2023.06.04 Trinity and Transcendence, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

It’s Trinity Sunday, a day when Christians celebrate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.This  is an ancient discernment that Divinity itself is ONE with three distinct self-expressions, all divine and mediated through Creation, through the Created, and through a Holy Spirit, traveling music for the unitive flow of energy. I guess this is why one of the lectionary readings for this Sunday is from Genesis 1:1–2:3—the entire Creation account according to the ancient priestly writers. 

I recall one professor loudly proclaiming: “Yes, the trouble doesn’t start till Genesis 2:4b when God foolishly decided to create us earthlings in the divine image and gave us freedom to choose good and evil.” We can choose God or not.                                                                                           

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What better Sunday than Trinity Sunday to weave a new tale of coherence in the Christian faith I embrace, the faith that, according to Mother Teresa is the Christian FAITH not the Christian Certainty.  

Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, wonders about the Genesis reading for Trinity Sunday. He points out that Genesis as a trinitarian story is not just because God is called “we” in Genesis, but because Genesis is about “the complexity of divine purpose, action and presence” throughout. Genesis never stops, I’d say. 

Still, I’m not a scholar/professor, and this is not a lecture with grades for superb parroting.  Also, doctrine is not the same as dogma. No one knows precisely what the nature of Divinity is. Some of us, of course, think we do, then set up prohibitive fences like certitude, to protect our own interpretation. What the Trinity does is to keep God alive and bristling with energy, available to all—inclusive and not mediated by any single religion, viewpoint, or source.

We are endowed with unique gifts: imagination, intuition, creativity, and yearning. We also get signs, hints, intuitions, dreams and occasionally a cattle-prodding wallop from a source we do not control but which we recognize as not entirely of our own making. These signs we label Mystery. I call them God-incidences.                                                                     

                                                    *  *  *  *                                                                                               

A good friend and wise professor recently commented that a Mystic was someone who experienced the divine, aka God, without mediation. My immediate thought was: there’s no such thing as an unmediated experience. It can only come to us through us—our prayers, senses, intuitions, imagination, even our unconscious as vision. Of course such an experience can come to us from outside us, but it still comes to us through us. It is Divinity Immanent. 

Helen Keller learned to know the world through touch. When her teacher Annie wondered aloud how to communicate God to Helen, Helen answered: “Oh, I already know God.”  

In the 1970’s, when I was a young mother of four growing children from fifteen to eight, I was in the midst of baking whatever number batch of chocolate chip cookies I’d baked as part of my maternal repertoire. I’d meticulously laid out all the ingredients. There were no cookie mixes then, or if there were I deemed the use of them as cheating. On what? Oh, on the ideal image of the contented housewife. As I plodded through this routine, I thought with affection of the children who would delight in my cookies. I was also bored. I felt like a metronome, not missing a beat of the the musical score written for my role. In my mind I heard my children’s lilting voices and saw them dashing into the kitchen, lifting my mood, grabbing a cookie then running out to play in whatever weather was available, their exuberance a guarantee of my maternal worth and my love. They were a delight. My ennui was not their fault in any way. Nor was it mine. Nor was it my husband’s who worked hard to make sure we were financially secure. 

Still, I knew there was something missing. Suddenly I smelled the odor of burned cookies. I jumped into action to save my cookies. As I did, I also heard a voice from deep within me, or from far beyond me. It was not harsh or confrontational. It was firm and gentle. It grabbed my attention. I wept.

Why are you doing this? 

I had no idea how to answer the question. I knew it didn’t sound like my own voice—exactly.  I knew I had to answer. Was this the voice of God? Possibly. Am I a mystic? No. But I knew this question interrupted my boredom, my uncertainty. I knew it was mediated through the odor of burning cookies and the depth of my own soul’s discontent. I also knew it was not from far away or high above, but deeply embedded in the ongoing, immanent trinitarian process.  It was not Divinity Transcendent.                                                                                 *  *  *  *  

P.S. I cannot resist now sharing the thought that popped into my head this morning: Gallia est omnis divisa in tres partes. (Gaul was the region we know as ancient western Europe.)  My Latin teacher would recite this magically as if we should remember it. AND Gaul is still one Gaul.  How galling.  

2023.02.26 Ashen Days/Dusty Path, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

The repeated refrain on Ash Wednesday echoes in my mind. Is it just this one day called Ash, or is it all of Lent, or is there something more universally true about this dusty theme? Is the spiritual life one long unpaved path—straight, curved, twisted, hilly, full of distractions, temptations—tedious and irresistible? What keeps us on this path and why? 

People stream forward up the aisle and stand or kneel before a priest whose thumb, dampened with blessed healing oils presses into a small bowl of black ashes that stick. Over and over the priest smears the black ashes onto each upturned forehead, making the sign of the cross and saying: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

This ritual kicks off the season of Lent, and shapes the whole season, one of reflection self-examination, grace and grit all the way to its climactic tragedy of Good Friday. Gloomy to say the least.    

Why is this ritual so popular?  You’d think it would fearful, depressing, overwhelming. Who wants to be reminded of their mortality? Many apparently do. 

