2025.04.20 Is It Easter Yet, Mom? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

My young and growing children used to ask me this question. They then complained bitterly about why Easter was just one day.“You know like Christmas or my birthday” they opined.

But Easter IS about FREEDOM………..not the same as license, btw. 

I understood their frustrations. Even I had to check the liturgical calendar to see exactly when Easter was this year. In addition, Easter was also a bit of a letdown because there were no gifts like Christmas. The only thing we resurrected was the “Alleluiah” we’d buried, meaning we couldn’t say it for all of Lent till Easter Eve. Anything forbidden, in a child’s eyes, automatically acquires extra power, because it’s for Divinity, not just your team. 

HALLELUIA!   

 As a child I used to march around our New York City apartment singing this song I called Dom Ring. 

My country tis of thee

sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died

land of the pilgrims’ pride

From every mountain side

Let freedom ring.

This remains the only national anthem that makes sense to me, because it covers far more than any national anthem. FREEDOM is for all lands, all peoples all creatures great and small. 

Yes, it is Easter— Dom Ringing all over the earth. 

2024.04.14 In Whom To Trust? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Watch what you say and to whom, especially if you are an authority figure. Watch whatever news you think is recent, even when it’s horrifying. Listen to people you trust with your one small precious life. Inconvenient as it is, you have to trust your own wisdom and divine Immanence alive within you—both/and. Follow your tears. That’s what the women who crept back to check on the dead Jesus did. It’s what all disciples do when they are afraid to trust. 

*  *  *  * 

It took nearly thirty years before I fully digested and embodied the personal implications of global warming/warning in my ongoing suburban life. By the 1970s, political furor about shortages of fuel meant that we had to wait in long lines to get gasoline for our car. Restless children wondered why we had to wait so long to get to—anywhere in our car. Delay was annoying. It was revealing. It was predictive. It was inconvenient. It was omnipresent. 

I bet the disciples of Jesus took a long time to figure out that Jesus’s gospel contained good and bad news together. He was telling them something that mattered on earth and in heaven, even though they didn’t understand or trust it. 

But right now it’s Easter, and Easter season lasts 50 days. Do we weep or rage or both?

All I hear and see in the “news” are images of war and poverty, dying children, and leaders who bully. I feel sad about getting old, sad about the pull of temptation to avoid my own sorrow. I am not afraid of dying as much as I am of losing faith in the vocation I struggled to fulfill.  In a word, I need  to trust Christ alive. I need blessed food. I need the depths of music and worship that hallow life itself—everywhere. AND I despise/distrust evangelical-ISM, as if Christianity were THE ONLY WAY for the whole world.

*  * *  *

The joy of Easter, whether I feel it or not, lifts me. It lingers in the air, on television, plastered on Facebook and also stuck in my heart, visible on my face, even in my tears. Great and unexpected joys are small and large, and they still happen. I don’t long to sit in a pew for worship. I do miss the soul of it—the hullabaloo, the Hosannas and Hallelujahs, the joyful ingredients alive and well and rising always everywhere—no matter what. Why Easter? Well, because Easter matters—on season AND off season! Day AND Night.

The Alleluia hype matters—for its own sake. For its own sake. It’s always present. 

2024.04.07 Wondering/Wandering/Weeping. The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

This compelling image by Italian freelance illustrator, Andrea Ucini, appeared back in July, 2023 in the New York Times Book Review. It was the illustration for a piece on global warming by Zoe Schlanger, novelist and staff reporter at The Atlantic.  

I cut it out and saved it. Why did it make me cry? Why right now?

Of course I’m concerned about the issue of global warming, labeled “an inconvenient truth.” by former President Bill Clinton’s, Vice President, Al Gore, Democratic Senator from Tennessee. Gore was a Rhodes scholar and a 1973 graduate of Yale Law School. He ran for President unsuccessfully in 1988 and 2000. In 2000, Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes, but lost to Republican George W. Bush, because the Supreme Court intervened in Florida. The result was Bush’s win via the Electoral College outcome rather than by the popular vote. I bet Gore cried, but he didn’t give up. 

Gore made his documentary, film “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, four years before I retired from active professional ministry myself, and just after I was diagnosed with emphysema. I had been tested by a Boston pulmonologist who glanced at my test results and said, “Well, I don’t see emphysema.” Feeling free and rejoicing, I went out to lunch with a good friend to celebrate. As we dined my phone rang with a call from the Boston doctor to tell me that I did, in fact, have emphysema. I heard nothing more than that. My tears flowed as I hung up, saying “thank you” of all things. 

