kind of catatonia in the face of the crisis of culture we are in and the denial about its depth. The death throes of patriarchy are painful and necessary. It hurts me to listen to a leader who styles himself as THE savior, the agent of breakthrough. Yet that too is necessary.

At a recent meeting of our deanery clergy I said something about needing a breakdown to breakthrough, and a colleague replied a bit cynically, “Yes, but sometimes there is a collapse.” Isn’t that what a true breakdown is?

Blaming and shaming keep me paralyzed and negative—catatonic. Holocaust memoirist Etty Hillesum wrote to God: “Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last.”   (Essential Writings Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2009 p. 59)

Theology calls this perspective, this practice, deep incarnation—deep reaching into the soul. 

The only way this works for me is to get brutally honest with myself and with God. Like Etty did about God’s nature and her own. Sacks, too, didn’t kid himself about the state of his patients. Abraham didn’t kid himself about his advanced age, his sexual impotence, and Sarah’s. He said:  Well, let’s get food for these angels and listen to what they have to say. Sarah, bless her, laughed at the idea of a pregnancy. And Jesus didn’t play games with the conditions of his time. He knew the risks of bearing witness to limitless love without condition versus limitless power without condition.

We may have to maladjust, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to Trump’s  ME # 1/AMERICA FIRST/GOD-BLESSED ALWAYS vision. Exceptional in some areas we may be. Superior in all areas we are not. This vision goes beyond jobs, education, healthcare immigration reform. It wraps our souls up in a hubris that is disastrous—a spiritual breakdown.

Our new president could be kidding himself, and us too, but he can’t kid God, whose Love within us breaks through—no matter what.

2016.06.26 Give Me Your Poor

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"The New Colossus" poem by Emma Lazarus; lyrics for Irving Berlin musical, "Miss Liberty"

A friend recently told me that Emma Lazarus’s poem had been set to music by Irving Berlin. She said the women’s chorus of which she is a member sang it, and that I should check it out. It would make me weep, she said. It did.

In the context of the current skirmish over immigration and our highest court's split about whether President Obama’s proposal to allow 4 million immigrants to stay here and work here, Lazarus’s message rings sacred. Yes, I know it’s a vision, a dream—two words never to be prefaced by “only” or “just.”

My mother loved broadway musicals. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were her two favorite idols. The information that Irving Berlin, composer and lyricist for “God Bless America,” first sung by Kate Smith in 1938, the year I was born, had written music for the Lazarus poem only added to my tears.

Mom died 18 years ago. I bet she never knew that music was the only source of income for Berlin, born Israel Isidore Baline (later Berlin, thanks to a typo) in 1888 in Belarus. Music was also the source of income for Mom’s own Jewish father. Berlin’s father had been a cantor in a synagogue. Through his father’s singing vocation Berlin learned to love music—for its spiritual power and its sheer beauty. I don’t know where my grandfather learned to love music, but he made a career of importing classical musical talent—most of it Jewish— from Europe to America.

                                                      Mr. Irving Berlin

With their music, my grandfather and Irving Berlin made this country rich. Neither would have come to America without the invitational hospitality of a Jewish poet named Emma and this country’s foundational principles. 

And neither man would  have come here without being ushered in by the inspired grandeur of the enormous Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of America. She stands as a symbol of freedom and democracy. She holds a torch of welcome, stands 305’ 1” tall, and weighs in at 27,000 tons. Up close she represents one image of the soul of America.

As a child growing up in Manhattan, I looked up to her as if to a Goddess. I was also a little afraid of her, just because she was so huge and a bit stern looking.

For some of us today the message she carries is frightening. Whom shall we let in? Will we lose our rights, our identities, our properties if we share? Have we become so afraid of “pollutants” from without that we are going to create a toxic closed system within our borders—such that we will stifle—not grow, not evolve?

Lady Liberty, the one Berlin praised in song, in all her glory and her gospel, reflects the God I love and worship, the One who amorizes the whole cosmos, kindling love throughout.  

2013.05.22 Endangered Values/Endangered Patriarchal Religion

I remember thinking when we—my first husband and three children—lived in Alabama (imagine!) and Jimmy Carter was running for Governor of Georgia in 1969 that he had something different going for him. I didn’t know what it was but I trusted my intuition over my shamelessly northern distrust of those who drawled and said “bless your heart” too much.

We’d moved to Annniston, a “northern”city about midway between Birmingham and Atlanta for a job offer too good to refuse. The job had promise, but the company boss was an all-day alcoholic who drank Pepsi Cola laced with bourbon, which more than once landed him in Birmingham Hospital with unstoppable hiccups. Guess who got a call in the middle of the night to go rescue him? 

Our house was elegant red brick and had a spacious front entryway of large square black and white tiles— fit for Scarlett O’Hara, not for three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, who ran in the red clay soil and tracked it into the house.  I slaved to keep the floor clean with my newly purchased electric floor cleaner. Still, the black tiles bled onto the white ones besmirching them with black flecks. What a ghastly metaphor for racism. I was as angry at the tiles as I was at the segregated uptown Episcopal church I could not, by any twist of conscience,  make my spiritual home

Alabama was a foreign land and I was a bored housewife who missed New England and had not much else to do but clean the freakin floor!—also drink scotch, nurse my depressed rage, write sloppy laments, read crap, correct the kids’ blossoming southern accents,  get pregnant with a fourth child— and watch TV.  

On TV, however,  I became acquainted with Jimmy Carter.  Later, back north, I voted for him for President.  He was a one-term president, some have labeled “weak.” He was hardly the traditional American macho president-of-choice. But neither is Barack Obama, yet both of these men won Pulitzers for peace efforts, Carter’s, uniquely, awarded 20 years after he left the presidency.

I still think Jimmy Carter represents something our American culture needs very much, perhaps a return to our basic values and faith in a power greater than ourselves.  We are a country that needs more than ever to be "under God" not above or without God. “Under” to me means overseen, not as a spy or a tyrant but as Love that is intimately, providentially co-creative. Dare we return to Genesis and the all-inclusive image of deity?

Recently  I read about Jimmy Carter’s “high profile defection” (NY Times’ assessment) from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which he’d been a member for 60 years. Carter could not support the Convention’s selective biblical literalism used to justify the subjugation of women and prohibit them from serving as pastors. At last I knew why I’d thought Jimmy Carter had something different going for him. 

Carter published a book in 2005 called Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.  In it he wrote: “The truth is that male religious leaders have had—and still have—an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.”

He rightly connects patriarchal theology and abuses of power with abuses of women throughout the world—with God as their justification.  Carter knows that such gender discrimination is a “clear violation” of the core teachings of all major religions.

Please note: Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention. He did NOT defect from Christianity, nor the Church, nor the Gospel of Jesus Christ—nor, I add, from his integrity as a human being and a son of the living God.

I don’t regret our southern sojourn in Alabama. There I got gifts: a dear fourth child, second son, born almost immediately after we came “home”; the memory of my friend, a lovely black woman who took care of the neighbors’ children while I took care of mine—we were domestics together; the surety that I would never have a black and white tiled foyer; and pride in an American politician who did have something different  going for him.