04/13/25 Shall We Dance or Flee, March or Sleep, Simply Wait In Hope? Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

I remember a time when I was standing in line at a sizable department store waiting to return /exchange a gift that didn’t fit.  A woman behind me smiled at me and said: “My dear, the meek shall inherit the world.”  I felt a flash of anger, imagining myself to be a weak wimp, without the guts to shove and push or curse.   

When I got home I looked up “meek” and discovered it meant “quiet, gentle, submissive”!! Wow, no way did I want to be meek! But Jesus blessed the meek, didn’t he? I might inherit the earth. I took my returnable item home and donated it to the parish church fair for the “white elephant” table. Wait! Elephants are huge, fierce only when necessary, faithful to their pack, and protective of their young—meekly powerful or powerfully meek!  

I left the line, went home, wept, and found a therapist who offered bioenergetic therapy. There I met my body and ALL its muscles, some weak and some strong—inner armor, forever meek AND blessed.

*  *  *  *

Life is full of varying muscles, varieties of prayers and hopes and fears. On this Sunday,  called Palm we Christians re-enact the dramatic biblical story of Jesus’s journey into Jerusalem to confront Rome’s antisemitism while crowds follow waving palms. 

We all knew how this bold confrontation turned out. BUT in the meantime we brandished our palms to wave in a parade. Boys turned palms into spears to fight duels. Others saved palms to create palm crosses. Clergy saved some palms to burn to make ashes to anoint our foreheads next Ash Wednesday.

One lone palm remained lying in the center aisle—all alone. I picked it up and gave it a kiss of hope, also kissing the palms of my own hands—open and ready.  

*  *  *  *  

Hope, Pope Francis tells us, “means believing that history does not end with our mistakes, our violence and injustice, or the sin that crucifies Love.”    

2023.05.28 PENTECOST, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I’ve loved and trusted the Presence of God since childhood, but I’ve never felt the urge to evangelize as we Christians are supposed to, right?  To me Pentecost was/is not the birthday of the Christian Church, nor the arrival of the Holy Spirit for the first time ever, but rather a stunning advertisement for the steadfast loving Spirit of God, present broadly, deeply, and wildly to all sorts of people the world over. Will they all be Christians? Not likely. Will they all be endowed with divine grace? Yes. Is that enough salvation? Yes. Is it the only way of salvation? No.

*  *  *  *

Recently at a sacred music concert taking place in an enormous church sanctuary, a listener turned to me and said bluntly: “What’s a mystic?” As if I knew! People ask clergy the most annoying real questions just because we are clergy. Clergy are NOT God, thank God!  

Still, the question got me wondering: What IS a  mystic really?  

A prayer practitioner. 

Pop-up answers seem foolish, I know, yet they are the kind of answers that force my attention away from my ego and all my educated answers. A prayer practitioner?  

Who, what, where, when, and why? 

WHO is a prayer practitioner? Anyone hoping, perhaps longing, to deepen their relationship of love with self, God and neighbor.  

WHAT is prayer? Being silent, preferably in solitude, while willing to open up to inner thoughts and feelings, to listen for God in your soul or notice God sitting on the branch of a tree. 

WHERE? At a place of deep quiet usually but not always at a monastery or a convent, run by monks or nuns whose ministry is to provide and maintain space and hospitality for prayer practitioners. 

WHEN? As soon as you admit to yourself that you need well, to know what the hell you are doing with your life.  And when you decide to sign up for a silent directed retreat for 3 days, then for 5 days and eventually for a whole week or 10 days. And when you submit to talking about your innards with a wise and trained Spiritual Director who listens and makes suggestions about things to use from Scripture or, annoyingly, recommends more silence. That’s when you take a walk, fume to God about all this damned silence, return to your room and sleep like a champ. 

WHY?  Because I said so.  On my first silent directed retreat, I stared for a very long time at a huge portrait of a rose. I loved its sheer size, its astounding beauty, elegance, and all its petals. I went to the greenhouse and asked if the man I met there was the gardener, just like Mary Magdalene had asked the Risen Christ who appeared to her as she wept at Jesus’s empty tomb in the gospel story in John 20:15.  In my case, this guy in the greenhouse actually was the gardener. He gave me one rose. I took it back to my room and dissected it, one petal at a time. The bright red petals were strewn all over the floor. There were only about 29. I left the petals and slept. The next day I returned to the chapel where the rose portrait hung. This time I noticed its long stem. There were thorns, sharp and pointed all along the stem on both sides.

 The thorns were hard. I frowned.

The petals were soft. I cried.

The petals far outnumbered the thorns.  I laughed.

  

2022.01.23 In Praise Of Women Who Read—and More

So here’s a small story—a joke and not a joke. 

