A Chalice Overflowing With Divinity, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post, 7/31/2026

 2026.07.31 A Chalice Overflowing with Divinity. . .YES!!!

It will never cease to astound/appall/amaze me how the residents of this retirement community where I live—all stunningly, glaringly and glowingly, proudly white-skinned—dare to presume they are superior to the black staff on whose care their lives daily depend. 

But maybe they/we are not this presumptive. It’s ALL betwixt and between. 

*  * * *  

I have stumbled on the deepest meaning of my book WHITEOUT, on the true and deepest dangers of unremitting racism and the radical need for transformative change. It means some ones must always be excluded!!  I do not argue, as some people think I do, that there is no such thing as racism. I do notice, however, that no live-in help, often dark-skinned, dine with residents or sit at the table with them, even though aids and residents live together in the same apartment, all day long, and all night long. 

This way breaks my heart still, just as it did when I first learned about racism as a child. We’d visit my grandparents, and I experienced the same familiar pain when I could not understand why the same man who created and served wonderful mashed potatoes, lived in the same house, yet was not allowed to sit with us at the table, to dine with us. 

It reminded me of how it  used to be at the altar table. Now everyone gets fed the same, right? We all get our holy food, right? Well, yes now at last!  Children used to have to wait until they were old to “understand” this disembodied Holy Communion meal.  OMG… who understands it? I do, but only from the distant intellectual point of view of evolving policies/rules/church history and performance.

I can still envision little hands, or aging wrinkled hands, reaching out for bread, even a wafer passing for bread. There was/is a yearning to connect. Without a loving touch, a smile, your name, there can be no SOUL—no room for tears or smiles at this communion/community meal we call HOLY COMMUNION?

Now, I release my tears. They are tears of impatience. How long it has taken for racism to be recognized and how long it will take to change? How slow is this process of racial integration to, yes, when will it disappear? I understand the need to pay for your guests at a place like this, a place with a budget! I’m naive and childish I know. 

It takes time for my mind to accompany my feelings. Change takes time!  I stare at the large cup called a chalice, large enough to contain the tragic bloody remains of  those who violated the rules and died for it. 

Suddenly I notice how large the chalice is, the one that supposedly holds enough “blood” of sacrifice for us all. It’s enormous—big enough for ALL tears and fears and cheers. My tears of impatience are in there. I recall the very first time I realized the cruelty of it all, felt it the first time I realized that this Jewish man name Jesus actually died like this!! Horrifying for anyone. We still do things like this and fill prisons with screaming people. SAVE US DEAR GOD FROM OURSELVES.

*  *  *  *

Most of us know too how little time we have to gladden the hearts and minds of those who travel this way with us in this life.

HOW MUCH MORE THEN DOES EVERY LIFE MATTER TO DIVINITY?

2025.05.25 DID YOU KNOW? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Did you know there are no fences in the fields of Divinity? There are no boundaries, only Presence. AND always a story. 

When I lived in Cambridge, a terrific small city under the wing of a big city called Boston, I used to walk downtown often passing by Harvard Yard, its huge iron gates open. Occasionally I’d wander about inside the Yard, absorbing the air of the Academy. Harvard, however, wasn’t academic or elite, just unlocked.

I learned all this from a street beggar named James. He sat in his wheel chair. He always smiled and muttered something unintelligible, as his trembling hands searched for his cup. At first I felt afraid of James. I passed him by. One day I stopped. I don’t know why, but James beckoned. I gave him a smile and a coin or two. He grinned. I walked on. All of this against the backdrop of the stately Harvard.

One day James motioned me closer and managed to tell me a story in his halting way. He told me that his wheelchair was stolen out from under him by some “hoodlums”.  He teared up. I braced myself. But then he pointed at the great gates of Harvard Yard and said “They saved me.” 

Some Harvard fraternity students had pooled their money and bought James a brand new wheel chair designed for someone with his palsied and mentally challenged condition. James could manage his new chair easily, and it did give his life work—begging—meaning. He lived in a special care home, and begging was his own chosen way of contributing. 

