2022.06.05 Pentecost. The Hot Pink Raincoat on the T. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

When, in 2010, we left St. John’s parish in Gloucester, Massachusetts where Dick had been the rector and I the Sunday Priest Associate for thirteen years, we moved to North Cambridge, Massachusetts into a lovely townhouse. I was thrilled. I grew up in a much bigger city, but still felt the lure of the urban in my bones. Also we couldn’t wait to ride the famous T—in and out and all around the big city of Boston. 

Retirement happened in stages. I found it hardest to say goodbye to one particular counseling client I’ll call H, who had been homeless on and off, depressed and, according to a psychiatrist I consulted, with “too many diagnoses for a clear treatment plan.” He admired my willingness to stick with this client of whom I’d grown fond but who never really made much progress. I admired H’s incredible survivorship—moving about, never settling, and somehow staying alive. When I said goodbye to her I expected her, despite all the advanced notice I’d given her, to blow up, rage at me, and maybe throw some at-hand “weapon.” It was 2010. I never thought of guns. But H was calm. She parted peacefully with a few tears and a hug I accepted. 

A few years later we, like Charlie on the MTA, were riding the famous Red Line subway into Boston when I suddenly spotted H entering  our subway car. I wasn’t quite sure it was H, but with a few brief hard looks without staring I recognized her. She looked frail, small, with scraggly graying hair. Instinctively, I looked away and hid behind my newspaper or some book. She wore a bright hot pink raincoat—full length to her ankles. I don’t think it was raining that day, but H was prepared. I grinned.

As the conductor called out the various stops, the T shook and bolted along towards the big city. I glanced over at H and suddenly realized that her hot pink raincoat was mine—had been mine! I’d loved it, but when we moved, I gave it to the parish annual rummage sale. I’m not sure quite why except I was sorting sifting and getting rid of as much as possible. H always hung out at rummage sales, and ours was no exception. She looked smashing in my coat; it covered her small fame with elegance. 

I can’t tell you exactly why, but it was a Pentecostal moment—unexpected, uplifting, very funny, childlike, and, yes, Holy Spirit resplendent.  

2021.10.24 My "Racism"—Part Twenty-three. -ISM Healing

When Jesus healed the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, he first asked him:”What would you like me to do for you?” Such a dumb question! Wasn’t it obvious?  Yes, of course, yet Jesus never flaunted his healing gifts, nor did he assume. He did not suffer from personal “messianism”—being a Messiah before being a kind human being.  

Scene LXV.  Gloucester-ISM?

Dick and I had moved from Connecticut to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1997. We were ready for a new experience, a new place that had no biases about our divorce/remarriage story. We felt branded. A Connecticut man had even called us “church criminals.” He was a victim of serious mental illness, but we felt the sting of criticism. I tried to laugh it off, but I admit that a new location had promise—the geographic cure. I didn’t want to feel my own self-doubt. 

Dick, whose heritage was Italian, was excited that this new location would be spectacularly Italian—full of great pasta, wonderful sea waters, beaches, and liberal Democrats. Well, the sea-beaches and the pasta were abundant, but the politics was distinctly mixed and local/eccentric—Sicilian, thus not really Italian. Or was it? We’d wondered about the isolationism of an island. Gloucester was not really an island. Or was it? Jokes abounded about people never “crossing the bridge”—off island. 

We arrived after a sad, teary, and strenuous move, as all moves are, on a fog-bound, cold and dreary February day. We had booked a motel for one night, because the moving van would not arrive until the next day. Where would we find a restaurant for dinner? All we really needed at this point was wine anyway. The motel owner gave us a few ideas, recommending Schooners on the road that runs along the harbor. The owners were friendly and welcoming, and I never—ever before or since—tasted shrimp cocktail like this one. The owner told us his recipe for cooking fresh shrimp was “a secret”—apparently his alone. Nevertheless, Schooners, although it changed names a few times in the ten years we lived in Gloucester, became our restaurant of choice on most Sunday evenings.  