When I worked as a chaplain in hospitals, staff would seek me out to get their ashes. Just the one phrase with the smearing and they hurried off to finish their day. Patients as well often requested ashes. I knew there were some who weren’t even Christian, including former Roman Catholics and young agnostics who had left the institutional church long ago, constrained by its rules and its gloom, not to mention their resistance to “organized” religion. Name me something that isn’t organized? Yoga, the spirit-calming practice, is very organized!  

Once the ashes I smeared floated down onto a recipient’s nose. She laughed. So did I. No point in being overly solemn or pious, as if we actually knew exactly what we were doing.  While working as chaplain in an alcohol/drug rehabilitation hospital I added a phrase to the traditional line: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. And God by grace will restore you to fullness of life. It was cheap grace, arrogant idolatry, and playing at God, I know, but some of these people were so beaten down by disease. And I had difficulty leaving them in ashes.

I left my own ashes on all day long—profoundly convinced that Ash Wednesday is the most true and honest day of the Christian year. 

-There is not a single soul who doesn’t mess up, clean up, mess up again, and clean up again. 

-No one does anything without two motives, one truly altruistic and generous, the other secretly self-serving. 

-God does not lead anyone into temptation. We do! Then we pray for help from God and others to get back on track, to save us from ourselves. God is far more generous than we are.  

*  *  *  * 

Do you know that our bodies can actually be composted, turned into rich, fertile soil, in which new green life grows? Tis true. Far less costly to the environment than cremation. Now there’s a new beginning!    

ADVENT. Who Am I? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 12/18/22

 All it takes is one—some ONE—to start a social/religious/political/cultural transformation, to break long-held patterns of behavior, our “ways” we say. 

In treacherous times when change is so needed, we all ask: Are YOU the ONE?

Perhaps a better question is:  AM I THE ONE?

*  *  *  *

As the oldest child, born (1938) from a mother who believed herself a failure because of three failed conceptions, I grew up much too praised and too adored, also with an insatiable need to overachieve and a praise addict, imagining: I am what I achieve.  

It worked for a while. School was my obvious haven, and even Sunday School where I learned that God Himself was the greatest achiever of all time, and I, by proxy became the greatest memorizer/reciter of putative divine qualities—all beginning with omni-.  I mean imagine creating all the whole world and everything in it from atop a cloud. (I’d seen this image in a favorite book, The Little Book About God by Lauren Ford, 1934) That would be the omni-est of omni feats ever—utterly omni-competent. 

My own omni-competence, however, failed miserably in two very important areas in my life so far: motherhood and priesthood. Why? Because neither of these was an achievement. Why? Because I was not in control. I could not make either happen by being competent, equipped, qualified, even desirous. For biological motherhood, I had to offer my body—unconditionally. For ordination as a priest, I had to offer my soul—unconditionally. For both, I had to risk giving myself deeply, and loving myself completely—finite, imperfect, and yes, needy. 

Yes, I did give birth to four healthy children whom I loved without condition, and in the heaving power of my own uterus I knew God. At being the traditional omni-mother-at-home, I failed. I chose to pursue my own needs and gifts; my children felt abandoned; I could not achieve the forgiveness I desired and needed. I could only ask for it and wait. 

And yes, I did, after much struggle and rejection, get ordained a priest in the Episcopal church, and in the powerful force of my own persuasive self-advocacy I knew God. At fulfilling the expected traditional role of parish priest, I failed. I chose to pursue a vocation in pastoral counseling, chaplaincy, writing, lobbying to remove gender from God’s name, and serving as non-stipendiary Sunday Priest Associate in parishes. I could not achieve the forgiveness I thought I needed. I could only wait, be a good writer, counselor, and chaplain, never call God HE, and see what God would make of it all.     

Jesus failed spectacularly at his mission to renew the reign of God. He even cried out to God from the cross: Why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22) Still, many called Jesus Messiah/Christos, and the renewal of the everlasting covenant between Creator and Creation took new root and growth in Christianity. Jesus could not achieve the fullness of his vision. Did he desire or need God’s forgiveness? I don’t know, but Jesus is remembered as asking God to forgive the enemies who jeered and crucified him. 

Perhaps it’s our own expectations, or society’s for us, that we fail? Of God’s expectations we know not the ongoing details. We live in hope and trust. 

We still fail, and we still pray, and we still wait and call out: Are YOU the One? 

All I know is that I am not the ONE.  I am one of the Ones.  

ADVENT. Who Is She? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 12/11/22

 All it takes is one—some ONE—to start a social/religious/political/cultural transformation, to break long-held patterns of behavior, our “ways” we say. 

This happens when all their stories are told—and retold.  

Of particular interest to me are the stories of biblical women who—ONE by ONE—  mightily influenced the course of Creation. 

Consider Eve, the woman who, drawn by natural curiosity, reached for the forbidden fruit in Eden and started what? She was the first women’s libber/ribber/fibber. Adam of course followed eagerly, looking innocent.  

The late American writer, Joan Didion, once wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It is the stories in the Holy Bible that keep us alive and fascinated with the Mystery of this Divinity of many names—too many for any one religion to own. 

