2023.10.08 STOP! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

"Everywhere we look we see violence, in our homes, on our streets, in our schools. We see it in advertising, in films, on the news. We see it in strife within companies, communities and nations, and between them. We find it expressed physically, sexually, emotionally and psychologically. It is everywhere and we feel powerless in the face of it.

Let's just stop it. Let the writers, producers, editors and actors who portray violence stop. Let the media stop presenting stories on violence. Let parents and teachers, brothers and sisters, men and women and children stop. Let the political, social economic, judicial and religious institutions stop. 

Let us all spend time in silence, stillness, meditation and prayer each day, drawing on the spirit within us to lead us into kindness, openness of heart, goodness, well-being and goodwill."  from Sister Stan, "Gardening the Soul", 2001.

AND TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER WHAT DO WE STILL SEE, HEAR AND WITNESS ALL THE TIME?     LET'S JUST STOP!  (This is hard for news reporters and media, but does it always have to make the front page?  NO.

*  *  * *

Just a few small things to help us all stop and consider:

-The government collapses when the governed refuse to cease hostilities.

-Attend to small gestures alongside huge unmanageable items. 

-STOP!: 

Do, see, say, live, love in different ways. Breathe don’t pant.

Make the sign of the cross western style (up, down, right, left).

Make the sign of the cross eastern style (up, down left, right).

See yourself as a child at play enchanted, creating with, say, Lincoln Logs.

Be a priest. Consecrate/bless bread and wine using ancient Hebrew words.

Watch grass push slowly up through tiny cracks in cement sidewalks.

Spell divinity God, Godde, G-d, godde—same sound different variations.

Use words of immanence alongside, or instead of, words of transcendence.

Avoid gendered (he, him, his) or role-bound (Father) words for Divinity. 

Because everything is scientific, doesn’t mean everything is not spiritual. 

All life—human, plant, animal—is both vulnerable and venerable. G-d bless you and keep you. The face of Godde shine upon you and from within you today and always. AMEN. 

2020.12.27 Grace-To-Go

Many people wonder what exactly grace is. It's a verb. Spiritual grace, the kind that comes out of nowhere and stuns one awake, is often confused with forgiveness, which is more transactional. Grace is a verb.

I have a dear friend who adopted/rescued a small female puppy in the wake of her beloved husband’s death.The puppy was named Minnie, but my friend rechristened as Grace. Grace came into her life at just the right moment when she needed the most comfort and courage to help her with her intense grief. I imagine that the dog represented the soul of her dead spouse coming into her life in the flesh of this tiny pup called Grace. She told me: "I named her “Grace” because I somehow KNEW deep down that she would be a grace to and for me following my husband's death earlier in 2018. And she has been just that, a grace, a blessing in so many ways. Gift of Godde… that’s my Grace."

There is enough sour in the sweet of Love to make it a VERB. So it is also with the Grace of Godde—also a verb.

Here is my alphabet:

A  aerate, amaze, activate
B   burst, bother, bellow
C   clap, cherish, create
D   drop-kick, delve, dazzle, deify, DO
E   eulogize, effervesce, erase, eulogize
F   fly, fix, forgive
G   God/Godde, grace, GO
H   hallow
I    irrigate, itch
J   jolt
K  know, kiss
L   lift, love, lavish
M  mourn, marry, mortify
N   notarize, navigate, nourish
O   own, overwhelm
P   potentiate
Q   query, quake
R   reconstitute, re-open
S   sanitize, suffer, sanitize, STOP
T   thank, terrify, tenderize
U   undergird, ullulate
V   vivify, verify, verbalize
W   wonder, water, WAIT
X   xylophonize
Y   yearn
Z   zest, zip

GODDE = GO ORDER DEIFY DIVINIZE EARTH

2020.12.06 HOLY

Where is John the Baptist when you need him? His is the voice of alarm, the clarion call to wake up. It is the screeching of the fire engine racing to help. It is the scream of a police car siren racing to help. It is the cry of a hungry baby, the agonized why? of the crucified, the whimper of those alone and dying, the near-silent mutter of a street beggar, the rage of the able and of the helpless, the sigh of the contented writing out a check which is too small to matter, the groan of a planet in peril, the blast of a shofar in early morning—calling, calling, calling.  

