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.  

 

2024.03.24 Stethoscopic Listening, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

If you want to hear the pulse of the universe, you have to BE a stethoscope, listening not just hearing. Turn off your urges, your longing for security. Move out of the eager parade, such as the one so many Christians try to reenact on Palm Sunday, the tragic walk towards what everyone imagines will bring ultimate satisfaction to that longing to belong. Surely it will become obvious—atop a mountain, in a procession of Palm-waving, by Easter for sure? Surely. 

                            *  *  *  *

Once upon a time a very old— ancient by any measure—snake called Rock-Dweller was born in my imagination at a writers’ retreat at a very holy monastery, when this very famous spiritual director named Madeleine told us all: Think of someone in Holy Scripture who was angry and write about it.  The snake in Genesis popped up. She was furious, asking: “Why do women hate snakes? Why, for that matter, does God?” Was there no grace for the snake? My snake prayed fervently, doubted even her own doubt, discovered her own secret shame, and laughed at divine folly. Eventually, my snake dozed on her “sun-warmed, soul-soaked rock”. (Spiritual Lemons. Biblical Women, Irreverent Laughter and Righteous Rage. Augsburg edition, 2005.) 

One recent morning, I did not want to wake up and face another day of what is called aging-in-place. I missed my get-up-and-go self. I felt angry and helpless, damning all self-help baloney, including my own. I lay still and listened stethoscopically—underground, beneath my heart’s resistance, my mind’s curse. 

“It has to be Qoheleth!” I finally said to my slowly-awakening spouse who groaned. 

                                *  *  *  *

Qoheleth is the Hebrew translation for the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. The name translates as teacher/preacher/messenger, sometimes collector of sayings. Ecclesiastes was written after the exile (450BCE) at a time of tremendous economic growth accompanied by the politics of, let’s say, acquisition of wealth for its own sake and its attendant temptations. Much like today, the poor got poorer while the rich got richer—and the gift of divine grace got, well, undermined, taken for granted, forgotten. In this socioeconomic situation Qoheleth struggled to find God. He asked: Is everything vain, futile, spiritually bankrupt?   “What’s the point?” 

“What’s the point?”was my own father’s deathbed question in 1983. We stood, my sister and I, on either side of his bed as he groaned out his last breaths. Dad was only 71! 

There is never a clear answer to such a question or quest. Qoheleth stayed open-ended—wise enough to continue to question himself, his world, life itself, and the divine intention. Also wise enough to be reverent and skeptical at once. I aspire to do likewise—with my imaginary stethoscope. 

For everything, the inquisitive one concluded, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven—birth/death, hate/love, mourn/laugh, silence/speech, war/peace. 

 

 

2024.03.17 Potentiation. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, 3/17/24, blog post

 

Above is my home altar, a great messy array of memories and images—all iconic to me.

Most everything you ever wanted to know about God is in Genesis, anyway. It’s the beginning of a very long story in a book called The Holy Bible—ancient and still a best seller. It’s not “holy” because it’s so old.  It’s not even holy because the Christian Jesus is in there, or the Jewish Moses, or even big bang theories. No, it is holy because your story is in there, too.

*  *  *  *

It was 1978, my first day as a student at Yale Divinity School. I sat in a huge lecture hall, loaded with tumultuous emotions—guilt, fear, joy, anxiety—great expectations!  I was supposed to be a traditional stay-at-home mother, not a forty-year-old woman in a huge lecture hall, wondering about having an affair, or who Jesus was, really, really, or who God might be, when suddenly a loud deep voice from the podium announced: “In the beginning (pregnant pause) God potentiated . . .” 

Potentiated?  

I wrote that word down. It was not the word the professor used; nor does it appear anywhere in Genesis or anywhere in the Bible. It was the word I heard. 

Where did this word come from? I didn’t know then, I don’t know now. Nor did I know just how potent it would become in my life, or just how painful it could be, or just how much personal truth it held for me. God or not God, potentiation exploded inside me. I sat up straight and listened.

I’m tech-savvy now so I “Googled” this word. It has to do with the potency of Being itself, whether it is found in material or spiritual beings. Courtesy of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle of course.  

I’m aging. I talk to God all the time as I always have. I don’t expect “answers.” I just watch for potentiation—tiny or huge bursts of Being itself. It just happens. It’s an experience, not to be evangelized from any single point of view.

