2025.06.08 PENTECOSTAL BIBLICAL DISSONANCE, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

If the Holy Spirit is anything it is full of hot air!  

William Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur Georgia, reminded us all that if the Bible is anything it is off key and filled with dissonance. 

Personally, this is precisely why I do trust the Bible, and its many translations, to leave room for me in it. I can always squeeze my perspectives in, because I do not take every word literally, ipsissima verba, though I take every word seriously.  

Women who experience a call to the sacramental ministry of priest are organized and have been lobbying for ordination in the RC Church for many years, are still hopeful, and still waiting, and still failing to understand precisely why their gender disqualifies them from ordained ministry.

I was at a grandson's college graduation recently. There were many women who have served in executive positions sitting on the platform. 

I also remember the politics and the pressures for a female presidency way back in the 1960s—at an all-women's college no less!!! 

Now I live with my husband at a residential retirement community. The entire administrative staff is made up of women. Let me say that a leadership team that is exclusively female is ALSO not the best model. 

Effective leadership is not either-or, or both-and, regarding gendered pronouns, but rather, it is according to vocational qualifications, educational and experiential qualifications, training, and yes, a deep inner calling, some of us would identify as divinely inspired—none of it bound by gender. 

Thank you, Holy Spirit!  

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.  

My "Racism"—Anecdotal History. Part Sixteen. Living Into Immanence.

Today is Sunday, and we priest spouses read and prayed and broke bread together. When I read aloud yet without a congregation, I sink into the text. I envision and dramatize it. Today I read the familiar story in II Kings about the Shunammite widow and the prophet Elisha. In short, the wealthy widow who had often offered the wandering prophet hospitality, now all but scoffed at the idea that she might need something to repay her generosity. I’m fine, she said. (How many times do we say that when we know it is not quite true?)

Elisha, however, is compulsive and insists on recompense. She is cheeky, calls Elisha’s prophetic bluff, and boldly tells him not to mess with her In God’s name, Elisha pushes his luck. The women gets pregnant, bears a son, loves him like crazy and of course he dies. (I say "of course" because biblical stories always take treacherous turns.) The mother, in a raging sorrow, chases after Elisha. “Did I ask you for a son, O prophet? Did I not tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?’ ”

You would think Elisha being a bit of an amateur, would give up, but no, he carries it to extremes. He ends up stretching his warm body onto the son’s cold dead body—twice. Like any good miracle it works out against all odds. The story shot me back to a time in my life when I felt like the Shunammite.


Scene XLVIII.  Sinking In

I’d experienced the thrill of pushing life into the world with the force of my uterus—my womb alive/creating. Childbirth had reconnected me with God in my flesh—immanent in a forceful, profoundly painful, fruitful way. I had children to love. The sprawling blossoming lives of my four children kept me alive as I pursued the God I knew as a child, in my children, and now I needed more—for myself.

I entered a decade of death—my youngest sister died in 1979; the parish priest and my chief supporter left; Dad died in 1983; my divorce from my husband of twenty years was finalized in 1983; I had suffered rejection in the ordination process in the Episcopal church in 1978 and 1981.

My chosen vocational course was left in a shambles of doubt, my self-love dwindling, and my soul trembling with fear and rage. I had no idea who I was, where I would go, who I could love. Many people in grief lose their grip on their connection with faith or God or theology, but— paradoxically or ironically or both—mine strengthened. I continued to pursue God’s identity with foolish yet honest greed as if I could contain, possess, ground, or at least secure Divinity.  

How odd that my frantic search for God would be my anti-racism training—or part of it anyway.

Scene XLIX. Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit

“The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God . . .”  (I Cor. 2:10b)  This phrase leapt off the thin crinkly page of my overused Bible. It was a phrase from  St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. I engaged with this passage because it was central to a course I was taking,  and because it contained a spirituality that ran deep—as deep as the very soul of God Godself. Paul’s teaching went on and on as Paul does, but my grabby soul latched onto this one phrase as salvation.  

The course was offered by a favorite professor, Luke Johnson. It was  a journal course on experiential theology with no required reading, so students flocked to it. “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit” based its premise on the biblical phrase that had hooked me. I was ready to let the Spirit run wild. I was running wild by then, too. Was I led by the Spirit or was the Spirit leading me? To me these felt different. I never found out—exactly.

We heard lectures on big, fat, unmanageable theological words— grace, holy, faith, sin, idolatry, prayer, possessions, sexuality and gender, anger, freedom, truth—then wrote our own experiences of these ideas.