James and Harvard students also healed my habit of making judgmental assumptions about beggary without knowledge of the inside story and the truth. I gave James my last $20 and walked the rest of my way home, begging Divinity to inspire generosity and peace for healing the world over.  

2025.04.06 Prayer Journaling. Lyn G. Brakman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

🙏🙏🙏

The writer Flannery O’Connor started a prayer journal when she was a young student about twenty. She began a journal of prayers, addressed to God. In it, she wrote: "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You." 

She kept her prayer journal for two years, then dropped it, calling her Soul “stupid and slothful”. “Dear Lord please make me want You .”  “I am a cheese, make me a mystic immediately.  .  .  .  Her Soul  “wants the God who made heaven and earth, to be its Lover. Immediately.   .  .  .   She judges herself and her writing as a “sham” and ends up feeling “very far away from God. He might as well not have made me.  .  .  .  Today I have proved myself a glutton — for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me." That was the end of the prayer journal.

Reading this was very sad. I too kept a prayer journal. When I was on a silent directed retreat I was able to let go of all judgments and, “egg up” (like puke) some coherent wisdom and deep emotions I had kept hidden.

The first time I took a weeklong silent retreat at a monastery in the 1980s, I felt like a religious hotshot. Solitude — no crockpot, no squabbles, no traffic — was mine. Within 24 hours, I became furious. Why was no one speaking to me? Why were they all so rude — monks, nuns, and everyone? Be patient. Wait for God? Baloney, I thought. 

I felt helpless and alone. I wrote letters of rage and sorrow to God. Slowly, a surge of safety and truth, wrapped in silence, rose up inside me. I met my self. 

Alone but not lonely. 

2025.02.09 ODD EPIPHANIES. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

’Tis the season to be wary. Grim and gruesome, scary and sudden, wild and weird, beloved and bewildered, insane and inane, in flight and buried—all at once and never before.  Here I am.  

Our President makes sweeping plans for lands and people not his own, not in his jurisdiction, not in his heart. All these people want is the same thing we all want, already bestowed by Divinity on ALL creation from the beginning. What is that gift?  FREEDOM? Deeper than that.

One of the most beautiful recordings I’ve ever heard is one someone taped from within a womb—the steady gentle thrumming of a mother’s heartbeat. When I heard it I felt instantly serene, calm, gentled no matter what was going on. Odd. 

Do most children obey as they grow, because they are afraid?  No, it is because they receive and give LOVE. Love is the most precious gift anyone can receive, and it is the most precious gift anyone can give, and it is what Divinity first gives. Such is the divine mystery.

Intimacy precedes independence.  

In the beginning.  

2024.11.24 CONFINING DIVINITY? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Most spiritual/religious groups have naming ceremonies for those newly born or for those later choosing to be a member of that group. Naming rituals are usually celebratory and happy. They vary according to the customs of each group. BUT ALL of them matter because we all need to know we belong and that we matter. 

*  *  *  * 

NOW comes trouble! How dare we presume to name, and worse, describe and define Divinity? 

In my younger growing years I assumed God was Catholic. Later, I assumed God was Father, then Son, then Holy Spirit, then Catholic!  Each tradition establishes its own vocabulary to define, describe, and yes, confine/ imprison Divinity.  

Even Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous concluded that everyone needs a Higher Power. Every evolving life-form on Earth, except the horseshoe crab which has never evolved. But I bet every beach-goer has praised that graceful glide.

*  *  *  *

Consider this bison who, thought-to-be extinct, has, after 200 years, reappeared to roam the range in the European Carpathian mountains of Romania—to fertilize the habitat for other species. LIFE! 

In the 1980s I worked as a Chaplain in a treatment center for recovering addicts. I met a young man who puzzled over the concept of Higher Power. He had never heard of prayer either. I’d never met anyone who never even heard of God. We sat in silence. I debated various arguments, all dry and useless. I thought damn, then I silently swore, and then I thought help. Something came to me and I said to the young man: “Okay, have you ever sat alone in some open space like a field and loudly cried out HELP!”

“Oh yeah, lots of time,” he said.

“Well, who do you think you were calling out to?” I asked. 

The young man sat up straight. All he said was “Oh.”  And again, “Oh.” He grinned and then left my office.  He lives on in my heart-prayers.

