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. 

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? 

2023.08.13 Will You Come Join Me? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I can’t walk on water, unless you count skating and careening about on frozen ponds with my skates strapped on—and even then I once ended up flat on my back and my head went CRACK. It stayed intact but my dignity did not.  

The biblical gospel of Matthew records that Jesus walked on the water, then beckoned Peter to follow him in faith. Peter headed out and started to sink. He called out in fright, and Jesus, rather than laugh at Peter’s bravura, simply reached out his hand for Peter to grab. Then he pulled the sopping and perhaps sobbing Peter out of the water to safety—and from fear to faith.  

I probably would not try to walk on water, but I can wade in it and play with it and occasionally swim through it. There is a Spiritual called “Wade In The Water”  Come on children, wade in the water. It was a signal song to assist black slaves running to escape from enslavement—running  toward freedom. They knew that the song wasn’t innocent. It meant much more than playful wading. It was a signal to head for the water and wade right on in, because the hounds of their enslavers who were chasing them would lose the scent as soon as the runaways hit the water.

Perhaps that old Spiritual is today a signal that we all should “wade in the water” to follow the faith of Jesus to freedom, whatever that may look like to you. The faith OF Jesus is not a call to become a Christian. It is an invitation to wade in the waters of Jesus’s own faith. To do what he did, to simply love yourself, God, and your neighbor whoever that might be, no matter how scared and hesitant you might be, no matter your swimming skills, no matter whether you go against the grain of traditional teachings. Just GO. Just WADE ON IN.

Sometimes what you imagine will “drown” you, or devour you, might not be as fierce as you have imagined.  Fear not. 

 

2014.10.19 Flor y Canto—Assisted Dying

Recently a dear friend, with whom I have shared both affection and a medical bond, died. We would call each other “lung buddies,” because we both had lung disease. We did everything we were told to do, took our meds, and ran ourselves to panting on the treadmills, because exercise strengthens any organ. Her condition finally took her life. Just before she died she told me, in a passionate and lucid way, that she wanted to die and was ready. She wasn’t a lingering person in life, so in death she didn’t want to linger and drag along. Me either!

It got me thinking........ (OK, fuzzy thinking image, because this classic Thinker image is not really me:)

In our present culture and church we celebrate life, life, life—life abundant, the divine imperative to choose life (Deut 30), God’s gift of life in creation. And we worship a God who brings life out of death. Life seems the only option that accords with divine desire. (OK. St. Paul wanted to die to be closer to Christ, but that was a little whacko. And the blood of persecuted Christian martyrs is out of fashion, thank heavens.)

What if someone feels called, moved, motivated to choose death? What then? Some religious folks think God is against this, that it's a sin, called suicide. This idea gives people little choice but to blame God for their circumstances: Why doesn’t God take me?  That would be the thing a compassionate God would do, right?

Maybe God doesn’t take anyone, like a body snatcher. Maybe God doesn’t take as much control as we’d like. Maybe God defines life by its quality not its quantity, though "length of days" is a good in scripture. And too, what if death is God’s idea? What if the freedom many believe to be granted by a Creator God really is free? Didn’t Jesus choose death?

Freedom is the hardest darn gift ever given. Damn! Still, it is amazingly respectful; it makes me love this Godde more and more. 

Personally, I’d like to take advantage of this great gift. I’d like the chance to choose death without guilt or shame, and with hope, while I’m still in state of mind, heart and soul which is sane, healthy, alert, that is, not distorted by physical pain, mental illness, or being under the influence of addictive substance.

But it’s illegal.

We have assisted living. Why not assisted dying? I mean for real, and legal. Statistics show that in Oregon, where assisted death is legal, the option is not exercised frequently. The feared rash of “suicides” just didn’t happen. Hospice care assists death, but is it enough?

I know this is complex, but if we don’t have serious conversations about it in families, in our churches, and at the level of public discourse, death remains enemy. I know when I bring this up with my children they shrink. I understand, yet I wish I’d had the chance for such a conversation with my parents.

IN THE MEANTIME.............  Here is a lovely way to celebrate life even in death, and while still being realistic about the pains and limitations in our celebrated freedom of life: flor y canto, flower and song.