I had to let go of the tyranny of my intellect. I couldn’t think my way out of this, so I wrote and it hurt.

Scene L. The Organizing Power of the Holy: Life Narrative.

“God is in me from my beginning.” That was my first sentence. I elaborated a bit on  immanence, but then I suddenly wrote: “I am early aware that God in me is hard on me.” What? If this Spirit searched into the depths of God as if by torch and searchlight, then there seemed no escape from this Spirit—even for God. I wanted such intimacy and distrusted my worth. I wanted to know once again that I mattered in the flesh. Where was Holy? Luke said that the Holy had organizing power. Organizing? I needed internal organization. I just hadn’t counted on such a right-brain process.

Without warning I wrote about black Carol Lee and the painful compromise I’d made to exclude her from my birthday party, because I wanted it to be at our racist white beach club. Was that holy? I wrote: “Part of the little-girl-God in me dies. Is God black?”  

Memory: My second daughter Jill had a horrifying sledding accident when she was about eight. I had left the three oldest children with my parents and taken the baby to visit friends in lower Connecticut. Jill and her cousin were thrilled with the snow. Jill slid on an ice patch and ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. Screaming and covered with blood, she ran back to the house for help, her frightened cousin right behind her, calling, “Jill, are you all right?” Jill was not all right. When she got to the house Ether opened the door and sprang into action at the sight. She grabbed Jill up into her strong arms, got towels, yelled for my father who came running. He drove as fast as he dared to the hospital, and Ether sat in the back seat holding Jill . She pressed her head to stanch the bleeding. Jill later told me: “She held my head so hard against her body, like she was holding me together.” At the hospital a brilliant plastic surgeon named Dr. Platt stitched Jill’s face up and saved her eyes.

Ether was black. Dr. Platt was a woman. Is God black and female? Yes.

The memory about Jill’s accident came to me when I was writing my journal chapter on Faith: Obedience and Creative Fidelity. We were supposed to focus on Jesus, but Abraham came to mind. In the story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac in order to prove his faith God stopped Abraham from faithful obedience—just in time. God loved Abraham more than his obedient faith, and Abraham loved God unlimitd by obediential demands.

I wrote: “God is going against himself in this request and call. God has asked Abraham to disobey him, to choose against the promise. But God himself is more important to Abraham than God’s promise. How about that? God is not defined by his promise!”  Professor Luke wrote in the margins: “Yes. Good.”

Was I getting God? Did I have the Holy? My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. My daughter Jill helped me again. She by now was seventeen and expressing angry feelings, telling me she did not feel loved. When I asked what she wanted she said she wanted to go see our family therapist with just me. I felt afraid, but we went and Jill blurted out: “I feel second best. You value your church activities more than me.”  

I made explanations.The therapist invited Jill to keep repeating her feelings. I was locked up inside my own fears and wrote: “She was hurt, and I was getting a bandaid. I couldn’t open myself to her wound without sacrificing my faithful obedience to my own “good mother” illusion.” I had made an idol of my motherhood. The ordination committee had told me that I could not be a good mother and a good priest at once. A “dual vocation” they called it. I wrote: “In fact, what blocked me in that process (ordination) was the same thing that was so painfully blocking me with Jill. I had made an idol of my motherhood. . . . I could not be creatively faithful to what was my real love as a parent to Jill, because I was being destructively faithful to my self as a perfectly caring and loving mother.”  
                                   *  *  *  * 

To be a mother is no more or less holy than to be a priest. All I had to do was choose, I thought. To be black or a woman was no more or less holy than to be white. But I couldn’t choose my sex or the color of my skin. Could God? More tears, more years, my search continued, but for today right now, this.
            
    The grace of God cannot be fixed
    or fastened to a sanctioned spot;
    when we move as the Spirit moves,
    there is no place where God is not.  
                 Michael Hudson, text. Doxology/Eighth Tune

2020.01.12 The God Between Us. A Spirituality of Relationships

I had this idea some years ago: we think that the space in between us is empty, but it is really crackling with energy. That energy pulls for connection. That energy is the one Christians call Holy Spirit. That energy is like an electric current. I call it the God Between, pulling for healing, healing with which we can cooperate should we chose to trust it. I wrote about my idea.

The God Between connects us through Word and Sacrament, through a tiny blade of green grass, through the grin of a child, over distances our bodies cannot traverse but for which our souls deeply yearn.  