*  *  *  *

I live in a retirement community. A young woman, CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) specializes in shower assistance as needed. Nothing fancy, but when you can’t get about without a walker, and when the shower seat is “miles” away from the water source, and when you’re stark naked and shivering, well, you need expert help. 

My shower was refreshing and lovely. I memorized the process and taught my live-in help/spouse. 

The after-shower conversation I had with my CNA, however, brought mutual potentiation.  After the shower I “walkered” into my office to my comfortable swivel chair.  She followed and sat on a small rocker from which we removed two stuffed owls and a stuffed pink “valentine cupcake” of sorts. She wrote her official notes and I swiveled round in my computer chair.  We sat facing my home altar at which I hope to kneel again sometime. It was designed and hand-carved, a gift from one of my daughters and her husband, a professional wood-worker. It is carved from good maple wood, about the measurements of a door lying flat, and it is polished to a sheen. On it rests my entire prayer life. Underneath it is written a date, and an inscription of love from my daughter and the artist, Pete. 

“What are these?” my shower aide asked, pointing to two small multi-colored striped triangle-shaped pins. They symbolize support for the Pride movement, celebrating the many different expressions of human sexuality GLBTQI.  

“Oh. We don’t allow that where I come from.”  

I chuckled. My altar array represents my family, my church, my culture, my favorite images of God, a crucifix, and most of my sins. All holy. I then  asked her if she thought the great and loving Creator of all of us cared equally for all of us, even with our differences?  She pondered a bit then shook her head Yes. YES!

In that small moment we potentiated the image of God.    

2022.06.26 In The Beginning? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The biblical story of Creation portrays a God who created, giving spiritual birth to humanity in the divine image. The only “rule” God set was the only “rule” humanity disobeyed: Just don’t eat of this one tree or you will open the door for evil alongside good in the world. Simple, right? Let’s check out if God is just being parental. One bite won’t hurt. Follow your bliss. It was HER idea. Turns out God was being loving not judging. This mythic story continues to be re-enacted over and over. It turns out we all have control issues. 

And again. 

The Supreme Court just ruled that the constitutionality of rights secured for 50 years by the Roe V. Wade ruling was, yes, unconstitutional. Make no mistake, this ruling is about women, none of whom get pregnant alone, some of whom get pregnant not by choice but by immaturity or crime. All of them are held responsible for the consequences of their putative “sins”, and many suffer abandonment, poverty, racial bias, classism, and ill health. Oh yes, others are condemned in the name of God as well.  

I think of the biblical story in the New Testament (John 7:53-8:11) about the woman brought to Jesus for condemnation. She has been accused of adultery. Assuming the accusation is true, did she commit this act all by herself? Jesus famously bends over and writes something in the sand. What he wrote no one knowe The crowds bellowed for her execution by stoning. Jesus rises and challenges the crowd:  “The one among you who is without sin may cast the first stone.” The crowd disperses—each heading home carrying their “toys.”  The woman is told to go and sin no more. 

Was it a “sin” to be a woman? Well? She didn’t commit adultery alone or get pregnant alone. As to what Jesus wrote in the sand, I bet he wrote: “So where’s the guy?” 

*  *  *  *  

This statement below was posted on June 24, 2022, by Kathleen McCartney, the President of Smith College, a woman’s college and my alma mater. There are many concerns and fears generated by the Supreme Court’s decision, and one of them of course is higher education, especially women’s education. 

“Today the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. As reported by The New York Times, “the decision, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, will lead to all but total bans on the procedure in about half of the states.” Decisions about reproductive rights are now relegated to the states, which will exacerbate inequalities in access to reproductive healthcare. In the words of Gloria Steinem ’56, “medical needs should not be distributed geographically. They're way too distributed by class and economics as it is because we don't have national health care as we should. And this makes it far worse for the female half of the population.”

In an amicus brief in support of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, economists noted that “there is a substantial body of well-developed and credible research that shows that abortion legalization and access in the United States has had—and continues to have—a significant effect on birth rates as well as broad downstream social and economic effects, including on women’s educational attainment and job opportunities.” Research in the years since Roe v. Wade became law has shown that access to abortion increased the probability that young women finished college by nearly 20 percentage points and entered a professional occupation by nearly 40 percentage points; it also found that teen motherhood was reduced by 34% and teen marriage by 20%.”

