2025.05.18 A WEE SNAKEY STORY ABOUT TRUTH-TELLING, Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

I woke up one recent morning with a strange prayer running about in my mind: “Well, dear God, do you dare pray for yourself, or is such an idea preposterous?” I pray for myself. And also with you. Jesus prays for himself, but he’s not female. The Holy Spirit is up for grabs, so to me SHE is feminine. Perhaps SHE IS prayer.

So I guess that praying for oneself is a good practice of holiness, eh? 

These awakening thoughts propelled me first to the bathroom for self-emptying and then back to my warm bed, next to my dearly beloved sleeping spouse. He I know would say, “You think too much!” He is right of course, so I grin and go back to sleep. 

Such is me brief anecdotal story. Story, I conclude, is the building block of faith, not doctrine but true-of-heart story. It is the stories we all remember.

*  *  *  *

The Holy Bible is full of stories. In fact they are the glue, the connecting links. They are not forgettable. These stories are why people love to read memoirs—stories in the flesh. It’s important to notice what or who in a bible story wakes you up. 

When I read Genesis, for example, about the beginning of all Creation I notice, not Adam’s loneliness, nor God’s giving Adam a hot soulmate named Eve, nor the fruit of the tree, likely a pomegranate, because of course Israel is Middle Eastern, thus too hot for apples. 

I DO notice the little snake. I’m not afraid of snakes like my mother who taught me snakes were hostile and poisonous, a curse, especially to women. I did not believe her fear, but instead took note of the snake’s valuable role in this story. This snake curled and coiled around the tree trunk in Eden. This snake told the truth: You won’t die if you eat the forbidden fruit.   

Thus began my sin career. Thus as well began my love for this Creating God who created NOT rules and punishments but truth and freedom. This Divinity created even snakes for truth-telling. This snake made me laugh. She too was there in the beginning. She told the truth. I love this story, and I love the role of Ms. aging snake whose truth-telling is there in the beginning.  

 

2022.06.19 Divine Empathy. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I used to think that with God as my father I would always be safe and loved. I also used to think that my own father, whom I loved without reserve, had no fears or flaws. That was until he took a course on assertive training that I offered at our parish church when I was in my thirties and he was in his seventies. Turned out he was shy. Turned out he trusted his oldest daughter to teach him how to love himself as much as his own “Father” God did. It also turned out that God is much more than a father. God is the Creator and Source of ALL Being—all living beings not just fathers or sons or daughters or mothers or Whites or Blacks or sinners or the righteous. Creation itself is an act of divine Empathy.

*  *  *  *

The other day as I sat on one of the many benches strewn along our walking paths at McLean Village retirement community where I live, I witnessed a poignant and typical scene.

Two children were riding bikes, a young boy of perhaps six and his older sister on her bike riding behind him. I watched them progress and overheard snippets of conversation.

She: Wait. Don’t go so fast. You’ll fall!

He streaks on ahead. 

She mutters: “This was my mother’s idea that we go out and ride bikes. What a stupid idea! He’s too far ahead now.” 

She is about to fall off her bike, so she stops and shouts after her small brother: WAIT! He’s so stupid I know he’s going to fall. She shrieks at the nearly out of sight brother, as she tries to mount her bike and can’t steady it. She mutters: “This is so dumb! I’m done.”  

She catches my eye, and I smile. I think to say, “It’s not easy being the big sister, huh?” But I don’t say it out loud. A simple nod with a loving intention is all I can manage in the face of a deep sorrow at this child’s life-plight. 

She mounts and rides off wobbling. God, don’t let her fall. 

*  * *  *

I think of the parable in Luke 9 about Jesus’s being confronted by a man possessed by countless “demons” all of which, or whom, Jesus banishes, making the man well, lightening his burden. My imagination plays fast and loose with this story. What rivets me is not the apparent miracle of an exorcism, but Jesus’s single-minded focus on the possessed man’s misery—not only derived from his illness, but because his terrified community had shackled and exiled him because of it. Of course he also feared more torment from Jesus. Jesus is slow to react. This is an emergency! Jesus should flee for his life. Still, he pauses to ask the man his name, and does not act before he gets a response. “My name is Legion,” the man cries.  Legion is the name his frightened and ignorant community have labeled him. It is also the name used for the Roman military, a fear-inducing name. You know how it is in adolescent years when certain teens are called sticky names like wimp, bully, nerd, queer, lard-ass, fraidy-cat, sissy, on and on. Such names are like glue, hard to live down—legion. 