What voice do you need to hear? What voice is strong enough to break open your heart? To wake you up to the naked need that surrounds us even when we neither heed, nor hear, nor need. It’s there. What voice moves you to stop running and start listening? Who is your prophet?

In every call, there is Godde. In every need, there is Soul. In every despair, there is Hope. In every wound, there is healing. I know this by faith and by glimmers, glimpses, glows, and guesses.

A glow: December 6th is St. Nicholas day. In life he was a bishop in the early Christian church who died in 343 CE. Nicholas was of Greek origin. At 5’6” he was small in stature but giantesque in heart. Sometimes called the Wonderworker, Nicholas instructed children to leave their empty shoes out by night, and by morning the shoes were filled with goodies and surprise treats. From this small holy activity emerged Saint Nic’las and then/now Santa Claus.

 

 

 

 

 

 I am reminded that the generosity of Godde —in Creation and through all life of all beings—is extravagant and eternal.

 

 

 

 

 

A shimmering story. One of my granddaughters asked for a cross on a chain for her 21st birthday. She specified :“Not one with that body on it.” I remembered a time when this young woman was in her teens and had a fight with a classmate about religion. What middle-schooler fights over that? She’d angrily insulted her friend’s religion, calling it stupid. The dispute was arbitrated by the principal, an apology was made, and my girl did further penance on her own. She went to church with her friend, jumped up for the altar call, and got “saved.” She came home, announced her salvation, and told her older sister that she should get “saved”—it would help her a lot. By the next weekend she decided against church and for the mall.

All of this is not exactly what one might call divine salvation—or is it? Something happened that this girl never forgot. Something to do with Christ, she told me, and wrote me a note, with this salutation: “To my Holy Grandmother.”  It is a beautiful articulation of her spiritual experience, her gropings and her raw and innocent wonderings as she tries to discern what Christ means to her. Salvation is a process. This kid’s a pretty topnotch theologian already!

I wondered about myself being called “holy” refraining from sophisticated definitions of holy.  She wrote me this: “In terms of your holiness, I think I meant it in the way I have always seen you. The only person in my family growing up that was spiritual and religious. I remember being young, exploring at St. John's, and finding peace there. I also remember always asking my parents if we could go to church (I mean, what kid does that??). There's always been a yearning in me for spiritual knowledge. I think for me growing up, you embodied that for me. So thank YOU!! :)”

I say the same to her!

2016.04.10 Dear Atheist

Dear Atheist,

Some years ago I gave a talk to some Episcopalians about God, or some such mysterious topic. I announced I was an atheist. I explained that I was an a-theist, not because I did not believe in a Divinity named God, but because I did not believe in God’s linguistic wardrobe we proclaim in Christian churches as if it were divinity itself. 

After the gasps settled down, I went on to speak of the God I did believe in, though I’m pretty sure many ears were slammed shut to whatever wisdom I thought I was going to impart. I was young and foolish then, you see. BUT now I am old and foolish, and I still do not subscribe to the traditional, and still dominant, imagery and language attached to Divinity: Father, Son, He/His/Him/Himself, King, Almighty, Lord, Prince—masculine images transferred like decals onto Jesus, the post-Easter resurrected one whom we call Christ, the One who has, so far as I know, transcended any gender.

So if you tell me you do not relate, intellectually or emotionally, to a deity that sounds so domineering, patriarchal, and male-gendered, I’m with you.

It’s not as if I want to castrate divinity. I never recall feeling penis envy myself; in fact, it seemed like it could be rather an anatomical nuisance, albeit quite necessary for procreation and pleasure. 
 
For me the telling biblical wisdom about the nature of God is in Genesis in which the Creator-God of the cosmos (not just our own earth, sun, moon and stars but multiple universes) made  life happen in many forms—suns, moons, stars, seas and all lands, vegetation, nature and human nature (male and female, and every combination thereof.) 

Do  you think divine creativity stopped with our galaxy? Do you think God meant to create rigid rank-ordering of biological life? Or did God, simply and deeply, potentiate evolution? Later, Darwin, a faithful man himself, would verify this process and prove that the test for survival was not fitness but adaptability. We are now adapting to an enormously wider and deeper view of BIO-LIFE and of GODDE.  Have we forgotten to look at the stars?
                 