When I met with couples for counseling, I invited them to focus on their relationship, the space between them, the space we called their relationship, a relationship on which each depends for spiritual nourishment  How do they take care of its life, tend it?  I’d tell them: “Your relationship is the client/patient here. We are here together to examine the relationship." They’d either flee, thinking me insane, or become creatively involved, with me and their trust in God, in examining what each one brought to the shared space between them: regular rage? icy cubes? nothing?A relationship into which each one dumps constant anger, for example, begins to look like roadkill—malnutritious, if not downright toxic to all parties.

To my delight, my current publisher has just brought my out-of-print 2001 book, The God Between Us. A Spirituality of Relationships, back into circulation. It contains midrash stories based on biblical relationships. It is available on Amazon or from publisher, Wipf and Stock. What others said:

""This work is absolutely unique, and potentially radically transformative for any reader who takes its premise to heart. Rev. Brakeman proposes a way of listening to biblical narrative. . . that brings the contemplative reader a fresh awareness of how the divine is present to us in the 'between' of vital human relationships."" --John McDargh, PhD, Boston College, Department of Theology
 
""A skilled weaver of stories, Lyn Brakeman offers a creative and challenging approach to the Great Mystery of divine and human love. Her use of words is lively and disarming. . .her refreshing perspective on familiar biblical stories draws the reader into unexpected depths. There is much in this book for prayer and pondering."" —Margaret Guenther, author of The Practice of Prayer
 
""Lyn Brakeman is without a peer as an imaginative wordsmith in making biblical characters come alive in the fullness of their humanity while wrestling with powerful issues that are of contemporary concern. By her poetic description and beautifully crafted dialogue, she captures the loving truths of interpersonal relationships and human struggles amidst the presence of the God Between Us.”"—Merle Jordan, ThD, AAPC Diplomate, Emeritus Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Boston University School of Theology, Author of Reclaiming Your Story: Family History and Spiritual Growth. (Sadly, Professor Jordan died in 2018)

2019.06.09 Who Is a Mystic?

Most people would say “Not me!”

Pentecost is the wildest, freest, most voluminous occasion and season of all seasons spiritual. It marks the biblical story of Creation’s awareness of the presence of a Holy Spirit that powers, let’s say, divine activism. GO! She travels far and wide, probing the depths and sowing seeds of hope, healing, and divine Goodness and Love. She/He is gender-free and bright green, passionate red, eye-popping gold and blue-all-over—a genuine Mystic, wisely irrational. 

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes about the Kabbalah Jewish mystical tradition:  “I think what our generation seems to be living through is the realization that rationalism is only part of the answer. I think, I’m not the first one to notice this, that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were perfectly rational decisions. So there’s this sense that religion has to be more than rationalism. Any mysticism offers—it says, sort of like in the corner, ‘Psst, hey kid how would you like a direct experience of the divine? Would that help your religious life?’ A lot of people discover that they’re mystics after all when they’re given that offer.” 

Rabbi Kushner’s definition of a mystic: “A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.” 

I like that definition better than the one that insists on a direct experience of the divine—not because it is more rational, far from it, but because it makes room for the immanence of the transcendent—the divine within us, encouraging and empowering us to trust that hidden unity.

Kushner is a long time student of the Kabbalah. He was influenced by a Jewish historical figure named Gershom Scholem (1918-1982). Gershom rescued this tradition from obscurity.  The spirit of Kabbalah wraps teachings in teachings, wisdom in wisdom, life within life—analogically, like a Torah scroll wraps round itself. Kushner is the Emanu-El scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, and the author of many books.
As a young child I experienced an invisible, inaudible, listening Presence I called God. I chattered. God listened. I learned that I mattered. You could say my words wrapped within The Word. I erred and strayed, but I never forgot the mark that experience left on me. It left me with that “gnawing suspicion” Kushner described: Good lies concealed in any chaos.

Every morning about 4 a.m., the birds begin their day-song before day breaks. They are natural anticipatory mystics, sensing, trusting, and proclaiming the light before it comes. Seeds planted in fertile soil do the same. Tree roots are the same: they hide under layers of concrete sidewalk, yet they push through and grow! GO. So also for tiny seeds of kindness planted in trusting desperate souls. Lions know when to leap and monkeys when to race up trees. GO! Jesus knew when to shut up and when to GO!

In the Old Testament, God spoke directly to prophets who conveyed divine messages—mostly about ways people can help God by listening and looking, especially in the darkest corners of misery to see where God needed help to create life anew. Imitate God, they said. Imitate Jesus the Christ, Christians say. Imitate Holy Spirit! GO!