We discovered quickly that if you weren’t from Gloucester you were, well, not from Gloucester, not a Glawsta girl or guy. How naive we were to imagine that the parish would be different. I mean, we did know what an Episcopal church was. That, it turned out, was about all we knew. The congregation had at its center a group of folks who had left a neighboring parish that split over what brand of Christianity was right and true. They had come to St. John’s to evangelize the parish with its brand of Christianity—conservative, leaning fundamentalist/ biblical literalist.

Dick’s first sermon articulated two versions of Christianity—one he thought true to the gospel of Christ and the other, not so much. The next week he preached on a story from the Old Testament, and after church I overheard an angry young man, comment to another parishioner: “Is he even allowed to preach from the OLD Testament?” Someone else said: “What about HER?” A man looked down on me one Sunday and, with a challenging tone, asked: “Do you believe Jesus was divine?” I can’t remember if I said a little prayer or not, but my answer came back firm and true: “Of course I do. You don’t think I’d be praying all these prayers to just any old guy, do you?” 

Much of this talk was underground, but you know how stuff leaks out. An older parishioner, herself not a Gloucesterian, adopted us and invited us for sumptuous dinners. I felt hopeful. None of this was their fault; nor was it ours. It was about differences, assumptions, and enough grit to make choices—not from right/wrong or good/bad stances, but from what we all called God’s Grace—also humor.  The first Easter that I preached I opened with my best Boston accent: “It’s Eastah in Glostah!” We laughed together.

Yes, I prayed for us and for the parish. God was good enough and big enough to listen without judgment, at least judgment that I felt. Dick stayed steady, got to know people, as did I. He opened his door to any and all parishioners. The place began to breathe, and the dissatisfied people either left by choice or found ways to adjust. We spent ten amazing years in dear old Gloucester where we grew to know and love many good people—Gloucesterians! 

Scene LXVI.  Healing Mentors 

Finding mentors in your journey through life enriches your soul. These are people who, let’s say, know the ropes of spiritual struggle and the tossing and turning of both joy and strife. They are people who pray and people who have experienced hurt personally and institutionally, often because they have bucked the system and its rules. These are they who rise above the temptation of ISMism. 

I will not forget the time I sat on the front steps of the church with Sereda, an aging old “salt”  originally from Nova Scotia. She found home in her parish church. She had studied theology in a correspondence course from Oral Roberts University and was very proud of this work, for which she had a certificate. She was talking vigorously to me about how she did NOT approve of women as priests. I cringed internally but listened. She then grinned at me and said, while patting my knee reassuringly: “But the Bible tells me (see Luke 2:36) that the old woman Anna hung out in the temple, praying every day, and actually bore witness to the child Jesus as the savior when his parents brought him to be presented at the Temple. She was a prophet! So I guess if an old woman like that could speak in Church, other women could too.”  We laughed. I felt warmed. Sereda was my first mentor on Gloucester. 

*  *  *  * 

The Rev. Elmore McKee was an Episcopal priest who had been defrocked because of his divorce at a time when clergy divorce was, well, more than frowned upon in the Church. I was living in  Connecticut, attending Yale Divinity School, and struggling myself with the Church’s rejection. It was the late 1970’s. My application to be ordained had been turned down twice. I was doing field work in ministry at the Episcopal parish in Avon. The rector there, the Rev. Philip Stowell, suggested I make a time to talk with Elmore McKee. I did.  

Elmore McKee had no political clout, but he sure was able to give me large doses of heart. He was kind and gentle. I poured my story, my tearful pain, my shame, into his listening ears. In his presence I felt consecrated. I could even glimpse his own pain, although he never talked directly about it. He knew what such rejection felt like. Elmore had remarried and occasionally interrupted our sessions to tend to his wife who had some form of dementia. He was remarkably loving and attentive to her presence in the next room. “Are you all right, my darling?” Elmore’s deposition was the Church’s loss.   

Elmore talked a lot to me about the value and wonder of lay ministry, imagining I suppose that he would encourage me in ministry, should I never be ordained. He went on so much I once asked him whether there was any room for priests in his definition of ministers of the Church. We laughed, although he, I bet, couldn’t imagine that I might try again after the diocese elected a new bishop. Elmore died the year after I was ordained priest in 1988.  He had been a “priest” to me. 

