2024.01.07 Let There Be Light and Let There Be Darkness. Lyn G. Brakeman,Spiritual Lemons, blog post

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and called all of it good.

What is wrong in a country, in a world, in any society that prays for Peace all the time and has no idea what makes peace happen?

What is wrong with a country that calls itself a Democracy, a United states, establishes a Bill of Rights/Freedoms for all its citizens, and then silences some of these citizens from telling or writing the truth about themselves in an honest way? As a citizen I protest.

Is this moral? Is this ungodly?  Is this a violation of the freedom of every citizen to practice his/her/their own religious faith? Does this corruption, this lie promote holocaust, exile, soul-murder, evil, the censorship of truth itself?  That you can be stoned for being who you are, that you can be exiled for being who you are, that you can be lynched, jailed, buried alive, murdered, butchered, burned, bludgeoned, maimed, scalped, terrorized, banished, humiliated, deformed from foot-binding, censored, crucified, and shamed for being who you are and for writing, publishing, telling your own story about who you are.   

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Why am I so passionate about all this? Well, because I am a reader who has read about campaigns to ban books that MIGHT be offensive to young minds. And because I’m a writer who remembers Holden Caulfield!

American writer J.D. Salinger, born in New York City (1919) is one of the most famous living authors in America even though he hasn't published anything since 1965, and he lived reclusively until his death in 2010. He’s best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, about a boy named Holden Caulfield who gets expelled from his boarding school and spends the next few days wandering around New York City, trying to figure out why people have to grow older, why everyone is so phony, and where the ducks go when the pond in Central Park freezes over.

The Catcher in the Rye started out as a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," and it was the first story that Salinger managed to sell to The New Yorker. The New Yorker bought the story in November of 1941, and planned to run it in their Christmas issue. That December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Salinger's story was put on hold, considered too trivial in a time of war. Salinger writes from within the mental musings of a young teenager, gawky, curious, sexually awkward—unforgettable.  

Salinger expanded the story into the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which came out in 1951 when I was 13.  The New York Times ran a review, titled "Aw, the World's a Crumby Place.” The children in it were unbelievably intelligent, and the style of the novel was too "showoffy." What adolescent is not?  Within two weeks Catcher made the best seller list. 

Who can forget Holden Caulfield, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Ebenezer Scrooge, Oz, Bambi, Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet, Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Rabbit, Cinderella, Grumpy, Moses, Cruella Deville—and more? 

Every tale and every character embodies good and evil, sorrow and joy, love and hate, light and darkness, heaven and hell, life and death—together. 

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and called all of it Good. 

O, light of the world, let your bright star stand over the place where the poor have to live; lead our sages to wisdom and our rulers to reverence. Hear this prayer for your love’s sake. Amen.  (from The New Zealand Prayer Book) 

2022.11.13 What? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Be patient and do nothing extraordinary. Oh sure! I’m not that type, but thanks for the advice anyway. I’ll keep on trying till I bust, even when it seems as if I’m failing and flawed.

I have to admit this futility is some of what I have felt lately about our world, our country, our planet. I even stopped watching the news. I prayed and read the Bible over and over until everything looked the same to me, except the Psalms, well known for heart-rending laments. Mostly, I’ve felt dry and dull and edgy. 

I was reading a sentence in some book: “No one knew and no one knows.” I kept reading it over and over. Unexpectedly I suddenly felt real fear—real fear like a stab of lightning in my gut. What if this country stops being my home? What if the whole Earth just dies? I thought these thoughts were irrational, but there was nothing irrational about the knot of terror in my gut.

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Then came Election Day, 2022. I went to bed without waiting up to see at least the first results. Strangely, I slept. 

Not until the evening did I listen to some news. Shocking! The American people went to the polls in record numbers. There was no youthful apathy. They voted. There was no violence. No one got shot. Political predictions of doom did not come true. Yes, the outcomes were according to my own hopes and party, but that wasn’t the point, just as winning is not always the point of a well run race. The point is that something very big had happened: WE happened. 

The American people, we the people, actually voted for our lives together and for our democracy. No one knew and no one knows exactly how or why this happened, despite many theories, stats, and pundits. And no one can predict the future, though many will try anyway.

