2026.02.25 THE INTIMATE ULTIMATE VALUE OF CHAPLAINCY. Spiritual Lemons, Lyn Brakeman blog post

I was a chaplain in big city hospitals, including a treatment center for recovering addicts. I had to self-advocate with the Director of the center. Yes, I will organize counselors and groups for all kinds of issues and will supervise staff on request. No, chaplains do not sell any single religion; instead we acknowledge, advocate, and serve as a presence on staff to acknowledge and care for and about spiritual health—connectedness to a Higher Power, the intimate value of Soul, and Prayerfulness.  

I impressed myself!

“But these people often feel lost and angry at the church or alienated. They don’t want any religion!” the Director said.  

Imagine having to lobby for God? But lobby I did, and LO! The Center magically found the money to hire me as a part-time chaplain, and even make room for a small private office—no, not a closet—with a nameplate on the door, saying CHAPLAIN. I was only part-time, so I had to make sure that I honored the self-definition I’d designed with such jaunty bravado.

*  *  *  *  

My very first patient was a young girl in her late twenties. She didn’t knock but barged into my small office, sat down, crossed her arms, frowned, and did not respond to my gushingly friendly greeting. I idiotically asked her why she was here, and she exploded.”I don’t need any goddamn god shoved down my throat!!”  I said a quiet little prayer to this “goddamn god” and pushed back: “What do you need?”  “Nothing from you, you goddamn religious freak!” 

Well okay then . . . 

I ushered her out, resisting my urge to kick her butt.  Then I went to the bathroom for a private cry all my own. God, help me! I thought to quit. I was inadequate. I cannot do this job. Why did I ASK to be called chaplain!  I straightened up and said to myself, “Well, fuck her, too!”  Then I went to see the Director to resign and and failed at that, too. On the way home I felt my spine tighten up and I cursed God as I drove. “Dammit, where were you when I needed you?” 

Hearing nothing from God, receiving lots of love and loving from the omnipresent stuffed fluffy owl-of-my-soul. I regained strength enough to stay on, to be a chaplain, to become what my first patient hated, and even to wear my favorite necklace, a gold cross with an empty space where the crucified body of Jesus usually was. I learned to say the F word when absolutely necessary. Such an opportunity arose during my Spirituality talk.  A young black man blasted God with the F word, and I returned the favor: “Shut up and sit down, Sir. I’ve listened to your bullshit. Now it’s time for you to sit down, shut the f**k up, and listen to mine!”  He sat down and grinned. Sometimes, you just have to use language—the kind we still bowderlize with * * as if that worked!                                                                                                        

*  *  *  *

Chaplain Margaret Kibben, now acting chaplain of the House of Representatives, has spent much of her long career as a U.S. Navy chaplain in camouflage. Often it has been the sailors and Marines she has ministered to who haven’t always known how to decipher exactly who they are meeting. 

In a recent interview, Kibben recalled a day in the late 1990s at Camp LeJeune, in North Carolina, when she overheard a Marine ask a comrade, “Who the * * * *was that?” Later in the day, after learning that Kibben was a chaplain, he asked, “Hey chaplain, got a minute?” It led to a chance for them to speak privately about his personal challenges.

“For me, that is quintessential chaplaincy,” said the Presbyterian Church (USA) minister and former chief of chaplains of the Navy, the 26th person and the first woman to fill the role. “You are where it matters, when it matters, with what matters. And sometimes the ‘when’ goes over a whole day, sometimes the ‘where’ takes you on a hike and into a camp post, but wherever or whenever you are, you’re there with what matters, and that’s an ear and a safe place and an opportunity to let that person be who they are and to be received with love and grace and mercy in those moments.”  (from Religious News Services RNS)

                     *  *  *  *

This is why I advocate for chaplaincy services for ALL people, aging or drunks or teens or kindergarteners. It is omni-important to use the title Chaplain, because it indicates that this person has religious training and identity alongside psychological training. 

I am now aging. I live with people in a community for all people who are aging in place—independently. I know that there are many challenges for this group, and I know how proud they/we are about NEVER needing as much help as they/we really do and admitting that trifold care for body, mind and spirit is non-denominationally religious. 

Aging with grace is our last job on this earth. So let’s do it with both grit and grace and without fear! 

2020.06.21 My "Racism"—A Brief Anecdotal History, Part Two. Falling Apart.

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

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

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

Mary Ann Bigelow, Spiritual Director, first published in Presence International Journal for Spiritual Direction


When I was twelve I perched on the lip edge of hormonal torrents, geographic moves, the feeling memory of a childhood wound, and the intense awareness of cruelty to others who are in some way different and tormented for it, and by it. I opened my whole self wide to the wound of whiteness, femaleness, and shame. I call this cascade my “racism” wound. I call this holy.

Scene V. Carol Lee

Carol Lee was my best friend in Westhampton, L.I. where, before the Connecticut move, we summered to get away from big-city heat. We had been spending summers at a farm in upstate New York, where I had my own pony, but my parents, I’m assuming, were climbing, so we switched to THE  Hamptons—another move for which I would hate them. I was afraid more than anything of being a snob. I’d heard my mother and her women friends talk with disdain about “snobs”on Park Avenue. Thank God we lived on Lexington Avenue and were not therefore snobs. I happily claimed that we were not snobs, because we were in WESThampton not EASThampton.  A similar claim would make us not elitist and therefore not snobs.