One morning a husband returns to the cabin 

after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap.

Although not familiar with the lake, the wife

decides to take the boat out, since it is such a beautiful day. 

She motors out a short distance, anchors, and reads her book.

Along comes a game warden in his boat.

He pulls up along side the woman and says, Good morning, Madam, what are you doing?”

“Reading a book” she replies, (thinking, “Isn’t that obvious?”)

“You’re in a restricted fishing area”, he informed her.

“I’m sorry, officer, but I’m not fishing, I’m reading.”

“Yes, but you have all the equipment. I’ll have to write you a ticket.”

“For reading a book,” she replies.

“You’re in a restricted fishing area,” he informed her again.

“But officer, I’m not fishing, I’m reading.”

“Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know, you could start at any minute. 

I’ll have to write you up a ticket, and you’ll have to pay a fine.”

“If you do that, I’ll have to charge you with sexual assault”, says the woman.

“But, I haven’t even touched you,” says the game warden.

“That’s true, but you have all the equipment.

For all I know you could start any moment.”

“Have a nice day, ma’am”, he said, and departed immediately.

MORAL: Never argue with a woman who reads. It’s likely she can also think. Sure, God created man before woman. But then, you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.

We Christians hear a lot about the mission of Christ, the human manifestation of Divinity on earth. We think it’s a mission to convert everyone in sight to Christianity—my brand of course. Some of us think Christ is only a title for Jesus. But I’m sure this mission is more expansive—a mission to enliven all Life everywhere. A mission to unite us all.

How? Follow the Golden Rule— golden because, it’s not a business deal; it has no value, is often costly, pays little interest, and, more often than not, you don’t see much payoff.  It is simply how we get along, and it requires grit, chutzpah, grace and a wicked sense of humor with a twist. The biblical version of this rule of life is in the biblical book Leviticus 19:18: “. . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” End of conversation. Jesus the Christ grew up with this rule and studied it like all good little Jewish boys. It was Holiness School; it was his credo. All religions advocate this way of life and, in spite of the tedious, rule-bound elaborations in Leviticus, this rule abides. 

So here’s a story about Leviticus—no joke yet funny. A boy of fifteen approached his grandmother with a pressing question she alone, the boy thought, could answer. He thought this because his grandma went to church and studied the Bible. The boy had searched for advice in the Bible and read in Leviticus (15:16, 32) that having a nocturnal emission of semen was against the law of God and could render him unclean, rejected by God—horrifyingly, to this teenage boy, the end of all sentient life. The grandmother chuckled inside herself, recognizing the boy’s urgency over what moderns would call a wet dream, but she answered with serious aplomb: “Well, my dear, you are a wonderful boy with normal inclinations. I love you. Stop reading Leviticus.” And from that day on forevermore, this boy was known to his grandmother and her closest friends as Leviticus.  

MORAL: always trust a wise old woman who reads the Bible. It’s likely she takes it seriously with her tongue in her cheek and you in her heart.

  

2015.08.23 Mystery Shows Up!

“Eat this flesh. Drink this blood.”  These words echo Jesus of Nazareth’s toast at his good bye dinner with his closest friends. They sound weird enough, but to think we Christians do this as a regular practice is positively preposterous! 

We’re spiritual cannibals. Yes! Oh, we know that flesh and blood are symbols. That’s how we keep them at a safe distance from our own flesh and blood. Further, we use paper-thin wafers, pale as albino flesh, as a substitute for bread. Some communities substitute grape juice for wine.

Still, we keep doing it. And when we do it, as Episcopal Presiding Bishop-Elect, the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, speaking about the Eucharist: Mystery shows up! We just do it. It’s a steady practice, accompanied by a sturdy hope that God abides in us and we in God—a fleshy, bloody phenomenon, more fancily called incarnation. Close encounters of a mysterious kind: this stuff is really your own flesh, your own blood. You are a christ.

When my kids were little they spit out the veggies, ugly green stuff in little jars. (Somehow, yellow squash got a pass. Could be sweet potatoes, hey.) Older, they just kvetched, and one of them skirted the entire veggie controversy by requesting Campbell’s “mmm-good” vegetable soup. Peas, for some reason, were the veggie culprit of choice in our house. I used to command: “Just eat the peas! Later you’ll understand nutrition.” I don’t know if they understand nutrition to the full, but they ate the peas and Mystery showed up as they grew. They ate; Mystery showed up; they grew up.