 

2024.10.13 MINE! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 10/13/24

Great fear coupled with great longing work together to paralyze the very best in us all, I believe. Are we possessed by our possessions, governed by our privileges, and blinded by partisanship so that we forget the only one thing that will liberate us ALL?  Humility! Meaning: be right-sized! 

“So strong is our desire to  have things our own way, so entrenched is the need to control, so fearful are we of taking risks, that we need daily meditation to learn how to be gentle and sensitive, to wait and be still, to notice things and begin to believe not just that it is safe to trust but that our only hope is to allow Divinity to take control.

Some of us have a blind hardness that quickly surfaces when our patch is threatened. It is the gift of prayer that softens our hardened hearts.”   from Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, Gardening The Soul. 

Mine is ours. I is we. They are us.

2024.08.04 CORRUPTION? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I became so corrupted by constant discussions and varying definitions, not to mention accusations, of corruption charges tossed about, I had to look up the word in the most faithful source of accurate information I know: The New Oxford American Dictionary (laboriously edited and regularly updated by word freaks and accuracy demons like myself.)  

I don’t know if I’m right but it’s a good bet that this dictionary, over time, has as many revisions, additions, and updates as the Bible itself. Both of these resources most people trust and hold quite sacred. They evolve as we do. 

*  *  *  *

It's worth considering the original roots of the verb CORRUPT (to break altogether altogether) It means to cause to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain, to cause to become depraved for money, that is, not simply to make unintentional errors by true and correctable mistake, but rather to  CAUSE ERROR/ERRORS TO APPEAR ON A BROAD DATABASE—WITH INTENTION.  

*  *  *  *

Can the Arts save us from corruption?  During the Black Power movement in the 1960s, I wondered what made power, or music, or poetry black. Poet Robert Hayden wrote about the experience of black people, just as I wrote about the experience of myself as a white woman lobbying for the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, and about the spiritual necessity of liberating Divinity from being corrupted by the exclusive use of masculine pronouns. 

Poet Robert Hayden, born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit (1913) wrote about the experience in such poems as "John Brown's Body" and "Middle Passage," about the slave trade. He said:  “There’s no such thing as black literature. There's good literature and there's bad. And that's all!”  

When Louis Armstrong, a trumpet player of jazz, was asked what black jazz was, he replied, “Good Lord, man, if you have to ask that you don’t even know what jazz is!”

*  *  *  *

There’s no such thing as black or white, male or female preaching. There are just good, lively sermons and flat boring ones. Good Lord, people, Jesus wasn’t a Jew who converted, corrupted his own religion, or started a new religion. He was simply a wise itinerant Jew exposing an already present Loving Divinity. We are to act accordingly. 

 

2024.02.18 Why NOT Tell? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

There is a series of healing stories in Mark’s gospel in the New Testament. All of them are healing stories —the transformation of some painful condition that interferes with someone’s wellbeing in life, health, or the normal progression of what is expected. In all of them Jesus of Nazareth is identified as the healing agent. He makes these miracles happen.  

Healing means change. Healing means restoration to the fullness of Life. There’s the healing of Peter’s mother- in-law. There’s the healing of a leper. There is the healing of a paralytic.

What is startling, is that in each one of these healing events, Jesus specifically warns the healed and the witnesses NOT to TELL.  Why not? Is this not all Good News? 

Is this secrecy because Jesus is not in full command of his powers yet? Is it that these healing stories are hints of his yet unrealized identity as Messiah? Or was it hasty, delusional reporting by the first gospel narrative, Mark?  

I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it was simply timing. There were many healers and “miracle” workers in first century Palestine. Who’s to say that Divinity is not at work in them all—and in the creation of amazing wheelchairs like this. 

*  *  *  *

I do know I need to make my own recent wheelchair-bound dependent condition more clear to my readers, and I do know that healing is not magic but requires the full participation of the healing agent, the one who desires healing, and Mystery.  

-In early December, 2023, I felt a twinge in my back as I was doing a familiar Yoga post I’d done many times. I stopped.

-Soon my legs became very weak and I felt pain when I put weight on them.