Laurie Metcalf, a movie actor, commented recently about how important the work of a good director, in this case Greta Gerwig, was in helping actors see and understand fully the character they were playing and the story surrounding that character—not just acting out a role. “That clicked with me in a way that was rare. That made it so real to me. It was the first time I was playing a fictional character where I actually was able to think of it as a real woman.” (N.Y Times, Sunday Styles, 12/4/22)   

Would the same not apply to biblical characters whose stories are not fiction, nor biography, but exemplary stories, told to highlight moral and spiritual meaning. Are they true? Yes. Are they literal fact? No. Are they stunningly beautiful even if painful? Yes. They are Schadenfreude—German word built on a combination of shaden (harm or damage) + freud (joy). It is usually understood to mean joy/rejoicing at someone’s else’s misfortune, like secretly gloating at your win or another’s loss as if you deserved all that praise. But what if the power of the joy of ONE could overwhelm the harm altogether? 

I recall a favorite New Testament exam or class question: Who founded Christianity, Jesus, Paul, or John the Baptist?  

What about Mary? 

There was no right or wrong answer to this question, of course. In a God-school exam one had to become an attorney for the defense, or the defensive. I voted for Jesus, thinking that was the obvious right answer for a Christian. But resentment coiled painfully around my gut: Didn’t there have to be a beginning to the beginning? Women, after all, naturally bleed for life— not for war. I filled with bloody joy when I suddenly realized in the deep dark depths of my own body and blood that a woman had to be indispensable to any divine project—Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection—in life and in death, especially one of enough magnitude to save this whole fractured cosmos. 

Who was this ONE in the Bible? Mary. She, with pain and fear and courage, started this Christian faith, this Christmas tradition, this Incarnation, this Christ. She bled for it. 

She was the ONE who labored  in pain and cried for joy. Now we all sing, “Joy To The World” with gusto. 

The Road Called Creation, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 10/09/22

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God; it is the road itself. 

I quote from  The Writings of Martin Buber, a Jewish mystic and scholar, Austria-Hungarian and Israeli philosopher. He’s famous for constructing a relational spirituality called “I-Thou”.  His book on this idea was translated from German to English in 1937.

When in seminary in the 1980s I first read Buber. As I read I felt a great surge of sheer aliveness rise up from within me like a giant blush. As a student of language I know that the pronoun “YOU” has two forms, one more formal to use with someone you don’t know very well or are just meeting, the other for your own beloved, a good friend, a family member, or, dare I say, God.  

In Spanish usted is you-formal and tu is you-informal; in French it’s vous and toi. I was surprised when I lived for a while with a family in Spain and heard in their family prayers the “Hail Mary” (many more times than I thought necessary) using the familiar pronoun for the BVM. 

“Blessed art thou among women” was “Bendita tu eres entre todas las mujeres.”  Notice that the English pronoun in the Hail Mary is also THOU, Blessed are thou among women.” AND in the traditional “Our Father” —Hallowed be THY name, THY kingdom come, THY will be done.  I sometimes think all our pronoun problems would be solved if we just went back to using thee and thou and and thine.  And would that in fact, and in spite of contemporary usage of YOU and YOUR, be more honest to our gospel of divine Love?

Which brings me back to Buber and his ethic of I-Thou relationships. Essentially, that means that each individual being regards every other being as worthy of the same respect each accords the other. You see how tangled up in pronouns I get, but you get the idea. Buber advocates I-Thou as a model for effective mutual dialogue. Often relations become monologues, which Buber calls I-It relationships—deaf self-talk. Otherwise, supposed conversation become monologues—deaf.

So do we dare consider such intimacy with God? Most would say NOT. But I wonder if God alone is bold enough to shed his almighty power in favor of  I-Thou  relations with all Creation?  

The parable Jesus tells in Luke’s gospel tells us about his healing TEN lepers who all go leaping away in joy, free of ugly sores and disease. ONE leper returns to thank Jesus for this healing. Jesus asks: Where are all the others? Were they not healed as well?  (Luke adds to the story that the one who returned with gratitude was a Samaritan, that is, a foreigner, a reject, a gentile—enemy of the Jewish majority Jesus addresses.) 

Please note that Jesus praises the grateful one, does NOT condemn all the others, AND proclaims that the reign of God is already in our midst. THIS DOES NOT MEAN HIMSELF, (Christians, take note) BUT RATHER THE JOY OF HEALING ITSELF AS WELL AS THE GRATITUDE FOR IT. 

This story teaches us all to be I-Thou with ALL today’s “lepers”—those we secretly imagine and secretly fear, to be the “It” to our “I”?   

Who on this road of Creation would you avoid?—a Republican? a Democrat? a Muslim? an anti-vaxxer? an Evangelical? an immigrant? a Queer or Trans? a trillionaire/fat cat? a criminal? a feminist? a schizophrenic? a Jew? an addict? a Pope? a demented one? a dirty street urchin? a beggar?  or, God forbid, someone whom you cannot call THOU? 

2021.11.21 Whose King Are You?

Today marks the liturgical anniversary of our marriage on November 23, 1986. We were married on Christ the King Sunday during the morning Eucharist in the parish church, Trinity in Collinsville, Connecticut, where Dick had served as the rector for eight years, and I had been on the Search committee that elected him to serve. 

