I ALWAYS THOUGHT. . .BUT Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 01/19/2025

I think too much sometimes. It could be obsessing, as in racy mind, or it could be careful concern about some important topic, such as why am I so old, or am I just too old even to think about being old? My wise mind wondered whether Jesus performed miracles. Or was he a phony? Was all this adoration/adulation a hoax? 

Today I am obsessing, gently of course, about the utter foolishness of the adolescent Jesus proudly showing off his divine gift as a “miracle” worker. There had been rumors in this messiah-driven culture. Who would God send? Could this gifted boy be Messiah? Save Israel? Perform magic? Do something no one else could to make Israel shine?  Such a messiah, they all knew, might also threaten their own security—social and political, not to mention spiritual. By spiritual I mean their own deep-down feelings of absolute security, superiority. Being Messiah would do it.

*  *  *  *

The Reverend Professor Dr. Kamal Farah led our tour in Israel in 2012. He surprised all of us who were hungry-for-truth as literal as possible to secure Divinity-on-earth: who, why, where, what, how and whose? 

The professor asked what this story was about deep down? We held our breath. This story is about Mary, the mother of Jesus. What? Our collective and well trained patriarchal egos stiffened, ready to dispute this atrocity. My natural curiosity perked up. 

According to the social etiquette of first century Palestine, the host or hostess of the party was responsible for its organization, its etiquette and its manners. Mary was a mother who, like any mother, wanted her son Jesus to shine. She knew him well. When he failed to comply she drew him aside and told him the proper behavior for a would-be messiah. BINGO!  He turned to his mother, offered some resistance, as in “Come on, Mama, I don’t wanna do it!” Mama prevailed however and obedient son turned about, told the wine caterer of this party that the host, his Mama, was upset because they were about to run out of WINE. Jesus called for more wine, and presto the wine kegs filled up—plenty for all. 

I love such impudence and Mary’s firm maternal authority. No mention of God the Father. I don't care much about the water-to-wine miracle, but rather about the greater miracle that this adolescent boy listened to his mother and obeyed. To be true to the laws of proper hospitality, guests come first. This was a woman’s clarity and triumph. The church tradition thinks of it as Jesus’s miracle.  

It is about nothing more, or less, than honoring hospitality for its own gracious sake. Divine. 

2022.02.19 Transfigured? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I am attracted to words, and today to  words that begin with with the prefix trans. Trans means across.  Transfigure means to move across, as the sun moves across the sky, crossing over the earth and thereby causing the earth’s light to shine. As its light passes it changes, transforms, enhances, illuminates, enlightens the whole landscape. This process is a transfiguration. I ponder trans word, transmogrify, which adds an almost magical dimension to my trans word games ie. a cucumber becomes a pickle. 

All those who witness trans movements feel changed in the moment.

There is a moment we Christians call THE Transfiguration, a time when Jesus chose the big three disciples (Peter, James, John) to accompany him up to the mountain called Tabor as he prayed. (NOTE: Israel is hilly, full of mounts, hillocks, rises, but not huge mountains like The Rockies or Giant Mountain in the Adirondacks in NY)

Imagine that you are one of those chosen disciples. You’re pretty exhausted as you trudge and climb, but you follow, imagining that something may actually come of this futile climb. You have not been forced to come on this journey, but you come—because Jesus invited you. I’d follow out of curiosity and my pride at being a confidante of Jesus whose light I would soon see for real and feel inside myself, for myself. The other two said they also saw Moses and Elijah in that light, but you didn’t, and Jesus seemed to be clueless about it. He just hustled you all down the mountain and continued with the ministry of listening love for all in need. 

Would you follow the light you saw? I would dash home and write all about it as if it might vanish or be forgotten. Would you wonder what it meant? I would. I would never forget it whether I understood it or not, yet I would remember that it all had something to do with prayer. Others in time wrote it all up, and still others would build a lovely Christian Church at the top of Tabor for future pray-ers, because prayer is what connects us all to one another and to God. See?