*  *  *  *

I am not in favor of abortion. Nor am I in favor of pro-life arguments that claim to save the life of the fetus but fail to consider all other lives, especially the mother’s life as one of those lives to consider in the pro-life arguments. I am in favor of LISTENING to many stories told by women about their experiences. I am in favor of compassion all round, in church and state. I am in favor of lobbying the Congress to codify Roe v. Wade so it becomes federal law, not to be regulated by states with wildly different moral and religious cultures. I bet that’s what Jesus would do. President Biden agrees, too—not about Jesus necessarily, but about restoring the rights and choices Roe v. Wade secured.   

As far as I can figure, women and men are equal by Constitution, by Democracy AND equal under the rule of law, AND equally created by a Creator-God who gave a nod to the other tree in the garden, the Tree of Life—abundance of food and life for ALL living things. Here is an image that depicts this forgotten Tree of Life God placed in Eden. 

*  *  *  *

Personal Stories

 

In my  ministry and in my counseling, I have sat, on more than one occasion, with a young teen who is pregnant, in tears, and terrified. She has no money. She looks forward to higher education and to pursuing her dream vocation. She is not equipped to take care of a child. She is afraid to tell her parents, and certainly her very Catholic boyfriend. She feels condemned and all alone. I have helped such children make decisions, choices each could live with. And I helped one girl find a doctor who helped her abort.  

And once I sat with an older woman who, in midlife, confessed her earlier abortion and sobbed with grief over the loss of her unborn child, a son, she felt sure, whom she had named. I listened with compassion. Further, I suggested that we could baptize this unseen, unborn son. She looked at me in amazement and then knew this was exactly the right thing, the right kind of absolution if you will. So she held her invisible son while I consecrated water and baptized him in the name of God. I think I have never presided over a holier baptism. 

May we begin again, please. And may we remember that God is not a gracious puppeteer but a gracious indweller. 

 

2018.05.06 Creation Praise

Creation Praise
. An early Celtic prayer

I offer Thee
Every wave that ever moved,
Every heart that ever loved,
Thee, my Creator's Well-Beloved,
Dear Lord.
Every River Dashing,
Every lightning flashing,
Like the angel's sword.
Benedicimus Te!
I offer Thee Every Cloud that ever swept
O'er the skies and broke and wept
In rain, and with the flowerlets slept.
My king.
Each communicant praying,
Every angel staying
Before Thy throne to sing.
Adoramus Te!
I offer Thee
Every flake of virgin snow,
Every spring of earth below,
Every human joy and woe,
My love!
O Lord! And all the glorious
Self o'er death victorious,
Throned in heaven above.
Glorificamus Te!

From Calvin Miller, The Path of Celtic Prayer (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007), p. 96

A sturdy and relentless theology of Creation, aka cosmology, is crucial right now. We need to stop arguing differences, to appreciate both diversity AND the wholeness of God’s creating. We need to do this in order to collaborate to save our one small unit of divine cosmic creativity. Such a perspective has been present in the Celtic tradition for centuries, as the above prayer illuminates.

Hearing the Creation story in Genesis always gives me a spiritual boost. It’s majestic, bold, and grand—a poem of overwhelming inclusivity and diversity. We pay lip service to diversity, yet it terrifies us. Still, God potentiated all this Wonder, culminating in beings made in the divine image—humanity.

BUT . . . did Godde create a hierarchy of being? Humanity immediately fell prey to such a notion and acted on it—men at the top, of course. All religions downsized Creation's wholeness and rank-ordered humanity and all other matter for the sake of power and control. Some things good and others bad. God's idea was that ALL of it was GOOD. This can't be said enough. 

Later in my studies I fell in love with Irenaeus of Lyons’s famous saying: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” I had that phrase calligraphed on the invitation to my ordination to the priesthood.  I still believe it, but thanks in part to the biblical Job I have a new vision. When the faithful Job lost everything he had, except his insistent faith, he prayed—harangued—Godde to answer for the excess of calamity on such a faithful servant. God, more patient than the impatient Job, finally appeared to Job and walked him through the whole of Creation.

Once again awed, I learned that divine creativity was boundless—and ALL of it is the glory of God.