So why all this introduction? Well, because this small parish had supported us both through more than difficult times for us and them. It isn’t easy to divorce and remarry when you are clergy, but this little place had seen us both through vulnerable times and stayed loving towards us both. That is why we wanted to celebrate the sacrament of our marriage within this context at Trinity—our spiritual home, not just his job.  

While planning our service, we fussed over the hymn chosen for the day: “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” It was the obvious choice for this Sunday before the season of Advent begins and hurls us— willingly or reluctantly, depending on one’s ability to play mental gymnastics with the ordering of events in time—towards Christmas when this “king” was crowned just four weeks prior to his birth. Either a very short pregnancy, or a very premature baby, or possibly an act only Divinity could, or would, pull off. None of that mattered much to me, but I did not want to walk down the aisle with my about-to-be new marriage partner, singing about “HIS” triumphal crowning. 

Of course I am overdoing my sarcasm here, but the truth is we did debate the hymn choice for that day—the  diademata, “Crown Him With Many Crowns.” I lost that battle; the long liturgical tradition won; Christ (not He) got crowned; we married each other. When we said our vows I had a small grief seizure—tears flowed down my cheeks. Dick’s mustache quivered with alarm. It was crazy and incongruent— unless you know something about grief and it’s odd inexplicably unpredictable timing. I did not regret my first marriage, nor did I regret the divorce, but I did grieve both and occasionally still do in spurts. 

Anything or anyone that has been such a significant part of your life, will always need to be grieved, even in cases when divorce has meant a sad but inevitable end to a marriage. 

*  *  *  * 

See what we marriage partners are doing now after 35 years of happy marriage!  It’s Halloween, 2021, at a party for the retirement community where we now live in Connecticut. A party and fun was just what we all needed—a time to laugh, enjoy hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, and show off costumes. Dick and I went as Good Brother Monk and the Beloved Monastery Cat. I dressed all in black, including mask and hat, and Dick wore his hooded alb. (Someone asked where he got his costume. It’s his liturgical vestment, the one he wore when he presided at the altar.) Ms. Cat  was saved by Good Brother Monk after she lost her tail on a coyote trail. He fed her lots of fish and milk in a dish. I made plenty of mewling, howling, and purring sounds. Good Brother Monk, who prays all day and all night, closed our routine with a somewhat edited, and slightly ribald Irish blessing, ending with Latin (illegitimi non carborundum) and final praise for the monastery pussy. 

Everyone laughed heartily and we won a prize—a large beautiful woven quilt to keep us warm in winter months. Meeeowwwpurrrr. Amen. 

   

2021.05.23 A New -ISM To Consider: Single Storyism (Pentecost, 2021)

Look. See. Taste. Smell. Touch. Feel. Intuit. Speak. Praise. Repeat.

What Wisdom is the divine spirit of communication/communion creating now? NOW.

How hazardous it is for me to take the biblical story of Pentecost literally, as if the shocked and bereaved followers of Jesus were suddenly overtaken by rushing winds and tongues of fire, not to mention preaching prowess. Thus empowered, they preached in such a way that foreigners from all over Judea heard, understood, and proclaimed the good news of this new savior Christ in their own languages. Their babbling ecstasy raised such a ruckus that onlookers thought they were drunk. Many Christians still call this bash the birthday of the Church.

When I was four my whole extended family, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins gathered to celebrate me. Their whole focus was on me as they toasted and sang and showered me with attention. I received gobs of gifts, including a favorite doll, still intact after many repairs. There’s a photo of me sitting at the head of the table, wearing my pointed birthday hat and a special new pinafore, and trying to eat a huge piece of birthday cake. I was in tears—too much well-meant pentecostal hype for me. Being overwhelmed, even by God and the love of many, can be traumatic.

I do believe that the depth and breadth of the Holy Spirit is beyond my comprehension, but the image of “drunken” charisma spawns doubt not faith in me. Joy, yes, but I’ve survived enough drunken bashes in my life not to invite another, even metaphorically. Persuasive evangelism and conversion happen in many ways, I know, yet sudden unanimous conversionary zeal and ecstasy gathered up in a party is just not my style, and I do not think Pentecost, metaphorically or not, is the birthday of the Christian Church.

My experience tells me that there are many different stories about ways the Spirit shapes each of us. God after all has no way to us but through us. Everything created is always becoming, not like a new dress, but as a matter of sentient Life breaking forth through a single Creator known by many, many names, and incarnations, and stories—all valid.

I’ve noticed that we are quick to attach -ism to a phenomenon. Ism reminds us to pay attention to something important. That’s positive, however, -ism carries with it the danger of spawning a fanatic, a single-minded purist, a rigid proselytizer, or worse, a violent warrior who rarely talks and listens but easily fights. Isms can endanger the becoming process. For example, my own waking up process led me to feminism—the general need to pay more attention to the growth, maturation, and full value of women beyond domesticity and at all levels of society.