But Jesus wanted to know all these names before he banishes them all, sending them to find a new host—a herd of pigs that suddenly race pell mell down a steep slope of land to their death in the sea below. 

Many people hate this parable, because they feel sorry for the farmer who has lost his whole herd and his livelihood, and/or they are overtaken by cruelty to innocent animals, or, yes, they are horrified at Jesus’s own careless insensitivity to local needs. I wonder. 

Eventually they called Jesus the Christ—anointed as healer/savior, not because of magic powers but because of extraordinary, dare I say divine, empathy. It turns out Jesus was much more than a son.

          *  *  *  * 

I’ve referred to my sorrow about this child’s “life-plight”. Of course I’m projecting from my own experiences, and no exorcism is called for, yet I wonder: Does she battle legions of invisible “demons” such as shame at being plump, anger about her caretaker role assignment, resentment about the cute, disobedient little brother’s freedom, hurt by her mother’s apparent favoritism, and her own enslavement—this child in hot pursuit of an assignment she feels compelled to do and hates but does clumsily, hastily, out of duty not faith?  

I don’t know. I pray. God’s grace I trust far exceeds my small momentary concern. After all God is a good “father,” right?  Okay, I’m kidding, something I do when I feel a little wobbly inside like the girl on the bike, or like my own father on occasion, or like Jesus before he heads to Jerusalem, facing execution.   

My dad was shy like me, but he kept it hidden. Once at a party for my seminary graduation he announced: “We’re not sure how this happened, but Lynda has graduated from Yale Divinity School.” He raised a glass to toast me and said how proud he was. I knew he was “just kidding”, so I too laughed along with Dad and everyone else. And I never forgot that “joke”. Dad wasn’t a cruel man, just a man with a few leftover “demons” of his own—like most of us really.   

So, happy father’s day to anyone who fathers, mothers, parents with good grace, and prays like crazy anyway. 

God bless the girl child on her way. 

God-in-Jesus, named Christ, who knows fear, empathizes, names, and disempowers all our big or little “demons,” to save us in spite of ourselves, bless this girl and all children.   

God is Creator of the TREE of LIFE—the one left in the mythic Garden of Eden to continue to flourish no matter what for all creation—forever.  

     

2021.10.10 Can Spirituality Trump Morality?

Sin, by one definition, happens when our own needs cause us to disregard, incorrectly assess, or fail to consider the needs of others. When this happens, individuals, as well as systems, fall into sin. Moral condemnations are made. What happens to Spirituality, that profound inner connection to Soul?

Even ancient biblical writers pondered this question. In the beginning God created everything in perfect order, hunky dory, with only one proviso, one moral restriction. Don’t mess with the tree that will give you both good and evil knowledge. You’ll fall into sin.and your life will be full of both good and evil. You will always be free to choose the good, the evil, or some mixture thereof. Oh, you won’t like the rules and the moral rectitude you think you need to live by, yet you will discover that when you get rigid about this moral effort, you risk losing your own soul’s health, your deep connection with the Love that created you and still re-creates you daily. So good luck. Take with you these clothes to protect you  from the elements, and remember that love triumphs over sin. 

All of us fall into sin, lose “Eden.”  All of us lament, all of us protest, and all of us struggle to re-create “Eden.” All of us hurt ourselves and others in this process.

My first husband and I struggled to be good spouses and good parents. We did what we thought was the right thing, the moral thing, according to the rules of the day and the promises we had made. We tried to stay married and to be good parents for twenty years. Over time we both broke promises, hurt the children, hurt each other. We grabbed for what I am calling our spirituality, our freedom-of-being. The “eden” of our whole loving family fell into sin.

While fulfilling my moral commitment to be a good mother, I’d neglected my own needs. Such imbalances may not be strictly immoral, but they are surely spiritual sin. The tremors from this loss of trust echoed for years. Over years I have been able to make amends, share tears, and make amends. Amends do not correct or re-create, but they can reconnect and heal. 

Institutions, too, fall into sin. The sin of the Institutional Church-Mama, all religions really, has always been the tendency to narrow access to God with rules and moral rigor. Spirituality, the soul-needs of the faithful, gets neglected. Worship does not entirely fill that need or heal that inner longing to know and trust God—Love itself. 