When the prophetic tradition died out, people feared there would be no more direct Voice of God. Would God be silent? No. God continued to communicate in a new way called the bath qol.  It means “the daughter of a voice”—not inferior to what prophets experienced but more inward/subjective, far-reaching. For Christians, this voice is carried by the Holy Spirit. It is what Jesus heard within himself at his baptism: You are my son, the beloved. GO!

I have heard this bath qol seven times in my life, mostly posing challenging questions, such as what in the world are you thinking of here? These queries were personal wakeup calls for subjective clarity. 

BUT twice, God’s bath qol was more direct.
    -I was in deep distress after being turned down in the ordination process. I had run out of words completely, maybe like Jonah sitting dejectedly under the sheltering plant God provided and Jonah failed to appreciate. Or Elijah sitting outside his cave in misery. Both discerned the bath qol telling them: GO! This is the same voice Mary Magdalene felt within her vision at the empty tomb of grief. GO! To me God said: “No one can take this away from you, Lyn.” This stark truth was confrontive not comforting.  I heard: GO! 
    -And once again when I was fretting about ordination, Godde’s bath qol said:“Lyn I don’t care if you’re ordained.” How rude. I got it. GO! I kept going, unresolved.

Do such experiences make me a mystic?  I don’t know. But I can tell you that I do have the annoying tendency Kushner identified as mystical: "the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.” 

I say “annoying” in part because this tendency annoys my empirical beloved husband who accuses me of missing the obvious ingredients that make things look impossible. I do miss them, but that’s often because I trust there’s something unitive, transformative, gloriously hidden, and emergent—if I can only trust the long slow work of God and my own grit to GO— no matter what.

In sum, I bet there are more mystics in this world than not—a few are clothed in human flesh.

2018.04.08 The Depressed King and the Deformed Musician

What do you do when you feel insane, trapped in the endless circle of your own mind? Sing, of course.

Here’s a story for you. It was part of a sermon delivered by the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates on Holy Tuesday, 2018. The bishop was speaking to the clergy of his diocese, many of whom were feeling exhausted, preoccupied, and some defeated, by the weight of their vocation at this most important time of the Christian year.

King Felipe V of Spain ruled in the early 1700s. He suffered from mental illness that caused him to howl into the night, become incontinent, play obsessively with clocks, and often go mute for weeks. Against all reason he was not deposed.

Carlo Farinelli was an Italian-born singer who was castrated at the age of ten in order to preserve his beautiful voice. Men like Farinelli were called castrati. Although cruel measures were used, the sound of castrati singing had depth and power and a pure, genderless, ethereal sound.

By one of those coincidences I like to call God-incidences, Farinelli the castrato and King Felipe the insane found something unique together. Farinelli was persuaded by Queen Isabella to come to Spain to sing for the tormented king. The king received Farinelli because he sensed a certain bond in circumstance—that inner sense we often dismiss but that sometimes turns out to be a nudge from the Holy Spirit, the Great Connector.  (She does know how to do Her healing work!)

The two men conversed:
    King: “We were both made [who we are] against our will. It is no more natural for me to be a king than it is for you to be what you are.  Both of us have been ‘robbed of normality.’”  Both men, concludes the King, have unreasonable, impossible expectations heaped upon them – by their families, by the public, even by God. “You have a world of subjects – as I do.  Mine were given to me by God, though.  I wish I were a pagan.”
    Farinelli:  “Why?”
    King:  “Many gods are fun; one is a nightmare. … He keeps us on a tight rein.”

The relationship that began in mutual brokenness evolved as healing. When Farinelli sang, the music penetrated the king’s madness. It gradually drew him out of his isolation and dark despondency—re-centered, restored, reconciled him to the world around him, even to the impossibility of his vocation. The king called it “the music of the spheres.”  As for Farinelli, he sang the king to his senses, himself to pride of purpose.

There is a young girl in the neighborhood who stands alone waiting for the school bus to arrive. While she waits she sings—to herself, to the world, to no one, to God—rain or shine, she sings. It’s not the quality of her voice, tonality or atonality, that makes her song beautiful. It’s that her music, for its own sake, evokes truth, love, soul, and beauty. Such odd holiness, eh?

P.S.  It was the patriarchal politics and religion of the King’s day that kept him on a tight leash —not Godde.