For me, feminism encouraged my desire to grow beyond being a stay-at-home wife, mother, and homemaker. It meant focusing my spirituality, getting a seminary education, and pursuing ordination as a priest of Word and Sacrament—a traditionally all-male vocation—in the Episcopal Church. I never burned a bra or shot a bishop, but believe me I seized my mid-life awakening, my free-to-be womanhood with wild  “pentecostal” abandon. I hurt my children and others. I soon ran headlong into church politics, chose resilience over shame, and engaged in a long, painful fight toward ordination, one I almost gave up. Some wounds are still in need of healing.

I’m glad Christianity has no -ism attached to its name, although Christian evangelical-ISM encourages Christians to believe that their religion is THE ONLY ONE TRUE way, as if one version of divinity offered some kind of guarantee of spiritual correctness, if not salvation. To absolutize this one way, one gospel, one story has led to the painful politics of exclusion with its obvious extension into hatred, violence, blind devotion, even war. It doesn’t do much for divinity or humanity.

Racism is currently an upfront focus in religion and culture. It doesn’t simply mean bias against people of color, which is bad enough, it means that ONE race—the white one, the right one— has self-selected as dominant, its story the ONLY story worth honoring, teaching, telling, and privileging. This phenomenon holds true for other -ism-bound words: sexism, heterosexism, able-ism, individualism, colorism ( skin whiteners, really?), truism, individualism, and yes, American-ISM. I am a patriot who loves this country and detests patriotISM. PatriotISM can create peace and/or war.
            *  *  *  *

Associate Professor of New Testament and Ancient Christianity at Yale Divinity School, Michal Beth Dinkler, is offering a summer course, “The Danger of a Single Christian Story.” The title made me shiver with hope. Could someone else be wondering like I am? 
 

Her talk was inspired in part by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie’s  2009 TED talk,“The Danger of a Single Story",  in which she tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice —and warns that “if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”

Dinkler focuses on the variety of stories in the Bible itself and on the four different canonical gospel narratives. The tendency in church and academy is to try to merge these four. But the stories about Jesus are different. What if the Christian imagination is restricted when we believe there is only one right way to understand Jesus stories? Or only one right way to worship God?

Well qualified with natural curiosity and her willingness to pursue theological education at an evangelical seminary, Gordon Conwell, and at Harvard Divinity School, Dinkler critiques storyism. She has landed at Yale Divinity, a non-denominational seminary.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “It was like, wait a minute—there are all these different people who say they are Christians but believe very different things than I did at the time,” she said. “I had to think, ‘Am I going to double down on what I believed before [Harvard]? Or am I going to open up and allow for these differences?” The Holy Spirit itself prohibits such limitations. 

“Every retelling of a story is an attempt to persuade in some way,” Dinkler said in a recent interview. “And these four gospels show us the importance of context, for the person who is telling the story and for the people to whom they’re telling it. Coming to any biblical text and trying to force it into one kind of truth is an unimaginative way of understanding God’s work in the world. The New Testament itself tells us that diversity has been present amongst followers of Jesus since the very beginning.”
 

I love Jesus the Christ and all his teaching and ways. He is not an -ism; nor am I; nor is the Christian story. I appreciate Dinkler’s  critique of Single Storyism. I am, gratefully, not a Christian-ist.

2021.02.21 COMPASSIONTIDE, Retreat with Martin Smith

It’s time!!  Go!

I’ve been restless, irritable, uneven of soul. It’s not the virus or hermetic ways, not even the bombardment online of a million glamorous offerings to deepen everything from your spirituality to your drain pipe flow. Something was missing. What?

RETREAT!  It’s been over two years since we’d been on retreat—out of town to a quiet place of contemplative solitude-in-community where you make friends with yourself and your God.

What is contemplative about Zoomed distance watching? Still, I need for my nerves a retreat, darling. So we sign up for a retreat, Compassiontide, at Holy Cross Monastery with Martin Smith, our favorite ex-monastic-now-married Episcopal monk-priest.

Retreat Silence  

An infuriating irony about retreat silence: the more you concentrate your focus outward on icons, images sculpture, artwork, natural scenery, a speaker, the more your inner focus sharpens.

Retreat prep 

I re-read Martin Smith’s Lenten classic A Season for the Spirit. I noticed the noble dedication by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie who commissioned a book for Lent, 1991. “It still comes as a surprise to many people that there are monks and nuns who belong to the churches of the Anglican Communion.  .  .  . This book is not a substitute for prayer itself. Instead it leads us into the experience of prayer.  .  .  .  Martin Smith has written a practical book.   .  .  .   I have much confidence that it will be found a rich quarry for Christians of varying traditions seeking to come closer to God in prayer, and also for those just beginning the journey of faith.”   

I have so many underlinings in this little book that it makes me laugh. I’ve internalized it and now imagine it to be my own clever theology. There really is nothing new under the sun. Good!

Typos 

I notice with a laugh that on pages 12 and 21 there are typos—the same word misspelled twice: INdentification.    
    In the chapter, “The Wind In The Wilderness,” Martin Smith describes the biblical story of Jesus being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit to discern his vocation. How could, or would, Jesus be human and divine at once? “If he is the Holy One of God, the Only-begotten, what becomes of his sense of INdentification with weak mortals?”
    In the chapter, “The Anaesthetic Begins To Wear Off,” Jesus wrestles with how to reconcile a broken world into the divine embrace of God. “The Spirit of Jesus moves us, as it moved him, to INdentify ourselves with a broken world AND to bring it within the reconciling embrace of God.”
    
