2025.11.09 WISDOM FOR ALL CREATURES ALL THE TIME. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

As we approach Veterans Day on 11/11/ 2025 and move towards Thanksgiving on November 27th, may we please remember that in all religions, in all lands, for ALL living things, at all times, there is only one truth wise enough to be universal: that of LOVE.

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) was a Swiss moral philosopher and poet living in Geneva, Switzerland. He  had mystical experiences yet never tied himself down to any single one. He wrote the above words when he was 59—young by today’s standards. On Amiel’s tombstone there is a quote from Galatians 6:8. In this small parabolic story, St. Paul articulates a great truth from a small and familiar story.  Here it is, according to The Inclusive Bible. First Egalitarian Translation— the latest, and only one among many translations of the Bible. 

“If you sow in the field of indulgence you will reap corruption. 

If you sow in the field of self-indulgence you will reap corruption.

If you sow in the field of the Spirit you will reap the harvest of eternal life.

Never grow tired of doing good.”  (Galatians 6:8-9) 

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. 

2025.06.29 ALL Time Perspectives ALL At Once. Lyn Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.    

As a writer of memoir I remember time mostly from the point of view of the past into the present. I’ve paid too little attention to the future. Luke’s gospel tells/warns us never to look BACK but to go forward.

Today in my aging I think that if we do NOT look ahead and move ahead we all, the entire community of Life on Earth, will stagnate collectively. We will eliminate ourselves. No one is able to thrive on memory alone. 

The only biblical writing that suggests such a forward-looking vision is the book of Job. Job has been critiqued and analyzed and “scholarized” practically to death— and yet it remains alive and well! 

I live now in a community of retired whities. We don’t talk about religion, yet when I dare to wonder about it, some people tell me they do not even have a Bible. So get one and read Job, I suggest.  What’s Job?  One resident ordered a bible, found Job and read it. Within weeks she reported with a grin: “Job and I are okay.” 

My theory? The Book of Job contains and lauds ALL of Creation and includes ALL the time values. It carefully and fully articulates the past history of this character, including all the sins and bad stuff alongside every critical perspective possible within Job’s own life, his autobiography. AND it tells us the envisioned future. 

The best part is that scholars and casual readers alike all are fascinated. Job has more written about it—more plays, works of art, scholarly texts, and so on—than any other work of art, literature, music, on and on. It covers ALL the time values. 

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.   

2025.06.08 PENTECOSTAL BIBLICAL DISSONANCE, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

If the Holy Spirit is anything it is full of hot air!  

William Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur Georgia, reminded us all that if the Bible is anything it is off key and filled with dissonance. 

Personally, this is precisely why I do trust the Bible, and its many translations, to leave room for me in it. I can always squeeze my perspectives in, because I do not take every word literally, ipsissima verba, though I take every word seriously.  

Women who experience a call to the sacramental ministry of priest are organized and have been lobbying for ordination in the RC Church for many years, are still hopeful, and still waiting, and still failing to understand precisely why their gender disqualifies them from ordained ministry.

I was at a grandson's college graduation recently. There were many women who have served in executive positions sitting on the platform. 

I also remember the politics and the pressures for a female presidency way back in the 1960s—at an all-women's college no less!!! 

Now I live with my husband at a residential retirement community. The entire administrative staff is made up of women. Let me say that a leadership team that is exclusively female is ALSO not the best model. 

Effective leadership is not either-or, or both-and, regarding gendered pronouns, but rather, it is according to vocational qualifications, educational and experiential qualifications, training, and yes, a deep inner calling, some of us would identify as divinely inspired—none of it bound by gender. 

Thank you, Holy Spirit!  

STRIVE, THRIVE, BE ALIVE. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/27/2025

It seems to me that all the things that matter most to me in my life are things that I have strived for and thrived with and lived because of. 

Besides avoiding my mother’s overweening praise, the obvious first-up on my list was the process of birthing, actually bringing forth into the light a brand new life, and then immediately feeling the rush of joy and terror at once. 

Perhaps I exaggerate, but for me, beside the trauma of sexual intercourse itself for which I was totally unprepared, birthing was first up. My first child was a daughter with amazing lung power and great weight for a firstborn: 8 pounds 13 ounces, born on the 13th of January, 1962, well before there was safe medication to ease the pain, not to mention much good literature on things like breast feeding and childcare. It is embarrassing to admit that I was both dazzled and intimidated by my beautiful new daughter—so afraid that I was sure I’d break her arm while putting on a wee undershirt, not to mention getting the diaper pin on securely without stabbing her, all at once and with adoration!

She was, and is still, capable of engaging my awe and my love at the same time. I went on creating, yes, more biological children, all equally beloved, and also my own dreams and sins. Unlike what our religions tell us, there is no end to such potency, such striving and thriving, such unjust justice, even to such believing disbelief. Ever. 

I wonder if this is how the Divinity the Bible calls God/Creator kept on slowly striving, paying meticulous attention to each tiny detail and its placement, laboring and even feeling pained by the effort itself as Life turned into Being?  Would Creator-God have felt such pride and awe at once?  