2016.05.29 The God Between Us: Interinanimator

The Pentecost beat goes on—and on, longest season of the church year. It’s Hers, the Holy Spirit's—all of it. (The Nicene Creed was written using the pronoun “he” for the Spirit, but revisions have toppled this unappealing three-men-on-top arrangement—to the good of humanity and divinity.)

I wrote a book about this Spirit back in 2001: The God Between Us: A Spirituality of Relationships. The God Between is energy, alive and vibrant in the spaces between us, relational spaces we imagine to be empty but which are really crackling with divine connective energy, pulling for healing and wholeness in a relationship or set of relationships.

GBU was published by Augsburg in 2001 and contains midrashim: stories about all kinds of relationships in the Bible—mother/daughter: Herodias and her dancing daughter, Salome, two close men: David and Jonathan, friends: Queen Esther and a palace eunuch, Adam and Eve, and my favorite story of all, “Idle Tale”: about the group of women who come at dawn to the tomb where Jesus has been buried. They come to anoint his body for burial. 

Now you don’t imagine that all these women were silent, do you? They were women. They talked!—with humor and varying perspectives, about how they will  get into the tomb, and further, how they will convince the men about the truth of what God has revealed to them—mere women, Godde help them. She does.

The principal character of the Bible isn’t God or humanity, it’s their relationship. They fall in love, they break up, they come back together. That’s the biblical pattern.
When couples came to see me for counseling, they usually arrived, each with a sharp, invisible finger pointed at the other: J’accuse! I listened to all the flak, trying not to take sides—not so easy. I could usually tell which relationships were going to make it, and they were not always the ones in which both people reiterated, “We love each other.” There was always a BUT, either before or after the love. Its volume and size told me how much work we all had to do to find the buried “love.” It was spade work.

As soon as I could, I told the couple that neither one of them was the client here. This was a show stopper. I told them that the client was their relationship—wounded and in need of healing.  The deal was that we all would work together on it. We made playful metaphors of their relationship. What did it look like?  Some relationships were suffering from too much distance—malnourished, a starving child. Others looked like roadkill, beaten down and bleeding because too much anger and blame was dumped upon them all the time. Some were simply lop-sided:one side deflated as if one person had stopped holding up their end—flat tire. Both people let go: orphaned. 

It helped if the couple had a sense of humor. It also helped if they were willing to pray for their relationship, rather than simply for self or other to change, i.e. be more this or that—or less.

My book is out of print, but my idea is not dead. Recently, I was thrilled to see it repackaged by no less than an Oxford scholar, John Hare, theology professor at Yale, in an essay: “The Third Life: The Life that is Between Us.” He wrote about unity in Christ and cited a John Donne (17th century metaphysical poet) poem called “Ecstasy”  in which love with one another interinanimates two souls. Now that’s no typo; it’s my type of word.

Hare writes: “The central idea here lies in this word which Donne made up, ‘interinanimates,’ which means, ‘puts a soul, or anima, into, in, the space between, inter, two people, inter-in-animates, so that there is not just my life and your life but the life that is between us, and this third life is stronger, abler than either of our lives on its own.” (Italics mine)

I was delighted to see my God Between again—reincarnated and clothed with a grand new word: interinanimator.  My couples would cringe at such abstraction, of course. They would say that their therapist had gone nuts. They would be right, and we would have a hearty interinanimating laugh together—thanks to the God Between Us.

2016.04.03 Playing To Play

We went to a grandson’s hockey game recently. At first we both groaned at rushing off on a Saturday a.m. to sit in the cold clime of a hockey arena to watch enthusiastic 6-8 year olds skate with grace and fury, and push a puck around with equal zeal.

Ours was #137, the only way to identify him behind the gear. He is the smaller of our two grandsons who play ice hockey. 

Ice hockey rankings for kids are by age group and metaphorical size. This lad, Thomas, is in the youngest age group and is a mite at age 8. Next year he will be a squirt, then graduate to peewee then bantam. God knows what could follow that?  Here he is with the smallest (in size) and youngest (6) player on his team.

Another grandson, Will, started hockey when he was about Thomas’s age. Will is now 13 in pee wee status. He chose this sport over others, because he is a fast and lithe skater (smart), and because this sport has the most protective gear (also smart)!!—also, the most expensive gear, his dad notes.

When we went to one of Will’s squirt games, I winced and ducked and feared for his precious young life. Hockey has a reputation for violence—part of hockey DNA. I found out later that there are well enforced rules about blocking tactics called checking. There are eleven different ways, some illegal, to check your opponent’s movements—none of them verbal. How fierce is that? But I’m pretty sure this boy will not aspire to the Boston Bruins. Here he is #3 (nice spiritual number) playing a championship game.