I will  INdentify. Honestly, I slip-slide around, flop to one side or the other, and pray a lot to keep balance and be compassionate with my blundering. I’m a failure. But I’m awake. I go for more.  

Retreat Meditations In Small Bits    

God is an Overflowing Never-ending Immensity of Compassion—a Niagara. We can resonate with this flow, as a piece of paper lying on the strings inside a piano would when that note is twanged. The paper suddenly rises with the vibration. That’s how we RESONATE with divine Compassion—seeking more. The MORE is always available. I go with the flow.

The mystical password to enter the Gospel Mystery is ADORATION, not obedience. Adoration is loving God with the brakes off. A brain-damaged child would butt his head on the TV screen. He was aroused and gestured that he wanted MORE. He wanted IN, into the action. How adore-able. Me too!

Christianity is the only religion that puts passion back into compassion. Our God suffers. The hands that hold us in existence are pierced with unimaginable nails. The Cross, therefore, is a judgment, not because it is violent, but because it brings human cruelty into the light. I see!  One of Jesus’s hand on my home altar crucifix is missing. I cover its absence with a tiny white shell.  I shiver.

Martin has a small lamb tattooed on the inside of his arm. “The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world; the sins of the world do not take away the Lamb.”  I see that silly lamb with new eyes—no longer ridiculing but with gently tenderness.

Compassion for others is an unstable idea. What? Justice is very popular for good reason today, but it is not the Gospel of Christ. What?  Justice offers equality, giving all of us just what we all, by rights, deserve. Mercy, however, is not just. It gives us all what we do not deserve, have not earned. Say again? Consider the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Some worked hard all day, and some worked an hour only. They all got the same pay. Equal pay for equal work? Nope, not the way of God.

When you are helpless establish a sheltering heart in prayer. I pray with a young man of 25 whose acquaintance I have only recently made through his grandmother. He had a normal accident for a teenager who at 17 climbed a tree, lost balance, and fell to the hard ground—flat on his back. He is now 25 and quadriplegic. His grandmother left the church long ago, in disgust about rules that hurt people. I’d told her I was going on a retreat—virtually. We laughed. She knew what a retreat was, and the next day asked me if I’d pray for her grandson on my retreat.  I do. I am. No brakes on.
 

Practice promiscuous empathy. OK, I’ve tried promiscuity in other ways, but this is much harder. Screech go my brakes. They still work—in case.

The Holy Spirit invites compassionate experimentation: Try this. See this. Ask this. Wonder this. Pray this. The Spirit tugs gently at your heart and gives it clues. For example, imagine that the person whose behavior you deplore may have an unhealed wound hiding behind mean behavior. In prayer, recall your own wounds, and Compassion will soften your heart. That’s God—madly soft-hearted.

Last Laughs

I asked my usual question about the lumbering pace of the Church in eliminating gendered language to find a more expansive and compassionate vocabulary for God. Martin grinned and said he knew who had asked that question. I’m that much of a pest, yes. He said he was not adept in this area, offered “Loving Parent,” and admitted that, although Church rhetoric is hard-edged to change, it is still locked into a masculine distanced God. (He didn’t add white. I forgave him immediately.)  After all, most of the quotes and images he used were from women.

Hilarious irony: the theological language question about which I am the most passionate, I have never prayed about, never directly consulted God in prayer about. Have I assumed that God already agreed with me?  Oh God, forgive me and help the Church loosen up and change traditional theological imagery. Thanks.
 

2021.03.07 On Saying NO

Most of us recognize NO when we see or hear it. Most of us recall seeing a wee one in a high chair, bibbed and ready to slurp and slop up whatever is on the spoon‚ until that something is liver, which gets spit out vociferously. Or the toddler who, after a little discernment, hurls unwanted food items from the high chair tray. We recognize NO when we see or hear it.

                                       *  *  *  *
Bible stories really should not be read as intellectual treatises or abstract academic texts. They are best read as sentient stories or bits of stories to swallow whole, like a poem—so profound and so everyday at once.

What does it mean to you that the putative savior of the world, according to Christian faith, wraps his hands around a self-made whip of cords (ouch) and kicks butt in the sacred place of worship, the Temple in Jerusalem, and drives people screaming from the premises?

 


Read the story. (John 2:13) Notice your initial thoughts or feelings. Now envision the Temple scenario.  Where would you be? I see myself in the women’s court standing aside—an investigative reporter taking copious notes. I feel secure hiding my nose in my precious notes. But my gut is churning. I can smell the heat of the marketplace, hear many voices in a babble. I watch Jesus approach. I see his keen eyes gleam as they sweep the scene. He’s calm, his stride purposeful, his hands twirl and braid a whip out of strips of leather scraps. I used to ride horses and I know the smooth feel of a riding crop. I’m tense, taut, tight—riveted. I feel sucker-punched.