In church we eat flesh and blood; Mystery shows up; we get spiritual nutrition; we grow. I don’t know exactly how all this happens. Mystery is sluicy, and not mine to govern. But I do know a couple of things for sure:

1. God, aka Mystery, has no way to you but through you.
2. When Mystery shows up it goes into you, and out with you, strengthening you to work for good.
3. Mystery never stops showing up, and whenever it does, something new is revealed. It can be scary, challenging, even painful. You want to run but you don’t, because Mystery gets under your skin and into your flesh and blood.

Ever wonder how Jesus got to be divine? He came eating and drinking and living life to its abundant fullness, every moment of it with gusto. A glutton, they said. Pig! And Mystery showed up. Who would have thought that this obscure, rank and possible randy, Palestinian Jew would initiate a Civil Rights Movement, including a march into Jerusalem to confront the powers with a vision of a kingdom where everyone eats and drinks together. ALL PERSONS TOGETHER. At one table? Indeed! 

We don’t have a big enough table, plus most of us Anglicans don’t like crowds, so we substitute altars. But we do it. We eat the peas. We eat the flesh. We drink the blood.

When I was twelve, I was excited to be having a birthday party at our Beach Club on Long Island (New York Long Island) where we summered. I could invite as many friends as I wanted. We’d have a cookout on the beach and swim in the ocean, maybe even after it got dark. My best friend at that time was Carol Lee, a black girl. We were BFFs, celebrating each day with giggles and wriggles, the way twelve-year-old girls do. We anticipated my party—until........

Until my parents were faced with the uneasy task of informing me that the Beach Club did not allow blacks. I was stunned. I’d never heard of such a thing—ironically, too sheltered among tighty whiteys. My parents didn’t tell me what to do. They gave me a choice. I wished they’d have told me what to do so I could blame them if things didn’t work well. But I had a choice.

I chose the Beach Club party. Then I lobbied for a separate-but-equal party for me and Carol Lee at home. Already a little politician, making a compromise! And Mystery showed up. Yes, in my awakened conscience, but more deeply in Carol Lee. She came to the separate party and never said a word, although I’m sure she knew the situation.

We ate and we drank and Mystery showed up.

2012.08.29 To Organize or Not To Organize?

My son John quipped the other day,  “Where is John the Baptist when we need him?”

(Today happens to be on the  liturgical calendar to remembering the beheading of John the Baptist, the biblical prophet who organized the people around sin, repentance and a new way of life. Good idea, not good for the powers of his day who preferred the status quo: despair and poverty for the 99%, power, money and isolation for the 1% with the egos.) 

Let’s get organized! hollered John the Baptist.  I think I shouted that to my young family, or if I didn’t I thought it loudly.  It seemed to me that in our family of six we needed to find a way to go in the same direction at the same time at least once a day—other than to bed. 

I wonder if Godde conjured that divine thought in Her mind just the instant before the firmament split-seconded out of control and Creation burst through—disorganized as hell.

Well, my family never did get organized much—except in heart.  We managed to stay in love despite internecine wars, divorce, suffering, geography, illness, alcoholism, sex, and even religion. We kept the vision of each other’s faces in heart and mind and memory. We occupied each other.

Occupiers recently occupied their vision of economic justice with their bodies. They sat down and stood for the shear voicing of truth.  AND I want them to get organized so that voice won’t fade out and whoosh off like so much sage brush in the desert.  I want them to keep screaming   like John Baptist. I want them to influence voters who have privacy in voting booths to vote, not according to external ideologies but according to their highest values and their spirituality— especially women who may be afraid to stray from the “herd” or think that they are better off kept in a patriarchal world.

To be blunt I want them to vote for the vision they occupied.  Republicans right now are organizing around a vision that compartmentalizes and categorizes human beings, envisioning an either/or nation, and excluding those who don’t fit their criteria.  Some Christians agree. I shudder.

President Obama envisions a both/and, bipartisan nation, organized and occupied by all for all. 
He could use a little more John the Baptist chutzpah but his vision bears my spirituality and will get my vote.
                 * * * * * * *

What about ORGANIZED RELIGION? — which is currently thought heinous.

The early seekers and followers of divinity realized there was more to this messy life than human effort. So they organized themselves and drew a community together to worship a Mystery they couldn’t know except by faith. Awestruck and wonderstruck they uttered prayers. It all began in astonishments and a vision.
And then they organized, the inevitable next step to preserve what they held most dear. This is true for families, nations and religions. 

Of course organization can kill if it gets encrusted in mere habit and when it isn’t occupied by flesh and blood and soul. Let’s face it: Love, by its nature, is impossibly disorganized.  But not abandoned if the people keep hold of the vision: love, peace, justice and equity for all earth. 

So I want our church and our nation to re-organize, to re-occupy a vision of common good, love divine and human, sacred and secular.

 So where IS  John the Baptist when we need him?