When we went to Thomas’s game, I noticed some girls playing. Oh well, we wanted equality, didn't we?  The team playing against Thomas’s was an all-girls team. The players were from many different towns in Massachusetts. I was impressed. These girls were aggressive, and some of them looked to be well over mite size. I knew they were legally sized, though. 

These mites, boys and girls all played their souls out. The girl goalie had perfected the art form of splaying her hips to simply sit on the puck as it came her way. Legal or not, it worked. I knew women had broad hips for a reason! The boys usually beat this plucky all-girls’ team, but this day the girls won at the very last minute by 2 points The boys’ team had even “left an empty net” so they could release another skater, the goalie, to make that one more goal for a tie or a win. But the girls prevailed and a whoop went up.

I felt conflicted. I'd rooted for Thomas’s team of course. Yet I also felt happy to see an all-female team win.

Our boy was a bit pouty, but they all shook mitts as they exited the ice rink.  “It’s only a game” doesn’t console a child whose team has lost the game. Neither does: “You played your best.”

Suddenly I realized, in a raw moment of truth, how small my own gender agenda really was. All these children were good skaters, earnest and honest players, full of joy at winning and deflation at losing. They’d all be back next week, eager to play again, renewed and refreshed and full of the exact same quotient of energy to contribute to the game and this team as they had this week.

I knew this to be true for each individual player, as well as for the human spirit in general, when Thomas said to his dad, “When’s the next practice?”  That’s a win.

2014.11.02 A Roman Catholic Priest Speaks Out—of Turn:)

To hear a “silenced” RC priest speak out was, to be honest, a pleasure. Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist Father and a native of Galway, Ireland, is on a speaking tour in the US, having refused to be silent about reforms in his Church. The group that arranges such reformist speakers is called Catholic Tipping Point. This event was sponsored by three organizations: Dignity, Call to Action, and Spirit of Life Organization.

In 2012, the Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith was “unhappy” with Flannery’s views, chiefly on the origins of the all-male priesthood, in part because of economics but mostly because of institutional misogyny and the necessity for collective discernment on matters of faith and morals. He declined to recant, was forbidden to minister as a priest, and silenced. His non-confirmity is, he said, “a question of conscience,” the title of his new book.

Jean Marchant, a  woman Roman Catholic priest, introduced Flannery—with joy in her voice. I felt the lilt and remembered the joy so many of us felt when our Episcopal church finally deigned to ordain women as priests in 1976. We are a smaller and more limber institution, but, believe me, the issue of women’s place in the church is not settled. Women do not enjoy equity.

Tony Flannery spoke for an hour with Irish charm, humor, and little bombast. He is the founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, which, he quipped, is “not exactly al-qaeda.”  He feels sad about what has happened to him— but not defeated. The Spirit will be alive in the Church if we get certain basic items understood, he told his listeners (perhaps 100 people, most RCs, I’m sure.)

Flannery believes that two very basic modus operandi must change in order for other things, such as women’s ordination and the rethinking of Catholic teachings on sex, will flow from these changes. They are:
       1) Centralized authority: decisions can be handed down without processes of discernment. “When the church centralizes too much it loses its ability to listen. No conversation is possible. Centralized authority is the scourge of the Church.” He called the infallibility doctrine a “millstone” for popes who are, after all, human men.

 

(No woman can be chosen for this office, but I do wonder if she would accept it anyway. I think women in church politics will slowly change the way things operate.)

       2) The Magisterium: Who exactly IS this magisterium, this teaching authority? The Vatican II Council reminded the Church that this authority is not just the Vatican’s, but rather the sensus fidelium, that is, the conscience of faithful people. Flannery cited the way Pope Francis presided over the recent Synod of Bishops, asking for discussion, input, feedback and discernment. Francis encouraged speaking without fear and offered his own willingness to listen, even though the final decision will be his. This is a conciliar model. Flannery called this “hugely important” and an openness for the voice of the Spirit.

Flannery said he wasn’t sure of many things about God, but said: “I am sure of the  Holy Spirit—or we wouldn’t have a Francis.”

I believe that women hold up half the sky, over half the church, and half the divine image. (Genesis 2:27)

[I find it ironic that the originator of the idea that women hold up half the sky was Mao Tse-Tung, First Chairman of the Communist Party in China, and a dictator who, despite his progressive reforms, also oversaw many human rights abuses.]

Nothing, and no one, is pure. AMEN.