Ironically, Phil Stowell ended up divorced, as did I, as had Elmore, as did the bishop who had rejected my application. The Episcopal Church, in time, unstiffened its moral and ecclesial spine, on this issue. 

*  *  *  *

Madeleine L’Engle, author and spiritual director, was equally priestly to me. She was impatient with the Church’s resistance to women’s ordination. She was confident I would be ordained. She was more vocal than Elmore, and very rigid about no divorce, except maybe for adultery. She did allow for divorce, but only in situations where it was inevitable, or nearly necessary.

Madeleine told me to talk to women I respected, six of whom were divorced and six of whom had stayed in long-term marriages. She was intent on making sure I understood what a “rough” process divorce could be. Just before I was to graduate from seminary in 1982, Madeleine wrote to me with a suggestion. “It might help a lot to talk with people who have gone through what you are about to go through what you are about to go through.”

I took her suggestion to heart and found enough women—itself not an easy task—whose experience might help me and who were willing to talk. I listened carefully to each woman. Each experience on either side was very different, and all decisions had been extraordinarily difficult for many reasons. To summarize my findings: I discovered that the women who had divorced could not imagine themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse. The women who stayed in the marriage could see themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse, with whom there was enough mutual trust.

As I moved through the ordination process once again, I heeded Madeleine’s final commandment: “Now my dear,” she said in the fullness of her certitude. “When you get ordained, and you will, do not become a little man.”  

*  *  *  *

The Rev. Pierre Wolff, an Episcopal priest, formerly a Roman Catholic priest and a Jesuit, was the spiritual director who guided me through several messy processes: divorce, rejections, shame, and falling in love with Jesus. He knew about grief and hard choices. Pierre “divorced” his Roman Catholic Church, principally because of the way they treated and perceived women—institutional sexism. He left his first religion, and he left his first country, France. He never left Jesus though. Eventually, Pierre married a former nun, and I officiated as priest at their 1988 marriage, a mere six months after I was ordained priest. The marriage preparation counseling was hilarious. Now I was his authority figure when he still felt like mine. Still, I felt honored to be chosen, and I think in the homily, I referenced the hazards of divorce and recovery from divorce—with God’s grace. 

Pierre didn’t know a thing about boundaries, but then neither did I back then. I suppose we learned together. Of the many things Pierre taught me about Jesus and Scripture and prayer, I remember his frequent spiritual refrain—what he would always say when things felt overwhelming: “Doucement, cherie.”  Take it easy. I say it all the time to myself. Pierre died in 2018 and I preached at his funeral.  

As I stood over my prepared and prayed-over text, I muttered to myself, doucement cherie, and began my thank-you-note homily, this way: “Dear Pierre. . .”  

2015.12.27 Vision Interrupted Not Lost

Dick and I first met the Rev. James Keegan, SJ, at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, perhaps ten years ago. He was then a lively spirited man, full of chutzpah and good humor, with a challenging vision for the future of the retreat house where he was the Executive Director.

Jim is still lively and full of good humor, and he still believes in his vision. Sadly however, the implementation of his vision and his own health were interrupted by the onset of Parkinson’s disease.

Jim had put together a team of people, all of whom were united, not by religious practice or commitment, but by their singular commitment to the need for spiritual retreats for all people and to the ongoing vitality of Eastern Point as a retreat center. Jim’s idea was a good one, and also perhaps threatening to Roman Catholic, not to mention Jesuit, solidarity, read, control over the way of things. Still, I bet Jim and his vision for this magnificent place by the sea will not be lost.

Dick had been invited to serve on the discernment and planning team for the future of the retreat house. He was honored and excited. Jim had more than once attended Mass at St. John’s Episcopal parish where Dick was the rector—possibly recruiting for his dream team.

Very soon after Jim’s diagnosis, however, he left his position as the head of Eastern Point. It was a loss. We agreed. Jim moved on to deal with his own health and develop his ministry as a spiritual director. With his departure his vision vanished. 