The Amerindian ancients looked to BEAUTY as a reflection of the divine. Their intuition survived in the Spanish phrase flor y canto and in the tradition of fiesta. Beauty signified the blessing of the divine and also was used to communicate back with the Sacred. They arrived at divine truth, not through linear abstractions, but in an aesthetic praxis. They trusted in the hidden power emanating from flor y canto. Social justice and ethical conduct proceeded from the practice. First things first.

The Eucharistic banquet is our flor y canto—a little stiff and pale in comparison, but we're anglos.

This is what we can learn from the U.S. Hispanic community. A people whose lives have often been marred by great suffering, currently in the immigration crisis, find God in a party—first. They don’t sit down to deliberate doctrine and form a plan, or write wordy blogs full of questions (see above); they form the Beautiful and live life in the subjunctive mode—as if.  It’s their spirituality, their theology. Mi casa, tu casa first—telling stories at table and getting to know each other comes first.

Maybe we have things backwards? Maybe we should throw a celebrative coffee hour before we hit the pews, right in the narthex?

Yet, maybe too, each people and culture has its own mystical ways to celebrate God EVERYWHERE EVERYONE ANYWAY.  But I wouldn’t mind a little flor y canto as I die.

2014.07.06 Faith It!

Freedom is not the same as choice. Nor is it the same as independence. But is it connected somehow to faith?

The other day I was deliberating, obsessing really, over a relatively small decision about whether to offer my opinion or let it go for fear of offending, when I heard myself say to myself, “Just faith it!”

Faith it? An immediate “Greek” chorus of English teachers chanted in my head: “Faith is a noun, dear, not a verb.” Alternatively, this might be a Spirit-nudge cutting through my mental murk—obviously not god the grammarian. But should I have faith to say what I thought or faith to shut up? I was free to choose. 

I hate freedom.

And who is really free anyway? (The last word is "immigrant.")




Choice is overrated, mostly because our fat affluent culture offers so much to consume that it’s overwhelming and stressful, and partly because choices that seem free are bound by inner and outer limitations—like unconscious motivations, what your mother and Mother Church always said to do, and other people. Still, I had to choose something, and I wanted God or Jesus or the powers to tell me what to do. I had choices BUT I wasn’t free.

As reported in Bondings 2.0, June 17, 2014, by newwaysministryblog, Britain’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols addressed the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence. He highlighted war-time rape and sexual degradation as “a most fundamental denial of human dignity and a most gross breach of a person’s human rights.” Duh.

I would have stopped reading— BUT I saw the next word, which was BUT.  ("But," I knew, could cancel everything that preceded it.)  I read on: “But . . . in his speech, Nichols offered a different definition of sexuality than is usually promoted by Catholic bishops.” 

After defining human sexuality as a vital component of our humanity, blah, blah, he continued: “A fundamental aspect of the Church’s teaching about sex is that sexual acts must always take place within the context of  . . .  (Yeah, yeah, we know it’s the context of Christian marriage.) 

BUT, the Cardinal did not say Christian marriage, he said “authentic freedom.” Authentic freedom. For any two people?  Not just Christians?  Outside marriage?  Just for love and not just for procreation?  The moral context of sexual acts is now about freedom, according to this cardinal, and, I would add, many theologians and ethicists.  Morality unbound like Lazarus.

I love freedom.

But, how did this help me? I’m not exactly sure, BUT this came to me: “authentic freedom” is spiritual freedom, faith freedom—the authentic freedom of the soul in Love, the soul in a moment without tight rules and contexts of practice, the soul at risk from without, willing to take risks from within, a soul who can faith it.

That’s how I stopped deliberating, praying, trying to fit my decision into some acceptable safe cubby.  I faithed it.

I don’t know if offense was taken or not.

Only after my faithing, did I remember the biblical wisdom in Galatians 5:1 :"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free."  It doesn’t say choice; it does imply faith.

P.S. did you know there is a car named SOUL? A Kia. KIA means "killed in action." Ill let you interpret that any according to your mood or your spirituality.  BUT I doubt if this little car authentically free.