When I saw Gore’s movie I cried. Suddenly, I saw that our Earth breathed —inhaling Oxygen and exhaling Carbon Dioxide. When the exhale of CO2 exceeds the inhale of O2, the planet has trouble breathing. It has emphysema. We earthly residents are only now beginning to understand and to weep, even as we rejoice at the Easter message. 

Below is the perfect icon—a crucifix without a body—to capture the Easter paradox. 

The more we Christians grieve the death of the earthly Jesus, the more we experience the Risen Christ alive in our midst, in our own fleshly hearts. It is surely an inconvenient truth. 

    

2024.03.31 EASTERING, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Way back in 1964 I gave birth to my second daughter  on 3/31/1964. She, I had hoped, would be born on Easter Day but that year Easter was later. It didn’t matter really, because her birth was so smooth, so quick and quite pain-free, her weight nicely moderate at under 8 pounds. I rejoice on this day as Jill turns 60—ON Easter Day this year, 2024. Alleluia! Here are Jill's beloved pugs, Olive and Jaelee, sitting in her office chair. 

I should I suppose on Easter be cheering for Christ’s resurrection but……………well, that is God’s work to do after we die. “Passed away” sounds weak and inaccurate. Yes, I realize “passed” may soften the harsh reality and finality of death, or it may postpone grief’s sting. Still, the mystery we call Resurrection is God’s business after death—a dead body its prerequisite. This is also why the most difficult death to grieve is MIA (missing in action). It is also why some people have pain at Easter, because they know they must celebrate Resurrection but their hearts are still in Good Friday. So if you have a Good Friday heart for Jesus, or anyone else, let it sorrow without judgment. The most authentic things in life always have mixed feelings anyway.  

*  *  *  *  

For myself, I grieve the almost daily pileup of weaknesses, great and small, as I age. I get medical help and attention for which I’m grateful, and I also try to carry on as best I can. Humor helps when it pops up, and so do friends and family who love you no matter what, as does our being able to take my almost-born-on-Easter daughter and her husband, Lee, out for a sumptuous lunch full of laughs and love.

For years I would always have to be presiding or preaching in a parish Church, but now I am retired and free. I do miss some communal worship and hymns. I do not miss going out to church. I do not miss my alarm clock. I do not miss the stiff white collar I lusted for in the 1970s. Now it makes my aging chin double up. And I do not miss having to cheer when I have a Good Friday heart, so I mutter, “Alleluia Anyhow.” (the late Bishop Barbara C. Harris’ favorite wisdom and the title of her memoir.) 

I rejoice that my spouse and I can celebrate a Eucharist together at our dining table. We sing hymns off key, and wear casual clothes. We can say things when we preach to each other that we could never say to a congregation. AND we have no pulpits to ascend. 

Some people bring their own internalized “porta-pulpits” where’er they go. But we aren’t traveling evangelicals. We laugh and we cry and we argue. No one wins. Then we eat M&M’s, not jelly beans.

Our home Holy Eucharist and prayers continue to nourish us both—casually, eloquently, perfectly. 

2023.04.09 What's New? Old? Here? Gone? Near? Far? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Today is Easter Sunday. Everything’s new!  Last evening we celebrated the Holy Eucharist around the dining table with two lovely friends. We had no organ, only our reedy aging voices. Is this a newly minted “church” perhaps?  A sacrament without a proper sanctuary? 

Easter felt intimate. God’s presence felt near, in our words, smiles, shared prayers, the flesh of our hands held. And yet, we worshiped a risen God. Far? Close? Near? Far?

I needed a new word for my two-faced spiritual experience. A new word popped into my head as I wondered. Did we experience divine transcendence immanently—or maybe divine immanence transcendently? Or both? 

TransImmanent. 

TRANS? In contemporary lingo, “trans” is short for transexual or transgender, someone whose sexual identity does not correspond with their birth sex. Deep inner truth prevailed. Is that just for individual human beings?  Trans is from a Latin root, meaning across. I envision God crossing, even dancing, back and forth, over and around two traditional theological definitions for the image of God: Divinity is transcendent—above and beyond physical human experience. Divinity is Immanent—remaining within, inherent.  

TransImmanent? 

The God I first met under the large table when I was a toddler chatting away about whatever popped into my small inquisitive mind, was a loving/listening presence, yes, on a cloud with a long white beard. That cloudy image faded, but the experience of God being intimate never did. Over many years I’ve studied and prayed and done all sorts of academic, sacramental, and spiritual calisthenics, trying to contain, or explain, or even shake off this inner God, thinking it was my own illusion. 

I can hear the echo of my wonderful late Spiritual Director the Rev. Pierre Wolff’s voice   in my ear: Doucement cherie. Yes, but . . .