Jesus the Christ preached Love, period. This embrace includes ALL creation. Jesus might be horrified at how exclusive Christians have made his name.

The work of Jewish scholars, like Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, is essential to make us aware that we Christians do not need to buy into anti-Jewish translations of scripture, or Christian chauvinism, in order to assure the uniqueness of our Jesus.

As I approach my ninth decade, my body warns, “maybe not” while my mind says, “yes you can!” I slow down, take time to observe as much as I can. I relish the small things more than ever—all good, all Glory, all God.
    -A tiny ant makes its way along the edge of my home altar, stopping occasionally to wave its sensory antennae before it crawls up to join Jesus on the cross—a wise and foolish ant.
    -A frantic squirrel nibbles at the edge of a discarded sandwich crust. Alert, it drops the crust and dashes to a perch in a nearby tree. Five minutes later the squirrel returns, knows exactly where that crust has dropped, retrieves it, and resumes its “communion.”
    -A small boy speeds on his scooter down the hill in the playground; he is thrilled; his dad sees he will be unable to stop before he reaches the edge of the trafficked road ahead. Dad dashes.
    -A baby in church practices her newly discovered extended squeal—a siren of praise.
    -The redbud tree in our yard bursts into bloom, its bare branches popping with dark pink blossoms. They weren’t there yesterday.

Godde, save us from exceptionalism: Christian, human, even American. Glorificamus Te for  the whole shebang.
     

2016.08.21 Dear Adam

Dear Adam,

You shouldn’t have left me here.
I haven’t turned to stone yet—not God’s way,
         But  . . .
I’m indescribably bored.
Oh, I know Eden was for my own good
—so you told me—
But I’m out of apples   
  and peaches
     and pears
       and plums
and worse . . . lemons! 









So,
dearheart, my man, my foolish
man-child. Don’t tempt me with more lies.
Come on back and get me.
I can give you a dash of eternity—
a couple centuries or three + apple pie.

                  with love, your rib-eye wife, Eve

P.S. God says hi, the god you forgot to tell me about,
the same one who told you you were naked but forgot to tell me,
the one with the sense of humor big enough to blow up the universe,
the God who is dictating this letter.

2016.02.21 Why I Support Hillary Rodham Clinton To Be the Democratic Nominee for President of These United States

I’m no policy wonk; nor am I more than an averagely-informed political activist, so I will try to keep this at least clear-hearted, if not especially bright-minded or serene. You can read more measured professional opinions and statistical data elsewhere. 

The woman I hope will be our next president is Hillary Rodham Clinton. I will refer to her as Hillary, not out of disrespect or any attachment to informality, but frankly because alternatives are, well   . . .  funny:
        -HRC? The other major contender is BS.
        -Clinton? Fails to honor the fight Hillary put up to retain “Rodham” in her married name.
        -Mrs. Clinton? Ok and respectful, but incomplete.
So Hillary it is, and how progressively wonderful that most journalists and others refer to the two front running Democrats in  the 2016 presidential campaign as Hillary and Bernie. 

My writing points for Hillary:
    -I read her memoir Living History. In it I met a woman of intelligence with a passionate and authentic story to tell. When she ran for president in 2008, critics evaluated memoirs by all the candidates, including Barack Obama’s, and found hers the most authentic.
    -I’ve been a feminist for years, a Christian feminist who believes that maleness and femaleness are created in the image of divinity. I’m no biblical literalist; nor do I discount that some biblical wisdom is inspired by God, so counter does it run to traditional human practices. This imago dei idea from Genesis makes my soul sing.
    -Hillary Rodham Clinton is a born politician in the best sense of that word. We need leaders like Hillary, and we need the perspectives women bring to leadership. The gift of gender is one formative factor in a  person’s profile. When women are on board, a discernment/decision process tends to be more collaborative, more inclusive of diverse points of view, and, dare I say, more affectionate without loss of strength. Also a little wild.
    -There is gender as gift and gender as handicap in a society organized around rank-ordering and -isms. Hillary knows in her flesh that women have not achieved the dignity and respect commensurate with their qualifications—simply because of their gender. If she knows that about women she knows that about other disinherited groups.
    -Hillary has stayed true to her desire to make democracy work for the common good. She has made many egregious errors of judgment. I believe she has learned to be more cautious, focused, and still to retain her vision. I don’t trust political rigidity. I don’t trust religious rigidity either. 
    -Hillary’s transitions and transformations over her long career have been painful. An early example was her movement away from the party of her family of origin to a party that better articulated her progressive vision for social justice. I know how much that can sting. I did it myself.
     -It is time for American’s “greatness” to include a recognition of the dishonesty and injustice of sexism and elect a woman as president—not at all costs and not any woman, but for the sake of who we say we are—and for the Statue of Liberty, herself. Economic injustice is not the only injustice.
   