In 2016, Americans elect a new president who will put his or her hand on the Holy Bible and swear in God’s name. To what? The American dream or God’s dream?

Republican presidential contender, Donald Trump, waves his Bible around – though he is apparently unable to name a single verse from it when asked – and talks a lot about making America great again and the threat from Islam. The other Republican front runner, Ted Cruz,  knows his Bible well—well enough to apply it rigidly to reinforce his conservative social agenda. And that speaks volumes about what sort of faith it is that most Republican believers actually believe in. Little wonder, as Professor of Ethics, Stanley Hauerwas, commented, that America doesn’t produce interesting atheists: they don’t have a God interesting enough to deny.

America would never nominate or elect a president with no religious faith, preferably Protestant. America itself has long been its own civil religion. Often I wonder if we worship America first, God second, or not at all.

Giles Fraser, writing in The Guardian (3/30/16) wrote: “When the Pilgrim Fathers got in their little boats and sailed to the new world, they took with them a narrative that had begun to build in England, that the protestant English were actually the chosen people. America, then, was to be the new Israel. The pilgrims had landed safe on Canaan’s side, the promised land.

“In other words, America became its own church and eventually its own god. Which is why the only real atheism in America is to call into question the American dream – a dream often indistinguishable from capitalism and the celebration of winners.”

I am, by this definition, an a-theist again, this time of the American dream deified. I do think America has become its own church, its own god. Maybe that’s why fewer people attend traditional church—even when the American flag hangs in most Christian churches. Is that patriotism or blasphemy? Do we worship the God of ultimate unconditional compassion we see in Jesus the Christ? Do we worship the God-made-masculine-only? Or do we worship the God of our own national idolatry? Some selfie addicts, I imagine, worship their own divinity. There are many brands of atheism.

Which deity is worthy of your atheism?

It doesn’t matter to me what you choose, really, because I know that you have lived and loved well; you have kept faith in yourself through many shattered expectations and crushing disappointments. Some atheists wonder how Jesus, a mere human being, could be so divine, so worthy of deification. Maybe Jesus is not the only christ?  Here’s a poem written into someone’s soul. It reminds me of you, dear atheist friend.

I don’t tell you how much it matters to me that you are my friend.
I’ll never tell you, bluntly and face to face. I can’t summon words
That way. They only come to my fingers occasionally if I’m silent
And just quit thinking. Our fingers are a lot smarter than we know.
Like today when my fingers want to say something like: your gifts
To me have been ears and humor. We speak some strange language
That few other people speak. I don’t know why that’s so. It’s surely
An accident. It’s not like we set out to find each other in the tumult
Of this sweet wilderness. But we did somehow. You can put names
On the finding if you want. The names all mean the same thing. An
Old name is Providence, which is another way to say God, which is
A way to say We Have No Idea How, But We Are Aware of Grace.
There are more names for God than we’ll ever know, and one is you.
                   Brian Doyle, A Shimmer of Something, published with permission

2016.02.28 Death Is Not Eternally Ugly, Is It?

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919), the great painter in the early impressionist movement, said this to his assistants as he instructed them to finish his last sculptures in 1913. By then Renior was severely crippled with arthritis. He'd kept on painting through it all. Such passion reminds me of an organization I choose to fund in small regular ways: Foot and Mouth Artists. Despite the ugly pain of paralysis, these artists create significant beauty, holding brushes between their toes and teeth.  

There is death in life, before biological death. Can death be beautiful I wonder? Can beauty contain elements of death?  Many great artists paint, write, dance, or sing painful death scenes, like crucifixion. The art alone evokes beautiful feelings. I mean feelings profound enough to move one to the soul's core—of love, sorrow, even anger and fright, or deep joy. Sometimes, memory and awareness, changes of heart, and healing come out of death’s beauty. It is the beauty that remains.

When my sister Jeanie died at 34 after surgery for the removal of brain aneurysms, it was painful, and so unnatural as to be free of pain—almost. Though I shed tears, I couldn’t cry for a while, because I couldn’t believe this had happened. Jeanie was too young to die. She was the mother of three young children, my little sister, and a sweet soul I never knew well enough, and now could not remember well. The photo, taken not long before she died, of Jeanie with her husband Don and the children— Chris, 9 and Kellie and Michael, twins about 6—hangs on my bedroom wall. I see it every morning as I get up.