Years passed. I often thought of Jim. Occasionally, we would see him at the Campion Center in Weston, MA. where aging Jesuits retired and where we went for Education for Ministry (EfM) trainings. The sight of him still jovial lifted my heart. But then we didn’t see Jim at meals any more. I wondered. I imagined him dead. Inquiries reveled that he was alive and living in The Pierce Pavilion for medical care  a Campion. I could get no information, because of “HPPA regulations, you know.” I kept wondering.

In November, 2015, I attended a day-long conference for spiritual directors, sponsored by Spiritual Directors International (SDI) at Campion, and there was Jim in the front row seated in an elaborate chair that gave him some mobility on his own. I was thrilled, as if I'd seen a resurrection. Jim grinned. We sat together and tried to catch up with each other, snatching time between the many process directions in the day, which we both thought was ineffective at best.  “Come visit me sometime,” Jim said. “Both of you. Call first. I have a cell phone and take messages.” I kissed him goodbye and left with his phone number in my bag.

On December 8, Dick and I visited Jim. The nurse knew we were coming and told us to wait while she ran down the hall calling out, "Father Jim, are you decent? Visitors."  We spent nearly two hours in delightful remembrances and church-only humor.  Jim is alive! Not well, but alive and mentally alert. He sees some 18 spiritual directees and has his signature humor, grin, and vision. “I had a great team,” he said, recalling his vision for Eastern Point.

Daily during Advent and Christmastide, Jim motors out to the central rotunda of the immense building and sits to meditate before the enormous Christmas tree. The big chapel is nearby, but Jim sits with the tree. I imagine him to be contemplating “the blessed sacrament” in arboreal incarnation. 

Jim writes poetry, some of it published. He gave me some of it to read. Without the use of his hands, Jim’s joy in writing and typing is limited, if not gone. He gave me permission to quote some of his poems. I relish it as a gift and as a sign of resurrection hope for his withered body to be made whole and taken home—resurrected into the soul of God.


These Hands

When did these hands become foreign to me?
Skewed like a lobster’s calls: about ten degrees
off at the wrist—and boney? Puffy blue rivers
of blood run north-northwest up their back side.

And when did these hands make enemies of
buttonholes, zippers, clasps, fasteners of
all sorts, screws, safety pins, paper clips or
any kind of knot? Did it happen in my sleep?

My sleep has been visited in recent weeks
by a newborn baby in a crowd. He looks at me and laughs,
stretches out to me ten perfect fingers and
holds my scarred flesh in his divine grasp.

Jim’s favorite poem:

Spring

If you can tell me how the frequent burst
of pheasants from the brush, the swagger
of the moon-struck waves, the dark receding
of the snow and, in the morning sprawl,
the news of robins, all are spring,
can you explain how spring
and you arise so clearly in my mind
together?

Thank you, Jim, friend and brother priest, for yourself and your gifts. Hang in there, spring is a mere 85 days off!!

2015.06.21 Addiction Awareness

I dedicate this post to all fathers, especially those in our family, who are clean and sober and a blessing, including my own dear dad, in heaven I'm sure.  Thank you. Happy Father's Day.

I also dedicate this post to the nine people who on June 17, 2015 were shot and killed in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. in a senseless act of terrorism. I don’t know if drugs were involved in this act, but I’m am beginning to believe that our American-dream culture is addicted to guns and the power they represent.

                                                               
“What I am about to say will make some people angry.”

Bob Stutman, an experienced DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent for over 25 years, now a consultant on the issue, said the above sentence more than once during a talk he gave recently in Boston. His warning felt almost like a threat. He was right. At almost everything he said, some heads bobbed assent and some heads swiveled negation. No one was neutral—a clear sign of the importance of this issue.

I chuckled inwardly, thinking about Paul the apostle’s preaching in Athens. Paul gave these men, and they were all men, no such warning when he harangued about this Holy One God in whom “we live and move and have our being; as even some of your poets have said.” (Acts 17:28) Some men felt angry, some hopeful, none neutral about such divine encompassment.