It’s a meaty scene, remembered well enough through hundreds of years of oral tradition. Think traveling minstrels strolling the ancient Eastern world, singing and strumming stories that drew crowds. These “street corner” prophets attracted crowds. They brought not just entertainment, not only simple propaganda, not even flat-out good news. They transmitted, through lyric and story-song, the invisible and indispensable gift of Hope.

Hope isn’t something you can go out and get, and you can’t give it to anyone else. Hope has to be caught, invisibly in the air, like a virus.You suddenly have it for no sensible reason, and you know it. You also know you can’t possess or re-create Hope it, yet it is yours right now. The Scottish have a word for this phenomenon: glist. Glist means sun streaming through a break in the clouds.

Eventually, all this Hope was written down, printed, translated, and bound into one huge book called Holy Bible. Thousands of years later, we still place a right hand on this book, and swear  to tell the truth or to fulfill a high office with integrity and honor. This book, ironically, counts, even in an age in which many people do not believe in its God and scorn religion.  

To return to our story, which—notably—is remembered and written into all four gospels. Jesus, whose entire message was about loving God whole-heartedly enough to treat yourself and your neighbor with respect, is saying NO.
NO to false gods!
NO to murder!
NO to adultery!
NO to stealing!
NO to false testimony/lying!
NO to inequity!
NO to injustice!
NO to worship in holy spaces, Temple and Church, that does not induce practices of Justice, Mercy, and Sabbath Peace in all living things.    

Was Jesus angry? Of course! There has been much resistance among biblical scholars and Christians, especially of the evangelical bent, to let the human Jesus have human emotions. I do not take the Bible literally; I do take it seriously. Bible stories are spiritually compelling precisely because they are emotionally intelligent.

My Hope? Well, if my biblical ancestors in sacred tradition can be angry, so can I. If the star of my religious faith can be angry, so can I. And with clarity and punch, I can say NO.
NO to systemic and individual domestic violence.
NO to violence against women.
NO to global domestic violence.
NO to murder as a strategy for maintaining peace or justice.
NO to being forced to praise a white male supremacist image of Divinity/God.
NO to CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) and to the idol they prop up as “savior.”
NO to lying to children generation to generation.
NO to churches who proffer a false God, preach sedition.
NO to unexamined white privilege I cannot help but recognize in myself.
NO to being a wimp!

2020.05.31 Pentecost. Whose Birthday Is It?

Pentecost is NOT the birthday of the Christian Church as many have been taught. Pentecost is a much bigger, grander, and far-reaching bomb of a holy day.

Think Mystic Flame, Mystic Wind, Cloven Tongues. Think crowds in the hundreds, Jews gathered to celebrate the 50th day after Passover Shavuoth—liberation and plenitude. Think crowds of thousands— Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Pamphylia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, Gentiles and Jews alike—all assembled, eager to experience Divinity. The huge guest list itself is the meaning of Pentecost in Acts—all drawn to the hearth of God's heart.

We dare not downsize this Spirit, nor confine it to certain sacraments administered by “fatherly hands.” Nor can it be claimed by any one religion or national group. It is the Spirit of deepest contact with the Divine, believers and non-believers. Pentecost is the birth of Internationalism—the spirituality of Democracy.

In 1918, theologian, Vida D. Scudder, said that Peter’s first sermon, carried a democratic message: “To you is the promise and to your children and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord God shall call . . .”   The struggle between nationalists and an international ideal was very much part of the story of the early church. How big will we be? How far is our reach? Who is part of this institution and who is not?

Peter, a nationalist, was overcome by the Spirit, which gave him breadth of vision. Nevertheless, he went right on opposing Paul and insisted on circumcision as a condition until the Spirit re-programmed his institutional tapes and shook his soul alive. That’s the goal of Pentecost. Even proper Anglicans get permission to shed decorum and explode with exuberance. 

Flowing from this Pentecostal Spirit are gifts. The first is Tongues. I once heard a woman speak in tongues in a parish church. To my shame, I silently condemned her as mentally ill, simply because I, sane and sensible, could not understand her language.

I was abashed to read Scudder’s interpretation of The Gift of Tongues as the Gift of Sympathy. Sympathy? Yes, feeling for the feelings of another. Tongues means to understand without language. It is the gift of knowing-by-soul, not by words. Habitually, we translate everything into our own language to validate it. I remember my thrill when I first read something in Spanish without translating it into English as I read. Tongues signifies that every stranger and alien, through the pentecostal Spirit, understood God’s revelation in their own language without translation.

When I went to Spain to live with a family, people talked so fast I couldn’t understand a word they said, in spite of my big fat college degrees! I felt scared and left out—alone. Too embarrassed to ask them to slow down, I just listened and watched until I caught the energy, the animation. I felt the people before I comprehended all their words. When I came home my mother asked me what the people were like, and I said: “People are people, the same everywhere.”

Habitually, I break things down, analyze meanings, develop my own arguments and opinions. That’s fine, but there is also a wordless language. Ask any baby. They all speak in tongues. And we listen, babble back, caught up in a transcendent moment of nonsensical connection.

To transcend one’s body is orgasmic. It’s not a sustainable state. For a moment you are both inside and outside yourself, experiencing a mystic self-transcendence, speechlessly beyond the comfort of intellect. Some of us cry out—O God—in such moments. 