When this death intersected my life, I tried to think it through. Thinking accomplished a lot to contain raw feeling, but it did not, could not, forgive. Forgiveness, I thought, would help me move on. I thought of forgiveness not as a moral issue, but as spiritual path to new life in the middle of  unforgivable death—not resurrection for Jeanie, who I thought was just fine now, but for myself. I didn’t think I had to forgive God, though at times I hated Jeanie for dying before I could get to know her better. With every death, I guess, one must forgive the utter failure of life, and beauty, and theology, and everything you thought mattered enough to die for, to console.  I searched for Godde, for some beauty to hang onto till the pain passed.

I also had to forgive well-meaning sympathizers who said dumb clichés, such as: “The good die young.” What trash! Worse: “God meant this for a reason.”  Or, “This too will pass.” True, but so damn what? Yes, I did search diligently for a reason. At first I blamed Oklahoma, where Jeanie and her family lived, descending into desperate and shameless Eastern elitism.

There was, it turned out, a medical reason: aneurysms at the base of her brain which, despite symptoms and many medical consultations over the years, were never diagnosed until it was time for emergency surgery. Too late. The surgery was “successful,” but Jeanie never woke up. “Cause of death: respiratory failure.” So said the death certificate. 

The oddest experience opened a small space for my broken heart, my memories, and my grief, and, very strangely, a consoling mix of pain and beauty. My father, my living sister Laurie, and I went to a local church to pray at the approximate hour Jeanie was being cremated. It was my idea but I don't know why I thought of it. We didn’t talk much about our reasons or about why we each thought this was important, more important than the public funeral to come. My mother had chosen not to join us for reasons known only to her. So we three went. We just sat there together in our separate silences in a dimly lit sanctuary—a church but a church unadorned, barren.  

Do you know how impossible it is to imagine the whole body of someone you’ve loved being thrown into a fiery furnace and burned up? A crematory is a furnace that combusts at temperatures as high as 2100 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes from seventy to two hundred minutes, depending on the weight of the body. Jeanie’s wouldn’t take that long. I winced, thinking how much the fire would hurt my dead sister. Oh God. The biblical story about Daniel and his three friends being thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the emperor instead of their God popped into my mind. God showed up in the furnace and the three men emerged, as unburned as the soles of firewalkers’ feet. The story was true myth—no facts but lots of truth. Would God be there for Jeanie now? What would God look like, ablaze with flame-tongues, yet unconsumed?  We three sat side by side on the hard pew in the stone chapel. I didn’t look to see if Daddy or Laurie was crying. I hunched up tight, put my hands between my thighs to warm them, and hoped.

2015.05.03 What Shines Through Matters

The barbarity and cruelty of the way people treat each other and their environment is sadly not often surprising. Although it may shock, it is violence that is easily denied or forgotten, or both.

What is truly surprising is the way people treat each other with exceptional proportions of love and consideration, compassion and truth in the midst of cruel circumstances. This is what’s truly stunning, because it shines through the horror and the grit, and it is what we remember more than the horror. It is also what we tend to call divine—and what we remember.

These are a few of my favorite divine things.

Think about fairy tales. How can they be good for children? Many children have see-through minds and hearts. They scream and shrink away from terror, yes. Some pretend it's a hoot. And some see through it, not as if it were a trick or a tease, but as if there really were some Goodness to see, too.

I remember the cottage and the seven little men of grace who welcomed Snow White into their home and their weird ways. They were very diverse, representing every kind of mood and personality imaginable, and far from perfect. But they had a little home and they offered it to her. Oh, they debated the invitation, but they got themselves to agree on hospitality if not salvation.

The little men were in disarray and Snow White helped them. They needed a good wife. But before they realized the gifts she brought to their mess, they welcomed her into their lives.

They are the ones I remember and love best—not the beautiful maiden in distress, not the frightening chase through the dark forest, not the wicked stepmother with the mirror, and the poison apple, and not even the arrival of Prince Charming and his magic kiss, but the community of misshapen little dwarves. But that’s me. Others may remember the dark parts with more clarity.