Do we think we can keep Divinity transcendent and conveniently far away?

Clergy were invited to attend Stutman's talk, because the current addiction crisis affects all stakeholders, and churches have a stake in the common good. I too have a stake, both personal and professional.  I grew up with alcoholism. I worked as a chaplain in an alcohol/drug rehabilitation center for six years: inpatient for 4 weeks, followed by several weeks of partial hospital aftercare. Such luxury today is costly and rare. It needs resurrection.

Why?  Addiction is of epidemic proportions; first-use age is 12, and 4th grade is the grade most at risk for recreational alcohol use; the latest killer drugs are opioids (synthetic drugs prescribed by medical doctors for pain,) and  kids get them out of the medicine chest at home, not from drug traffickers! The only thing that made me feel angry was this: WE DON’T TALK ABOUT IT. Drug addiction is a disease. Our silence is a sin. 

 Bullets
    -Opioids, such as oxycontin, are synthetic drugs. Opiates, such as heroin, are natural drugs. 
    -The leading cause of death by accident, automobile accidents, is now #2, replaced by death by overdoses of pharmaceutical drugs.
    -Don’t blame pharmaceutical companies and don’t blame the drugs themselves. Think regulated medical marijuana. For the biblically savvy, don’t blame the snake in Eden either! It’s us!
    -Kids say things like: “Hey dude, this s..t’s gotta be safe. It was prescribed by a nice doctor for dad (or mom.) I got it from our medicine cabinet!”
    -The feeling you get from an opiode is not a high, a charge. A man described it as: “being held in my mother’s arms.” Warmth and safety—primal.  
    -Any pharmaceutical drug is abusable. Pills get crushed. Imagine snorting all those extended release granules of a stimulant, like Adderall or Ritalin, prescribed and effective for some conditions, but also abusable. Stutman said: “You may know and trust your teen, but do you know her or his friends?”
    -We are winning the overall drug war, because drug use is down.
    -We are losing the drug war, because drug dependency and death from overdose are up.
    -WHY? Age of first use is lower than it was in 2007 when the stats for overall U.S. drug use went down by 30% 
    -68% of high schoolers interviewed described their “biggest stress” as DRUGS. It wasn’t drugs they feared; it was being approached to use, and being unable to say no. DARE, a police program of drug resistance education, has had little impact.
    -College drug use combines often with alcohol. Every day (all 365) a college student goes from campus to an emergency room because of a drug-related incident:alcohol poisoning or drug overdose, not to mention rape.
    -NO ONE CAN IDENTIFY AN OPIODE ADDICT!  Stutman, an expert undercover agent, could, on observation, pick out addicts, but not opioid addicts.They are successful in traditional ways. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, admitted to being oxycontin-dependent for 5 years. All that time he had a regular radio show. Never mind his politics, his condition was drug-impaired. No one knew.
    - White teens use 2-3 times more drugs than black kids. Think medicine chest.
    -Urban problem? Alaska and Montana have the highest percentages of drug addiction.
    - Sports are not a safe shelter, team sports being the most vulnerable, football the worst.
    -“WE (name any group, Jews, Catholics, Swedes, abstainers, etc.) don’t do drugs.” ALL kids are at risk.
   -The U.S. prescribes more opioides for pain than any other country in the world. #2 is Denmark.    
   -Pain responds just as well to other non-narcotic medications, such as physician-recommended combinations of acetaminophine and ibuprofen every 3 hours.
    -AA and other 12-step groups are support groups for the disease of addiction, NOT treatment. There are now medications that help control symptoms, like cravings, and even death by overdose. 

A dramatic story: Stutpen received a request from a woman in Florida who asked if she could deliver a very short message after his talk to parents. He checked her credentials and said yes. She had six sentences, with props.

1)   My name is XXX and I live in XXX, a wealthy suburban area.
2)   This is a photo of my son, XX, a 2001 graduate of Brown University.
3)   This is his law degree from Harvard University.
4)   This is his MBA degree from the University of Chicago.
5)   This is an empty bottle of oxycontin, his drug of choice in 2009.
6)   This is an urn containing his ashes, 2010.