    -I know what it is like to be consistently behind the patriarchal eight-ball, to keep trying, and to get up and try again because you believe in yourself and because you have a voice and a vision that matters enough to never say die. Hillary is ambitious, sometimes too much for her own good—quite unpopular in a woman. I used to be ashamed of my ambitions—until I met Jesus and then I blamed God for us both.
    -Hillary has survived public ridicule and humiliation in her marriage. Living through the trauma of personal betrayal is humiliating enough, but going through it in the public eye and holding onto personal dignity through the impeachment threat and other scandals, takes courage—not just to grin and bear it, but to stay the course. I chose divorce and she chose to stay. Either choice is very difficult, and neither is right or wrong.  Either way it’s messy. The eye of the Church softened its gaze toward me. Maybe the nation will do the same for her.  I care about good credentials in a leader. More important to me is a sturdy well-smelted soul to go with them. Hillary has not become enslaved by her wounds.
     -Hillary isn’t popular. Fine with me. People say she isn't warm. Boo hoo. I don’t know how anyone can be warm under such pressure. Nevertheless personal caution is not necessarily a sign of weakness but of modesty, a lost value in today’s world. That’s not a bad boundary for a public authority figure to maintain.
    -People don’t crow and moan about aggressive men in politics or other fields of endeavor. Aggressive women? Well, they are still considered a threat to the system. They are.
   
    -Hillary is too establishment, they say. When I was a young teen I was thrilled to discover that the longest word in the English language was antidisestablishmentarianism. 11 syllables! Eventually, I learned that it meant opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Would I want to disestablish the institutional Anglican Church I’d fought so hard to get established IN via the Episcopal Church? Just because the established institution of power needs to change and evolve doesn’t mean it is rotten to its core. Women are still trying to break the Episcopal stained glass ceiling. I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t care so deeply about the health and wholeness of that for which I fight.
    -I learned that I myself, can really mess up, defy many establishment norms, be forgiven by an established institution, and continue to lobby for reforms. Maybe the same process can be true for Hillary in the institutional halls of government and with American citizens.

    -Hillary has a spiritual life of prayer and goes to church not just for public appearance's sake. How politicly incorrect! 
    -Metaphorically, Hillary could be a stealth Robin Hood in female garb since she has already begun robbing the rich through collecting their outrageous fees for her talks. It’s ironic, but so was Robin Hood.
    -Is there temptation to elect a woman just because she will be a first? Yup. There is equal temptation NOT to elect a first for its own sake. Take your pick.
    -Bernie Sanders would be the first Jew. We don’t hear much about that, now do we? God forbid. But are we more scared to be anti-semitic than we are to be sexist?  Or is there just resistance to a woman in high office? The way it looks now, and it is early I know, we shall have a first woman president, a first Jewish president or, let’s say, a first unashamed and authentic public bully president.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wounded woman who has the potential to become a wounded healer. Such a gift, if realized, has much to offer public office. But then I am a person who believes that security/safety is NOT the highest value. Humility is.

Do I pray about all this? No, actually, not exactly— only that God will make sure the best woman will win.

2013.04,14 Potentiation Never Ends

“In the beginning . . . “  he began in somber tones.

I wrote it down in my brand new spiral notebook marked Old Testament; “In the beginning  . . . “  Then I waited, through a long pause, for more.

“In the beginning God potentiated life—over and over and over.” 

I loved that word, potentiate. I’m not sure if that is exactly what he said but that’s what I heard and never forgot.