-Ct scans showed a compression fracture at Lumbar #3.

-One day my legs gave out completely.

-I ended up in our Health Center/Hospital for physical therapy and more. There I learned how to use my walker for assistance in walking, bathroom use, transferring from bed to walker, and getting in and out of a wheelchair.

-I am now back in my apartment working with various therapies to strengthen my legs with the goal of walking on my own—in view and not yet accomplished.   

I’m appreciative of all prayers and more grateful than I can say for the presence of my beloved husband, Dick, who is managing all other household chores, his own worries, and our joint irascibility.  I’m also grateful for all our children who call, visit, and care.

*  *  *  *

So, for this Lenten season I am giving up giving up! Some days the task of weight-bearing on my legs is so painful I am tempted to stop trying to walk at all. I wonder if Jesus was also sorely tempted to STOP trying to persuade the people that this God who created all earth desires liberation, wellbeing, fullness of life and love—on earth as it is in heaven?   

2023.11.05 How Bold Is Bold? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Children often color outside the lines on impulse, when they feel inspired. Often the “fancy” spiritual word for such impulses is “call.” We feel “called” to do something different, out of line—bold.  Is it disobedience? Maybe. Is it insanity? Some say so. 

Many teachers correct such impulses. Why? Because I suppose they think that there is a right way, a neat and orderly way, a best way, or simply the way they want kids to do it, or the way they themselves have been told to do it.   

I suppose this is why many religious authorities and teachers of Jesus’s day thought he was way out of line, opening access to Divinity up to everyone under the sun and then some. And on top of that Jesus called for obedience to this way. Obedience is not just mechanical saluting like wind-up soldiers. The word itself comes from Latin ob (in the direction of)  + audire (hear). It is heart-listening. 

Do you know someone who is deaf? If so, you often can watch them speak rapidly with their fingers in sign language. When there is someone up front signing for (speaking to)  deaf people, I watch them with my eyes as I listen with my ears. I discover I need both. 

I don’t know sign language, but I do know that the signer often will place her hand on her chest, then up towards the sky, then back to her lips, then in a circular motion. The gestures tell me that my heart is connected to heaven above, then to my own lips, straight back down, and all around to everyone else, including me. The Great Commandment! 

I cannot tell you why I weep, simply that I do.  

2023.10.01 "Who Says So?" Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

From the Gospel of Jesus the Christ according to Matthew 21: 23-32 comes one of those tough choices stories we love to hate. It’s about authority and how some things are not really part of the Kingdom of Heaven plans, but if you must………..

One of my favorite rejoinders to my mother when she told me not to do something was: “Who says so?” Of course her greater authority, though highly questionable in my mind, won over—sort of.  I somehow found a way round it when she told me to stop sucking my thumb, an activity of consolation that seemed to me to be absolutely and indispensably necessary to my salvation at the time. After all, they’d gotten rid of the dining room table under which I hid to assert my own authority and to hold my secret one-sided conversations with God whom I’d met in a book. All I had left for my soul’s comfort after that table was gone, was my thumb.  I practically sucked it raw as I grieved the loss of my hideout.  

*  *  *  *

In this gospel story, Jesus asks the Temple authorities where John the Baptist got his authority to baptize people. Was it divine or human? Not easily fooled, they conferred and knew that if they said “divine” Jesus would ask them why they refused the baptism? BUT if they said ’human’ the people would rise up against them, because they understood John the Baptist to be a prophet sent from God. So they answered, “We don’t know.” to which Jesus replied  Well then, neither will I tell you by what authority I do, and say, the things that I do and say. 

Brilliant! 

Now, substitute abortion for baptism for a moment.  You can see, even experience, the authority bind: is it “God’s will aka divine authority,” that we all have equal rights/freedom of will? Or is it by divine authority that we do not murder ever and under any circumstance whatsoever—even under the best, most loving/caring/compassionate/true circumstances. 

                                        ?

Most all our worldwide current quarrels, uncertainties, even murders or executions are about one thing: AUTHORITY. Are you, and can you be, the AUTHOR of your own divinely given freedom—no matter what?  "It depends" really doesn't cut it—or does it?