A final story: The President of Marquette University in Milwaukee, a Jesuit institution, organized an evening talk on addiction and invited all parents. The invitation threatened parents:  RSVP required. If you can’t come to this evening we are recording it and will send you a video. If you don’t respond, your student will show up for classes and will not be admitted until we have a word from you. Amen!

What to do?

     Pray for people in bondage to addiction, out loud! —whether you know one or not. And don't let "those poor people"just meet in your church basements or be confined to your own innermost disdain. Bring the upstairs and the downstairs together. Bring the inside and the outside together.
     Understand your own codependent behaviors. Listen to your kids. Don't just talk to them.
     Read about what the Gloucester, Massachusetts Police Department’s initiative NOT to charge any individual who comes to the police department for help with addiction. Police Chief, Leonard Campanello, introduced the initiative in June, 2015  with a question: What is one life worth to you?

“Law enforcement,” Campanello wrote, does not have the right to judge that life. We believe in second chances, and third chances, and in starting over. Addiction is not a crime.” His site has over one million hits and counting.
    There have been many addicts who have responded; they have been assessed and treated, using any and all available resources. The people and the politicians are behind this effort.
    Connect with other citizens in your communities to have an evening discussion on this issue.

Chief Campanello is married and is a father. He has adopted many new "sons" and "daughters" thanks to this non-traditional, gracious, and, yes, godly, innovation. Happy Father's Day, Chief. 

 





   
   

Flying Prayers at Pentecost

I saw something recently I’ve never seen before.

Before the sun had settled below the horizon there was a pinkened glow on the cloud cover and hanging from it was a rainbow. I’ve never seen a hanging rainbow the rest of its usual arch completely out of view. It looked like a colorful waterfall. I thanked the Creator Godde for this sight, marveled at such beauty, and circled the car for another turn of the harbor road so I could see it again—and again.

I imagined I knew exactly how old Noah in the Bible story must have felt gazing out from the famed ark of his making, an ark to save Creation as the story goes. I was only in my Honda saving nothing but just as grateful—and oddly happy for no reason. I felt suddenly like the young child I was, happy simply with life on its own terms, replete with tragedies, horrors and hanging rainbows. The invisible divine spirit connected me through beauty to my inner beauty.

I understood why children know how to appreciate mystery, how to take holiness for granted, and how to pray with fearless integrity. I understood why Jesus designated a little child as the ideal candidate for Godde’s kingdom.

At St. John’s in Gloucester, the parish where I’ve been Priest Associate for thirteen years, we do a rainbow-like array to celebrate the Holy spirit, Person # 3 of the Trinity, Godde’s helper and the one I call the Great Connector. Every one is invited to write a prayer on a colored dove. The doves of many colors are cut out and strung up on invisible wires to hang in the sanctuary over the altar. The sight astonishes.

All our prayers are flying, a visible recognition of the traveling power of the Spirit—and of prayer.

The best ones belong to children, not for their humor or cuteness but for the raw power of their authenticity and for the themes of love, gratitude, desire, concern for others as well as self, and for their honest recognition of pain and fear without making it the center of the prayer. Here are a few examples from children ages 2 to 14.

God, please don’t let Teddy collapse he’s my best friend. (six year old boy re. his beloved childhood bear that has been mauled by love like the Velveteen Rabbit)
I hope/pray that Piper has a happy life in heaven. (boy, 6 about the dog the family had to euthanize.)
I pray for Piper to let her know I miss her and I love her. (sister, 3, of the above)
That all people of Haiti have food and homes. (girl, 10)
I pray my Daddy’s shoulder gets better so he can play golf with me. (boy 7)
That nobody gets huuuurt. (boy 2 1/2)
I pray that Maggie always stays safe. (girl, 5 about another beloved dog)
I thank God because I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Amen. (girl, 10)
I pray that everyone is happy and that the people in war get home safely. Amen. (girl, 14)

These prayers represent the substance of spiritual truth—the ordinary stuff of life for its own sake encased in hope. They will fly well.