What is hard to admit, however, is that Godde remembers ALL the parts and people of such tales with equal vividness and equal reverence. I want Godde to favor only the good, and sanction that, as I do. But I guess that is one difference between divinity and humanity. Godde doesn’t have to see through anything. But we do, and we call that see-through vision divine.

Here is a picture that illustrates what shines through. It may as well have been created by God Creator because it shines through dense darkness and the darkness does not go away. It’s a holocaust survivor effort, recently exhibited in a collection called Forbidden Art. It’s not realistic—or is it?

2014.09.28 Women Who Talk Too Much?

When I’m in an informal group of women, 2 or 3 but no more than 6 or 7, I notice a phenomenon. It’s enough to die laughing over—or die for.

I only notice it when I stop talking myself and listen—detached from my own thoughts enough to hear the whole.

All the other women talk at once and keep right on talking. It sounds like the proverbial hen or chicken house, but, at closer hearing, it’s not.

Women seem to be able to talk and listen at once. Everyone talks at once, everyone listens and hears at once, and everyone comes away knowing what was said and mostly by whom—and still with her own reflections intact and often enriched or altered by what she has heard. Now that’s amazing! My husband says it's baloney! (He really used another b word.)

It seems to me that the key to this phenomenon is in the breathing pauses. We all do have to breathe after all. Perhaps it is in the breathe that the thread of meaning and content is picked up. How Spirit-uelle.

Of course you might not want to count on such a group in any formal way. Such groups have only one agenda: being together. We’re usually not trying to accomplish a task. I’ve been in groups where we women take turns in an ordered way, a linear way. I prefer the breath-filled chaos.

Learning theories about women suggest that in fact some women learn best by connection or in relationship—in a group. Connected learning.

                                                     

                                                         

                                                            YAK IT TO ME, BABY!

This practice can be risky. Occasionally, a gavel might be useful. Also, basic relational rules, to say nothing of courtesy, suggest that one person should speak at one time, a space should be left, and then a response made. ONe. ONe. ONe. Such rules of conversation work better for my own "sin" of interrupting—usually out of the fear I may not get heard at all, an old conditioned habit.

My spouse, a man, sometimes shouts out, “Stop talking.” He clutches his hands to his head: “I can’t get my thoughts together. You don’t know what I was going to say. Let me finish!”  He thinks I’m interrupting, filling in his blanks. He has a point. I tell him I'm only commenting, interjecting stuff as we go along. To me, I interject as HE goes along. I don't understand why he just doesn't pick up and keep going. “This is a conversation,” I say, and add, “Besides, you go on and don’t stop.”  Then I talk some more, just to clarify—until one of us exits the space.

I mentioned this phenomenon to my male dentist and his female hygienist. She and I laughed. The dentist said: “Tell me about it, I eat lunch with all of them,” and waved his hand, referring to a good-sized all-female office staff.

Perhaps Godde made women multi-task thinkers and talkers needing snatches of breath—a mind on several tracks. It could be a gift to help us hold onto women friends and keep track of children, or even lively canine pets, who dart and race through the world exploring recklessly, in their developing years and beyond. It’s like having antennae.

As we evolve, and gender roles lose their grip, men and fathers might develop this capacity, though I suspect not to the same breathy degree.

Godde the Spirit breathes in us, in each one differently, as any sensitive deity would.

2014.05.11 Divine Mothering, Psalm 23

In honor of Mother’s Day and the mothering nature of Godde’s spirit—tender and bold—in all things, I share this beautiful prayer psalm written by Bobby McFerrin, vocalist and poet, born 1950.  By mothering I mean that capacity given to all humanity to hold close, to nurture, to guide and guard, empower, and to feed.

Julian of Norwich, mystic and saint, wrote of Jesus Christ thus: “Jesus, our beloved mother, who feeds us with his most precious body and blood. . .”


McFerrin wrote this version of the psalm and dedicated it to his own mother.  You can hear him chant it on YouTube (google his name of course:)—or click:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9fzWq-d8jU    I promise you it will make you weep.


The 23rd Psalm
By Bobby McFerrin

The Lord is my Shepard, I have all I need,
She makes me lie down in green meadows,
Beside the still waters, She will lead.

She restores my soul, She rights my wrongs,
She leads me in a path of good things,
And fills my heart with songs.

Even though I walk, through a dark & dreary land,
There is nothing that can shake me,
She has said She won't forsake me,
I'm in her hand.

