2024.03.10 Heartbeat. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I once had the opportunity to hear what an en-wombed embryo would hear while slowly growing inside a mother’s womb. I recall vividly my own feeling as I listened to this sound—something like woosh/woosh/woosh—steady, regular and astoundingly comforting. 

No wonder babies wail so fiercely when they are pulled out of the womb, forced into the world of bright light, and then spanked. It is not the sudden elevation and medical inspection that calms them, nor the tight swaddling, nor the joyful cries of family. No, they do not return to calm until they hear again the faint yet familiar sound— woosh, woosh, woosh— as they are placed on their mother’s chest and hear again her heartbeat. 

I think we never stop listening for that sound, seeking it even, coming through a stethoscope. No wonder we use heart language to speak about Love, and especially about divine Love. It’s what we all seek and crave. It is what spiritual religious traditions tell us to seek and serve in ourselves and in all Creation.  Woosh woosh woosh.  

When you love deeply it’s not the same as caring lots and lots. It is much more painful, full as it is of the ache of longing—not for more but for more of the same. Laying aside partisanship for the sake of companionship to the end. The end of what? Love of, and for, and with, and upon this Earth our island home—fragile and beloved at once. The painful struggle for control is enough to make the whole planet sob. Weeping clouds neither our eyes can see, nor our ears hear, nor our fingers touch. Yet we recognize that Wooshing. 

 

 

Last week we listened to President Biden’s State of the Union speech. It was firm and authentic, even defiant. Why always a fight? Is that the heartbeat of our nation? 

The visuals of the assembled congress showed a grim assembly, completely split—one side cheering and hooting with applause, the other side sitting, arms crossed over chests, grimly stern-faced. Even the two behind Biden at the podium of power, the Vice President on the left, popping up and down to applaud as her current “boss” spoke for her political party, her own aspirations. Simultaneously, the man on the right, Speaker of the House of Representatives, sat resolutely planted on his butt, while looking desperate to stand and join the applause. Once he did stand for something idly non-partisan. 

*  *  *  * 

I could not help but think of Jesus resolutely hiking toward the seat of power, Jerusalem, to confront the authority of his time with a higher vision. All of it doomed to die of exhaustion. Yet there was a heartbeat thumping still alive. There was that ancient steady sound— woosh, woosh, woosh.  Did you hear it?  This future of hope for the American vision, unable to be embodied—yet.

The art of hearing heartbeats is upon us, as close as your own heart. Ask to listen through your doctor's stethoscope. Find a child to play the game of heart-listening with you. 

*  *  *  *

I suspect the assembly heard the humming and thumping beneath the crowded chaos. Biden was eager to echo it. He is 81, old enough to hear that faint echo beating beneath the despair, and young enough at heart to tell us that our nation still has a heartbeat:   “A future based on the core values that have defined America. Honesty. Decency. Dignity. Equality. To respect everyone. To give everyone a fair shot. To give hate no safe harbor.” 

As evidence, Biden included “Moscow” in his list of places where his inclusive vision would be realized. It just slipped out. At first he corrected it, then quickly reinstated it: “Yes, Moscow, too.”  

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.
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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?
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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.
                 
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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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