When I went to a bullfight in Spain, I felt this transcendence. The howling crowd swayed side to side, following the energy of both toro and torero. To parse it was impossible. To make it mentally accessible impossible. So I lost my mind. I swayed with the rhythmic pulse of Olé. I had no objectivity, so I simply got lost in pentecostal exuberance. My olés were for the bull, but it didn’t matter. The crowd rose and fell in one piece—as one, just as Jesus advocated.

Try not to be offended that I put Jesus, and sex, and and the cruelty of bullfights together. All analogies fall short of Pentecostal immensity. Beyond the birthday of one religion, Pentecost summons us to recognize and realize the intimate transcendent oneness of all living things.

In church Christians gather to receive humble wafers and hear: “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” possibly with the addition, "may it keep you in everlasting life” These words are not death sentences; they  do not mean we have to die or fly off to heaven to be with Christ. They mean that right now we are embraced by Infinity—IN God.

Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Presence, I believe, is always, always these things:
    -unitive not divisive
    -expansive not contractive
    -connective not disruptive
    -inclusive not exclusive
    -impartial not partisan
    -potent not passive
    -creative not destructive   
    -international not national
    -interdependent not autonomous

Pentecost is not the Birthday of Christianity. 

It is the Birthday of Creation.

   

2020.04.26 Up, Down, and All Around

As a child, my eyes were trained upward, peering through the jagged line of city skyscrapers, trying to get a glimpse of God on high. I saw many clouds and sun and rain. As an adult, I look downward for glimpses of God in my own heart, in the faces and actions of people on earth. I see smiles, and kindness, and tears—signs of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, the dear truth of a holy society envisioned here on earth.

For centuries many have prayed:  “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Do we expect that all this will happen without our help?

According to Vida D. Scudder in her book, Social Teachings of the Christian Year. Lectures Delivered at the Cambridge Conference, 1918, republished in 2015, the appointed Scriptures in Eastertide “keep us strictly to earth, at her homeliest and most difficult. The Risen Lord with the marks of His Passion on Him, moves among His own in old scenes, in the familiar ways. As they tread dusty roads, as they eat their suppers, as they ply their trades; in rooms where they were wont to gather, or by the lake whose waters have known the tread of His holy Feet, suddenly He is with them.”

Suddenly, someone verifiably dead appears—not in a dream but in a vision, earthbound in a sensory way and often with a life-changing message. Some of us have had such visionary experiences of someone to whom we’ve been very close. These are mostly personal and private. We are afraid we’re crazy, so we don’t tell anyone. But a child will always tell. A child I knew once announced: “Daddy called today.” Daddy was dead. Mommy argued truth, but the most she could get from the child was an agreement that she would not to tell anyone else. Such things just do not fit into rational boxes. Jesus’s followers were just as blown away as we are.

Still, let’s remember that the very first person to “tell” about such a strong vision had never seen Jesus alive, but only after he was dead in a vision with a message to TELL the world. That person was Paul, persecutor-in-chief of Christians. He was so radically converted by this vision that, once he digested what had happened to him, he never shut up. So we ought never dare dismiss such an experience as “just a vision.”  The child knew the sound of Daddy’s voice and heard it through the phone—so strong was the sensory memory backed up by the truth of Daddy’s love still in her heart. This was true for the gospel writers—and for us as well.

What’s odd is that these extraordinary spiritual experiences happened in mundane ways and were nothing new. As Scudder puts it, Jesus was “still bent on training his followers to create the Beloved Community.”

This Lord/Christ—alive, dead, resurrected—was/is consistent and insistent. With few exceptions, this Jesus addressed them when they were gathered in a group.

Today we are the group. Some have interpreted these appearance visions to include instructions to organize the Church to be the Kingdom. Scudder warns, with wry humor that “there is scant evidence of this in the Bible and the idea of the Kingdom is belittled when confined to the partial and imperfect expression in the Church visible here below. The Church is doubtless the natural, the appointed instrument of the Kingdom, but it would take an inveterate optimism to identify the two.”  

This vision, this message, this God, was to be proclaimed up and down and all around, all at once, and not restricted to any one religion, including Christianity. 

I find this limitless spirituality helpful today when we are all of us together yet trapped in solitary confinement because of a lethal virus sweeping the globe. We are caught in a paradox we cannot, and are not supposed to unravel: the more alone we are the more together we become.

Can anything good come out of this crisis?  I believe that a cultural shift of massive proportions will occur to move us from global selfie-ism to a god’s-eye-view perspective—up and down and  all around— in every major institution: arts, business and commerce, religion, politics, science, medicine, education, social organization.

Why so? Because we have lived with solitary confinement; we have lived surrounded by death; we have lived in the throes of collective angst and hope, death-in-life. And we will grieve and live to begin anew in a catastrophically changed and strengthened world. Oh yes, we will live with the cruel bruises of this pandemic on our souls and bodies, and we will write new bibles, work to love and heal our Earth, tell old and new stories, sing new songs, never forget.

                                 All changed, changed utterly
                                    A terrible beauty is born.
                                                                 -W. B. Yeats