The Holy Bible itself even ends with something like, I’m coming and I’m not telling you when or why.   

And beloved Job, finally and after a whole life of nagging and being righteous, received a guided tour of Creation and ended up with something like WOW!

It is enough to strive, thrive and be alive— never imagining an end. I am ready to give up all that language about justice in order simply to proclaim: 

Divinity isn’t moral, only holy?    

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! 

2024.11.17 THERE IS ALWAYS A STORY! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post,

I hear myself say something like: Are you kidding? But I have no interest in debates or discussions that go nowhere. All I know is that when things go kerflooey, quite off-kilter, I return to something ancient yet continuing to be amazingly graceful. For me, that is the ancient story of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Honestly, I have no trouble with Job, the biblical master of the long whine. I used to gag over this poor-me man. Now that I am aging, however, I admire Job’s way of grieving which is long and incessantly nagging God and anyone who will listen for explanations of all the grief and woe in this life on earth.  Job’s friends exhaust him with a million explanations—all quite obvious and logical. My favorite is from Job’s fed up wife who tells her husband: Curse God and die! (2:9)

I can identify with such a headlong grief and have sat listening to many a grieving soul, including my own. All we want to know is WHY this putatively almighty God does nothing, or worse, causes all this suffering. I ask grievers to forget about WHY, and  just talk honestly about their losses, or anything else on their minds. Then I simply listen, for I know that there is always a story, and rarely is it what I might imagine.   

It’s very easy to get stuck in grief, so please talk about it to someone you trust, even if it’s not directly about the loss. ‘Tsokay. There is always a story.

PS. What I love most in Job is the role of God/Divinity. After many years, God finally treats Job to an enormous vast, and complete view of ALL Creation spread out before him in 3D panorama. God doesn't brag but simply offers Job, and us, a panoramic vision of enormous depth, breadth, and width—almost too much for Job to take in. 

Job’s jaw drops in awe. All he can say is: I know my redeemer lives. You’d think he’d offer effusive thanks. Wonder is quite enough. There is ALWAYS a story!

😉💕

 

A BIT OF WISDOM, Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post, 10/27/24

“Moral imagination is the special gift of the prophet and the artist. The artist listens and looks and sees and hears the pain and suffering of the world, and it is from these experiences that the artist creates new images. Without moral imagination there is no compassion, for it is from the ability to picture the suffering of others, that we develop the skill to imagine other ways of living.  

Solutions to political problems depend on moral imagination. We find these solutions in the process of being and doing, listening and seeing, with deep sensitivity, to the insights of our imagination. But it is not just artists who exercise their imagination in this way: we are called to sensitize our perceptions so that we come to learn where real suffering and injustice lie.” 

 

-Sister Stan Gardening the Soul. Soothing Seasonal Thoughts for Jaded Modern Souls.  The author has an honorary Doctorate of Law from Trinity College, Dublin. She joined  the Irish Sisters of Charity in 1958 and develops programs of social service for people in need.  

*  *  *  *

This wisdom I believe is precisely geared to how to make choices, and how to vote using our moral imagination—not just according to the authority of a political party. It is also how anyone governs, with compassion and respect for the office AND for those you will govern.

 

Notice that the biblical gospel story for today is that of the blind beggar Bartimaeus (Mark 10: 46-52) who, after he received his sight, did not run off in joy to celebrate like most of the healed do, but stayed to follow Jesus.  

Oddly admirable, no? 

2025.08.25 Ingredients of the Holy, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Start by looking in the mirror—over and over. Smile at yourself. Salute yourself. You’ll see yourself as beloved, in truth.   

As it’s written in the New Testament, Ephesians 4:14-15: “Speaking the truth in love, grow up in every way into Christ.” The author of these words has never been fully established, just as Christ is not tied down to the earthly Jesus, nor to Job’s healing vision—frighteningly, openly, inclusively divine, all holy. 

Do you remember that little phrase “Bloom where you’re planted”?  I always thought it was hopelessly corny and immature. Now I wonder.

Of course that phrase must be in the Holy Bible, somewhere— a selection of writings all of them equally holy. Paul, thanks to his verbosity and long-winded speeches could even see himself as speaking truth in love, because he was a plodder determined to seek and find Divinity in everything and everyone, including himself.    

Each person makes his/her/their path, takes that path, veers from that path, returns to that path, and so on. I have tried many times in my own life to discern and tie down the HOLY. I have sought advice from many sources—all of them helpful yet none of them permanently perfect. 

*  *  * *

The HOLY is of God, and therefore compels me to seek it in all things, great and small. 

-Gazing out the window a friend sees the trees moving and imagines that God is waving at him.

-A young child kneels at the altar rail, discovers he can’t see, looks around seeking guidance, places one small hand on the railing, pulls himself up to stand on the kneeling cushion, sticks his other small hand out to receive a communion wafer. There is a moment of hesitation, then the priest winks and places a wafer that looks nothing like bread into his small hand. The child fists the bread, pops it into his mouth, then turns and runs back down the aisle.