Spirituality can trump morality in the human heart. 

*  *  *  *

“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.” Rumi. 

Rumi (1217-1273) was a Persian poet whose full Arabic name is too long to manage. He was Iranian, and identified as a Sufi Muslim—deeply, mystically committed to the Oneness of God and consequently the oneness of being:  

“On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.”

“In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one.”   

A favorite Sufi parable tells about blind men washing an elephant, each one washing a different part, and each one concluding that the whole elephant can be described and defined by that one part.  We all know how misguided such narrow knowledge is, and yet Rumi compared it to the ways of institutional religions—each one posing as the best, each one too narrow. Rumi, a teacher, spiritual guru, poet, and theologian, did, nevertheless, give primacy to Islam and the Q’uran. A popular saying in Arabic apologizes: “Love, however, has its own many other dialects.” 

American religious scholar/philosopher and one-time professor of religious studies at UC Berkeley, Huston Smith (1919-2016), was born in China and raised in a Methodist missionary family. He devoted his study and life work to bringing the world’s religions together in order to promote understanding, justice, and peace. He said: 

“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” 

Although a Christian, Smith had no aversion to taking his “vitamins” from other religions. He wrote: 

“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the AMA? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion. Religion is institutionalized spirituality.” 

This feels harsh, yet I can see how institutions, even small systems, become fearful and rigid. Families, societies, businesses, nations, religions get corseted by their need for moral rules and regulations, to such a degree that the beauty of personhood itself, not to mention Nature and her ways, gets stifled if not lost. Overbearing moral regulation stifles Love. Morality trumps spirituality. The system falls into sin. 

But do we not need organization? Even Yoga and Twelve Step Recovery are organized. The idea is to pay attention to the rigor, and by your own heart keep it from exploiting those, including yourself, seeking spiritual wholeness. 

  *  *  *  *  

Jesus is remembered as liberator and reformer of systems, both political and religious, that had fallen into sin. The love of God in and for all creation was gasping for air in stifling systems. When Jesus asks a rich young man, sincerely moral and devoted to his faith—upstanding and ambivalent—to give away his wealth to the poor and the hungry, he was calling for systemic change. He was asking for less morality and more spirituality—not chaos without organization, but living breathing space for all Creation.  

All we creatures, great and small

are the heirs of sacred wealth,

and we all, together, live

by the other’s Lasting Health.     (Michael Hudson. Songs for the Cycle, 2004)

2012.11.14 Eat Lou or Die?

Well, you won’t really die if you eat Lou, that is, your biological life will continue full of protein and new strength, but your spiritual life may suffer a bit.

The late Lou and his surviving team mate Bill were working farm oxen at Green Mountain Junior College in Vermont. The college has a sustainability vision which of course requires that some things die that other may live. The college made the same mistake that the biblical God made in Eden: made the forbidden fruit too attractive and told Eve and Adam in paradise a lie (they would die if they ate)— to protect them from knowing how to do evil as well as good.   

Green Mountain's farming program encouraged the students to love and befriend the farm animals —including Lou and Bill with whom the students worked to plow fields and haul heavy loads. The strong oxen duo served well for ten years. Now they were scheduled to be slaughtered for meat for the college meal program.

BUT these oxen had acquired names and become like pets to the students who protested wildly when it came time for the violence of the slaughter house for Lou. They knew Bill would follow. They knew too much.  They cared too much. They had the knowledge of good AND evil.

When you engage the human heart you invite love and compassion and then you put stops on violence, because how can anyone of sound mind and heart slaughter or harm a creature they also know and love?

Recently Lou was euthanized despite local offers of retirement care until natural death— a post-controversy compromise I assume between the high value of sustainability and the equally high but less predictable value of love. 

Is this a lesson in sustainability and its natural consequences? Or is it a call to become vegetarian? Or is it a challenge to expand the breadth of compassion and its mercies? 

Would I never again enjoy a hamburger or a juicy steak if I thought it might be Lou or Bill?  I don’t know to be candid.

But I do remember the late Benedictine monk and liturgics scholar/professor at Yale Divinity School Aidan Kavanagh’s fierce clarity when years ago he taught students that: “the holy things of the liturgy did not ‘drop from Heaven in a Glad Bag’ ” and  to remember that, “the Eucharist began in the slaughterhouse.”