But of course I didn’t figure all this out when I was twelve. I just overheard stuff and picked up the nuances of class. I wanted to be Carol Lee’s best friend as much as she wanted it. We became fast friends, and friends make everything better.  So do bikes.

I didn’t think of my parents as rich, mostly because my father always, always worried about money. He worked in advertising on Madison Avenue, yes. He advertised soup while my mother advertised me and bought me clothes galore. Sometimes I overheard their arguments about my mother’s extravagance and felt guilty about my clothes—but not guilty enough to dissuade my mother. Still, I figured my parents must have been pretty rich, because in Westhampton they joined a private beach club. I fell in love with the ocean and its waves. I  could swim all the way out to the floating raft which had a diving board. Once I drifted out too far and had to be rescued. I did not think I had to be rescued but the lifeguard did. It was uber-embarrassing to be rescued, yet it was a small “whew” too.

I have an August birthday. My parents were going to give me a party. Did I want it at the beach club or at home?  I chose the beach club, and excitedly told Carol Lee all about it.

Life turned cruel.

There was a hitch. The beach club was only for white people. Carol Lee was black. I did not understand. The ocean didn’t care. I told my parents they should ask for an exception. They didn’t. Nor did they tell me what to do. I was just so furious. I had to choose between Carol Lee and the damn beach club. For the first time, or the most conscious time, my life choices became my fault and my responsibility. That’s the moment I became a deal-maker: I chose the beach club and demanded another party for me and Carol Lee. I got my two parties—one more populated than the other, and my best friend was hurt. So was I. We stayed friends, but it was never the same. I don’t remember how I told her. I do remember that I did not tell her about the beach club’s rules.

I was swathed in smoldering inner pain I did not understand.  Carol Lee wasn’t a “servant”  Nor could I blame Russia as I had with Olga or the NYC Puerto Rican influx. This was me. This was my conscience. I was learning morality—and diluting it with compromise.

There had to be a better way to do things I loved and have the friends I wanted. 


Scene VI.  Snowy White Land—Colorlessness

They say white is not a color or is a non-color. That makes me feel colorless, bland, like white rice—little taste or substance. I always ordered brown rice in a restaurant, but that was mostly to be different from my too-adoring mother who favored Minute Rice—all white.

My parents joined what would come to be called “white flight”—white people moving out of the city to the suburbs, Darien, Connecticut to be exact. Darien must have had the same rules as the beach club. There weren’t many colored girls in my New York private school. Of course not. It cost money. I knew that, because my father tried and failed to persuade my mother to send me and my younger sister to a public school. That suggestion, apparently, was horrifyingly “black” and not for us. The public school in Darien wasn’t very colored at all, so I puzzled about color lines as I grieved.

I grieved the city —its colorfulness. I didn’t know the word “diversity” then, but I knew I felt the absence of color. 

I blended into this white-on-white culture. I guessed that whiteness alone was supposed to make me feel safe and secure. It didn’t. What did make me feel safe was finding a best friend whose skin was whiter than mine, and who had white blonde hair to match. Most importantly, she actually understood the “facts of life.” We bonded immediately. 

Academics also helped, because I was smart. Meritocracy was the way of it then. Who could imagine life without grades?  I loved A’s. They were my way to self-esteem. I was learning to run things with my mind—majoring in thinking. As to emotions, they were hidden but painful because now I did not fit in physically. I needed boobs, maybe a waistline—a little stature. I needed to menstruate—right away if possible.

What is the most rational thing that a young girl of thirteen—failed immigrant to suburbia, entering junior high school, lost in a sea of boys and boobs—could do?   (Luckily, I have no photos of myself at this time.)

To be continued.

2012.12.14 Not God

Today's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (a small community right next door to where one of our children teaches and some of our grandchildren attend school) means that 20 TWENTY! young children are dead, and 6 adults.  The children were babies, kindergartners. It's a massacre of holy innocents. I write through blurry tear-filled eyes.

My Godde!

More information will flesh out motives and patterns and all that BUT for now....... so what!  All we can do is sob.

I want to know where the HELL our Congress is? Why the HELL wasn't the ban on assault weapons reinstated? Why the HELL is it legal in 33 of our states to purchase deadly assault weapons of mass destruction with NO license or identification? How the HELL can we justify a whole war in the Middle East over the possibility of concealed weapons of mass destruction, when we can't even keep them out of our schools and away from our babies? In short, what the HELL is wrong with us? What the HELL is wrong with this country with its grandiose vision for peace-keeping?

People want to blame God at times like this. "Where was God when this happened?" they whine.

I ask: Where the HELL was humanity?

I'm grateful our President had the nerve to invoke God, prayer and scripture.  God is "close to the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" according to Psalm 147. That's where the HELL Godde is.

People today blat on about being secular humanists. Well, OK, then let's get going and humanize the HELL out of ourselves.