-The 2024 Democratic Convention, gathered and viewed from above—every color, gender, ethnicity, political persuasion, religion, class, on and on.

-Here is a photo of a very large Weeping Beech tree that stands at the entrance of Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut. It's lush in the summer, however, whatever the season or the reason, this tree stands to welcome all of those who seek the Holy in silence or through a spiritual direction program. The tree tells me I am in a holy place, that all who come here seek and find holiness, and also that all seasons and seekers are holy in the expansive language of our One Holy Creator/Creating God. 

Below stands this tree in winter dress. Holy, eh?  

Finally a tiny baby, holy sloth, held up by a human hand. 

2023.11.19 An Annoyingly True Balance, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The gospel story in Matthew 25 about what to do with gifts of money is quite clear if harsh.  You invest it and it multiplies. You hoard it or hide it away, it stays safe yet benefits no one, not even yourself.  Whichever way you chose there are consequences. That’s the idea! AND, if you invest and thereby multiply your wealth the “Master” is very pleased with you.  

The idea behind this harsh little story is obvious and not obvious. If you think of real money you’ll be frustrated and seek everything from stock market advice, much of it flawed. If you think of “money” as loving kindness you will fare much better.  

In what do you invest your heart?  Because where your heart is there also will be your money or other gifts. Simply so.

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Today is my youngest son’s birthday #53. I am grateful for his life, his one precious life he almost lost to ulcerative colitis when he was a young man. He had invested his time and energy in making a living, being successful, doing a job well. He was young and did not heed his bodily symptoms carefully enough. He suffered a brush with death. He survived this brush with death thanks to excellent surgical care, the love of his family, countless prayers, and a brush with what I can only call The Light of Christ, offering him a choice—not a sentence, a choice.  He chose to live.  

When you heed the Great Commandment, basically true in all religions, to love your neighbor as yourself do not forget yourself! 

 

2023.10.15 The Guest List? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Have you ever made out a guest list for a big important and personal event? Something important like your own wedding? Now, imagine if you just bagged the list, flung wide the doors and invited everyone—absolutely everyone.                                                                                                                                      

The parable of the wedding feast was told by Jesus in answer to those who asked: what  is this kindom of heaven like?  Kindom sounds silly, right?  Where is THE KING?  What ruler would throw a huge banquet to honor the family heir, send invitations to those on the guest list, then be astonished when the entire guest list declines—  too busy with their own enterprises, and some even murdering the ruler’s emissaries?

This ruler became furious, ordered his military to burn the murderers and destroy towns and businesses, then went out to invite everyone and anyone, good and bad, credentialed and not, to the feast. The new guests all ran on it and celebrated mightily. Well, except for one poor soul who had no proper wedding garments so was kicked out by rough bouncers and removed from that guest list forever. 

*  *  *  *

When I read this story, I felt my mood soar and plummet immediately. Of course it’s only a metaphor, but . . . a godly guest list? 

THE DIVINE REALM SHOULD BE TRULY INVITATIONAL WITHOUT COST, YES?

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Once I was ordained and serving in a parish I started a gospel drama group. Acting out stories would be fun and educational I thought. Better than a one-preacher sermon from a solo pulpit. I invited anyone interested to join. We gathered. I suggested that we try an impromptu and improvisational version of Jesus’s ancient wedding feast parable. We used the altar area as our stage. I read the story, and told them to begin the drama. Everyone started to talk at once. Some thought they didn’t deserve to be invited. Others claimed they had been invited because they were best friends of the family. Still others hung back uncertain. One woman, trying to play Jesus’s mother, Mary, shouted: “Son, this isn’t working!”  We all suddenly burst out laughing and crying at once. We had created chaos. 

*  *  *  *

This drama group certainly was a failed idea, I thought. Right? 

THIS IS THE REIGN OF HEAVEN-ON-EARTH. IT’S OPEN TO ALL, RIGHT? 

*  *  *  *

Why in the world would God with whom I’d had lively one-sided conversations since I was a small child  kick me out, kick anyone out? If this God is CREATOR, then that word itself automatically means to do something new, to challenge traditional ways, to respect the vast array of offerings and opportunities and not insist on or rigidify just one single way.

*  *  *  *

My drama group kept going. We sized down by choice not by rejection. I acted as a director, figuring that a great orchestra needs its conductor to make good music together. We read biblical stories and shared thoughts and feelings not “answers.” By Easter we were ready for the Vigil. A group of six or seven women came into a darkened church in single file and solemn. They slowly walked up into the altar area, which became, well, an empty tomb. One shroud-like blanket was lying on the floor. The group gathered in silence. Some knelt, some stood, some close, some with a bit of distance. Very slowly the women began each to say something as slowly the lights were coming up—dawn. There was no script. One woman who did not believe in God, stayed silent except quietly to say something like, I just don’t get it? When the lights were fully on, the drama finished and the women all walked slowly away from the empty tomb and out of the church using the side entrance. The watching congregation stayed silent. One woman snuck back into the church, snatched the “shroud” and left again. As she was leaving she turned back three time to say, “But what does it mean?”