Potentiation is what God, by whatever name, and there are many, is all about—over and over and over.  My time as a seminarian at Yale Divinity began in 1978 with this enormous required basic biblical course in Hebrew scripture.  The professor, Robert Wilson, has been teaching, potentiating, there for 40 years. (I never thought this then, but I bet he’s about my age now:)

I remember when some students nearly went nuts over an exam question which asked us to connect the texts about Sarah and Abraham in their aging process, with its attending issues, to our own lives and ministries. How would we use these texts to inform our pastoral care work, say in a nursing home? 

My recollection was that many students were angry and protested this approach, calling it proof- texting and all kinds of other putative interpretive “abnormalities” they thought were forbidden when working with sacred texts. I guessed they were afraid of aging and death, or other demons too fierce to mention.

But I loved it.  The issues were the same then as they are now, and I got it.  For me this approach made scripture come alive, and its people real. Years later I wrote two book of midrash stories using this connective experiential approach.

Recently I read that Robert Wilson said:”Religious tradition canonized the biblical text but it didn’t canonize an interpretation.  That is the job of each generation. . . .That’s the human condition. It was also an exilic problem.  How did I get where I am? How do I deal with tradition, with what has happened in the past? You have to figure out where you are and how you got there. It’s what being a fully involved adult means.”

It’s what Creator-God is all about: unending potentiation.

2013.02.03 Book Review, Face of The Deep

I’ve been reading Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and let me tell you it’s deep—and dense, full of scientific and theological language  worth puzzling. Keller is a scholar and theology professor at Drew University. Oh, how I wish these fine scholars would teach to a world of hungry non-academic students who could access their texts easily.

Still, Keller’s ideas are intriguing. She writes about quantum entanglement and gives it a theological pulse. When science explores beginnings and hits a brick wall of explication, there is an opening for theology and its ideas, read G-O-D or Creative Divinity—an option not explicable or provable, so far, but enlightening.

Quantum science and theology admit that this biblical Creator is intimately entangled energetically with cosmos—through chaos. Thus, Creation never stops, but constantly unfolds—like a pleated whole unfolding as it goes.  

As a writer I know that an opening sentence has to hook a reader into wanting more. So here is the Bible’s first sentence.  
            1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth   (Ok, I’m drawn in.)
            2) the earth was formless and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (spirit) from God swept over the face of the waters.   (Suspense.  What will this spirit-wind do? I’m hooked. My dopamine levels are up, and I haven’t even taken a Sudafed. I must find out what happens.)

Keller makes a lot of this second sentence. The action has already started before God says the famous and oft-quoted dictum, “Let there be light!”  Shapeless darkness therefore is not nothing. God tangles with matter before God speaks a word. Many will find that shocking. Why?  We’ve been carefully taught that God created ex nihilo—from nothing, making God a real superpower.  

But no. There’s a verse in between God created and God said. The between God messes with chaos and darkness, up to His or Her divine neck. 

The patriarchal church has taught an almighty omnipotent Divinity (all male to be sure) by ignoring verse #2 and establishing the doctrine of creation from nothing.  But no.  The Spirit vibrates (Keller’s lively translation) over something, not nothing.  That something is The Deep. 

Here is a deity who creates NOT on demand and command, who is NOT omnipotent and utterly transcendent, NOT a He-Man-God, but a Godde who, like a curious scientist, plunges into the depths of dark chaotic matter—tohu vabohu in Hebrew.  Keller calls this process Creatio ex profundi vs ex nihilo and develops a theology of BECOMING. Genesis is a becoming text, not a fait accompli text about divine executive function.  

How do this Deep and this God work things out together?  Does The Deep resist God’s engagement? How much power and energy does matter exert? What happens when God creates Humankind?  Process theologians call this process co-creation. 

What thrills me is that Creator God of verse 2 desires relationship over obedience. Keller suggests that there is in this cosmic quantum entanglement an ethical call, bidding us to join God in this work of transforming darkness and chaos. Think of a God who is entangled as much as we are in injustice, hate, war— a Divinity that energizes for change, not legislates about it. The ethical charge is IN creation itself.  

Keller’s exploration of this one small verse (Genesis 1:2)  does not support a patriarchal male- stereotyped Divinity.  What then?  To me it suggests that God is fully male and fully female—an idea that charges me, and frankly, demands my cooperation to help transform traditional perspectives and language, for the sake of new life. One day the image of God itself will be whole.

I end, as is my wont, with some humor, hopefully apt.  

Rita Mae Brown said:  "If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell."  But I hope for heaven, myself.