Jonathan Capehart, PBS News Hour commentator, said “The American people proved they can walk and chew gum at the same time.”  The electorate chose Democracy, period. This could be the emergence of an anti-authoritarian move—proof that we actually know how to get things done without violence or noisy political bullying. 

My gut fear has been replaced by gratitude without reservation for being American.

Jesus told his panicky followers during apocalyptic times: Sit tight. Do nothing extreme. Trust the process. “By patient endurance you will save your lives.” (Luke 20:19) 

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.

   

2014.01.31 See This Film!!

SEE THIS FILM!!

I Am,  filmed by Tom Shadyak, shows and tells, through the wisdom of many voices and the actions of many human bodies, what is wrong with out world and what we can do together to make it better. Shadyak, in the midst of paralyzing post-concussion syndrome, faced the fact of his death and recovered to make this witness.

He dedicates the film to his father who spent his whole near-100-year life working tirelesslessly for the health and well-being of children at a St Jude’s Hospital. His dad is Tom’s mentor. On the film son interviews father, who says, something like: I go to a church and I cry. All this love for  an hour and a half. Then I leave, and I get no more turn-on for a week. When I go out onto the streets it all vanishes— until the next week.

What IS wrong with our world and how can we make it better? Tried and true questions explored in graphic and revelatory ways— not about the will of God but about the soul of God. God is never mentioned, nor is religion. 

Teasers:
Darwin in his book, The Descent of Man, mentioned survival just two times. He mentioned love 95 times! Humanity is wired for empathy; making war and excessive competitiveness breaks the natural law of being.

It's actually NOT the economy, stupid.

Deer, fish and birds vote on the next move of the group.

Modern Science agrees with all the spiritual traditions of the world. It turns out love really is all you need.

2012.07.04 Tender Icon of Hope

Worship in London on Sunday before we left for home was beautiful, although full as always with He's and he's and Hims...and lots of Fathers. 

The parish, All Saints Margaret St. does not let women priests celebrate. Clergy are working on it slowly but surely. Building rehab came first of course. And it is elegant.

I tell you, despite great music uplift and Eucharist and a good sermon,  I felt excluded from both humanity and divinity by the all-male language for things holy/godly.

And there was the gospel read from Mark, chapter 5,  in which Jesus heals the daughter of Jairus, president of the local synagogue,  and calls the girl "daughter" .......AND the hemorrhaging woman whom he also restores to health and the human community. TWO females included into community, religious and social.  So what is wrong with this picture in so many of our churches?  

I do think it will take a healing miracle of Jesus to bust up two of the two most recalcitrant idols in most liturgical churches: pews and language.  Social justice thrives outside the walls, but what about justice in the worship language?  OK, my soapbox again. 

I was myself healed from my ire as my attention was captivated watching a young family with 2 small daughters, maybe 4 and 2.  And a baby doll.  The 4year old cared for her baby and never complained. The 2 year old slept and only peeped when Mom tried to apply a brush to her knotted hair. She deftly avoided the brush by swiveling her head fast.  

The 4 year old in time asked her dad to lift her up so she could see. Her attention was riveted on the lovely statue in front of her of the BVM (not the latest car but, for those who might not know, the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

The statue represents Mary as Queen of Heaven all crowned and majestic, her right arm supporting Jesus, of toddler age. He holds an orb as if it were his ball to play with and his right foot and right hand swing out and point outward towards the observer. Go!  

The little girl began to swing her foot in and out, (imitatio dei,) a feat that looks easy in statuary but didn't quite work for Daddy's grasp.  Down she came but later Daddy took her up to see the votive candles in front of the Mary and Jesus statue and with great patience and care showed her how to light a small candle carefully, then place her coin in the slot.  She nodded vigorously and pointed up to Mary.  She knew something. God knows what:)

Flesh and blood icons are the best.

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Happy and blessed American Independence Day. We are lucky. Despite my critiques I am patriotic.  America, home of the mostly free and the occasionally brave, my home.  We struggle still with the vision of equity and democracy

And pray for peace and inter-dependence for Israelis and Palestinians......... and for all those who have courage to serve their country and still ask dream of a war-free peace.