She sets a table before me, in the presence of my foes,
She anoints my head with oil,
And my cup overflows.

Surely, surely goodness & kindness will follow me,
All the days of my life,
And I will live in her house,
Forever, forever & ever.

Glory be to our Mother, & Daughter,
And to the Holy of Holies,
As it was in the beginning, is now & ever shall be,
World, without end. Amen.

2014.02.16 THANK YOU

                 

                         

=     THANK YOU LOVE


Unless you’re six and perfectionistic about your large misshapen letters, then it takes a minute to write a thank-you note to your grandparents for your Christmas gift.

It takes even less than a minute for your grandparents to read your missive, and the rest of a swiftly aging lifetime to re-read it and inscribe it on their hearts.

My mother hounded me as a kid about writing my thank-you notes to my grandparents after a birthday or Christmas. I thought it was stupid, since I had already thanked them on the phone when they called.

My note was especially hard for my paternal grandparents, because, from birth to about ten, they gave me government savings bonds. When I was old enough to pick a silver pattern at Tiffany's, they gave me one piece of silverware in my pattern with my initials on each piece every birthday and every Christmas. The forks and knives came first, followed by teaspoons, soup spoons, and butter knives. 

As soon as I learned basic math, I figured out that to accumulate a whole set of 12 place settings, each set with 5 pieces of the most basic silverware @ the rate of 2 pieces a year, one for a birthday and one for Christmas, it would take over 30 years to complete my set. By then I'd be an old woman of forty; plus, the completion would happen only if my grandparents didn’t die before my set was complete, which they did.

All my careful calculations aside, I still wrote my thank-you notes every year. I never figured out ways to make my notes creative, or even enthusiastic. Thank you, I thought, didn't seem enough.

I think my parents, or an aunt, completed my set eventually, save some soup spoons and two dessert forks. After I was married I did use my good silver at holidays and to entertain, an activity I do not do well and avoided if possible.

Today my set sits in a lined silver chest where it stays more or less free of tarnish. It is beautiful. I don’t use it much any more. I’m about the age my grandparents were when they died. I hope one of my grandchildren will love and use my set.

My maternal grandmother was widowed and gave gifts that she, a prize seamstress, had made. I loved the specialized clothes she made for my favorite doll, Lucille. Those notes were easy.

One year an aunt sent each member of our family a single place mat, one of a matching set. We each had to write a note for our single mat.

Thank-you notes today from our grandchildren, sometimes two on a note, some in pencil and some boldly in ink, are more precious than a phone call or an email. I have a couple of samples.

“Dear Grampy and Grammy, Thank you soooo much for the sleeping bag. I sleep with it every night  they are so comfy. Everyone has been asking me where I got it. and also thank you sooo much for friendly’s (where we took them for ice cream).  Love   Her name in cursive.  See you soon”  Bold flower illustration in purple and signed by her two brothers, six and three, who also got bags.

“Dear grammy and grampy, I love the gift cards that you got me. I am planning to use them wisely. thank you.  love, ” Big smiley face illustration.

As they get older the notes are the same with a little more formality and content, and usually a small open circle to dot the i’s (girls). Then they include some reference to our “thoughtfulness” and maybe a sentence hoping we too had a Merry Christmas. And one teen super-shopper described the outfit she had already bought: “Thank you for the card. I bought a really cute outfit at Forever 21 that I love. Love you guys!” Some say “I love you,” and some have xxx and ooo.

They write to both of us, but Dick’s biological grandchildren put “Grampy” or “Grampy Sim” first, followed by “Grammy” or "Grammy Lyn.” My biological grandchildren put my name first. This tiny sensitivity may be on parental advice, but I don’t think so. They are all naturally good-hearted—not so easy to remain so with second marriages. I remember one of them asked, when she was about seven and trying to make sense of the family flow chart, whether her grandmother’s second husband had first been married to me, her father’s second wife?  In other words was there a swap? 

We adore every single one and all of these small and growing souls and, if all goes well, by next summer we will have our twelfth, six girls and six boys. 

We keep our thank-you notes in a basket for a long time. The children have no idea what these love- notes mean to us.

Thank + you = two words. They are as essential to the work of Godde as are the famous “three little words.”