Through all my wordiness and wonderment over years, I’m struck with a sudden heart-thumping elation—a new idea I can’t suppress, a new emotion, even though it is attached to, yes, a word and my childhood experience! Without warning, a very old traditional childhood hymn popped into my mind:  

For the beauty of the earth, 

for the glory of the skies, 

for the love which from our birth, 

over and around us lies. 

Lord of all to Thee we raise 

This our hymn of grateful praise. 

TransImmanence.  Over and around us. . .  

HAPPY EASTER. 

  

2022.04.17 Little Easters Everywhere. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/17/22

O God of Love

    so high above

       so deep beneath

           you never sleep

                you always keep

                    your heat in beat

Your love of LIfe’s

alive in strife

You love, therefore I am.

I love, therefore You are. 

                   Lyn G. Brakeman

Bovine Salvation

Sturdy Ms Methane

staunch in her pose

She’s not vain

Just full of Methane

See how she stares

Her soft eyes engage

She’s gassing the planet

In peril it stands—yet

We’re changing her repast

De-scenting her gasses

She’s still very well fed

And we’ve nothing to dread

For the gasses she passes 

are now Methane-free. 

Lyn G. Brakeman

  

Does anyone imagine that God does not have emotions? I bet it is hard to imagine God’s own feelings, especially fear or anger, if you’re not in touch with your own. Still, we have for so long worshiped a Divinity so dominantly transcendent, so consistently almighty, and so exclusively masculine, that we really don’t know God at all. 

The Creator God of the Bible creates natural wonders of Life itself with excessive prodigality and excitement. This God has creative power and shares it radically with all Creation—natural world and human. God wants it all to thrive, and adorns it all with the freedom to do just that. 

We, according to ancient story, chose to do the one thing God knows will make trouble for us for the whole rest of our existence: we exercised our freedom to know both good and evil, and to choose either way. We exposed ourselves to evil as well as good, to moral as well as immoral. And thus this little mythic story explains why we have been at odds with ourselves, each other, and God forever and ever, amen. It takes courage to make choices, and more courage to undo or reset those choices that turn out not to be so good. It takes courage to suffer choices we do not make. 

It takes prayer and serenity and wisdom and love to realize that the binary God seemed to set up is much more subtle, much more demanding and much more rewarding, precisely because it is NOT a true binary. There is no such thing as a purely good choice OR a purely evil one. This, I believe, is why God Creator warned the Edenic couple to leave the fruit of that tree alone—and why they could not leave it alone. 

This little story never happened. This little story always happen. Outside the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem there is this giant sculpture. 

 

The wind was fresh, the earth was young,

the scent of life was everywhere

the garden lay a fruitful dream

and God enjoyed the evening air

Where are my loved? the Maker wooed.

The clay I shape and call by name?

The questions spread through stem and leaf,

but as God waited no one came. 

God’s loves were hiding, faces turned,

beyond the reach of breeze and Voice,

aware that sometime in the day

they’d made a dark, far-reaching choice.

The question lingers in the leaf

in barren branch and shrinking pond—

Where are my loves? The Maker calls,

still trusting clay may yet respond. 

Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle

* * *  *  

A wise old owl says: Now, my dears. Do hoot and cheer and never fear, I’m always here.  

Another wise owl stays far aloft. I look out for danger and for prey. I’m always here.

Both the guardian and the nurturer seek little easters everywhere. Both equally incarnate the Spirit of Love that simply never burns out. 

*  *  * *

EIN SOF

The first time I heard these words was on our 2012 trip to Israel—a two-week pilgrimage I shall never forget. It’s in my bones. It was sponsored by St. George’s College in East Jerusalem, led by tour guides who knew the land and the language in way that made it come alive. The course was called “The Palestine of Jesus” I shall never forget my experience there. I felt as if I’d walked right into the Bible. Ein sof is one of the phrases I learned there. It’s Hebrew to describe a mystical divinity I can’t possible explain, so I call it God before God—the infinite unknowable known or finite infinitude. You see, it makes no sense and yet we know it s presence. It come in Kairos time. God’s time or timing. 

No wonder sweet mortals went speechless when they experienced kairos. It does not submit to any containment or control. No wonder that before long we humans, failing to control Kairos, invented calendars and clock, for chronos, our own time and timing.

We watch a medical television sitcom, set in the busy ED in a big city hospital. Whenever a patient, despite heroic medical efforts dies, the doctors and nurses who have been working so hard suddenly get it. They all stop at once. One doctor calls it. God calls it simultaneously. 

“Time of death 13:30” says chronos. 

“Time of Life: 13:30” says kairos.  

Ein sof.