Mountainous transfiguring grandeur alone is enough to sweep you up, out of your fears, out of your doldrums, for just a minute or ten? You can experience it spiritually without climbing, and even without a mountain. 

Some mornings I gaze at the usual daily scenery outside my bedroom window: lines of tall trees, clipped golfing greens in the background and a few cars grounded in the parking lot. And then I see movement. Birds of course as usual. But this day there are many birds, not swarming but gathering. I count eight. They perch all at once, close and separate, on different branches atop the highest trees. They sit completely still—immobilized. I sit still—posed, paralyzed. I do not reach for binoculars. I just stare. Suddenly, without sound or any detectable warning signal, the birds all take flight at once—in unison, off and gone, vanishing into the sky for the day. I have just witnessed the morning meeting of the birds.  

Why, in that moment, did I not grab for the binoculars? Why did I delay my own purposive daily routine? Why didn’t I even glance at my schedule, check for appointments, make phone calls, bustle about as I usually do?

I saw something slightly different from what I expected. I felt internally transfigured, transfixed. I had no thoughts at all, which tells me that my mind was blanked, halted, yanked away from its thrumming drumbeat of a task: managing my life’s agenda in time and space. And I was conscious. Don’t tell me trance, dissociative shock, fixation or day-dreaming absent-mindedness. Don’t even tell me it was definitely God. 

No. I have no idea what happened to me. None. I just know it was a trans moment, inexplicably mystical and quotidian at once. 

2022.04.17 Little Easters Everywhere. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/17/22

O God of Love

    so high above

       so deep beneath

           you never sleep

                you always keep

                    your heat in beat

Your love of LIfe’s

alive in strife

You love, therefore I am.

I love, therefore You are. 

                   Lyn G. Brakeman

Bovine Salvation

Sturdy Ms Methane

staunch in her pose

She’s not vain

Just full of Methane

See how she stares

Her soft eyes engage

She’s gassing the planet

In peril it stands—yet

We’re changing her repast

De-scenting her gasses

She’s still very well fed

And we’ve nothing to dread

For the gasses she passes 

are now Methane-free. 

Lyn G. Brakeman

  

Does anyone imagine that God does not have emotions? I bet it is hard to imagine God’s own feelings, especially fear or anger, if you’re not in touch with your own. Still, we have for so long worshiped a Divinity so dominantly transcendent, so consistently almighty, and so exclusively masculine, that we really don’t know God at all. 

The Creator God of the Bible creates natural wonders of Life itself with excessive prodigality and excitement. This God has creative power and shares it radically with all Creation—natural world and human. God wants it all to thrive, and adorns it all with the freedom to do just that. 

We, according to ancient story, chose to do the one thing God knows will make trouble for us for the whole rest of our existence: we exercised our freedom to know both good and evil, and to choose either way. We exposed ourselves to evil as well as good, to moral as well as immoral. And thus this little mythic story explains why we have been at odds with ourselves, each other, and God forever and ever, amen. It takes courage to make choices, and more courage to undo or reset those choices that turn out not to be so good. It takes courage to suffer choices we do not make. 

It takes prayer and serenity and wisdom and love to realize that the binary God seemed to set up is much more subtle, much more demanding and much more rewarding, precisely because it is NOT a true binary. There is no such thing as a purely good choice OR a purely evil one. This, I believe, is why God Creator warned the Edenic couple to leave the fruit of that tree alone—and why they could not leave it alone. 

This little story never happened. This little story always happen. Outside the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem there is this giant sculpture. 

 

The wind was fresh, the earth was young,

the scent of life was everywhere

the garden lay a fruitful dream

and God enjoyed the evening air

Where are my loved? the Maker wooed.

The clay I shape and call by name?

The questions spread through stem and leaf,

but as God waited no one came. 

God’s loves were hiding, faces turned,

beyond the reach of breeze and Voice,

aware that sometime in the day

they’d made a dark, far-reaching choice.

The question lingers in the leaf

in barren branch and shrinking pond—

Where are my loves? The Maker calls,

still trusting clay may yet respond. 

Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle

* * *  *  

A wise old owl says: Now, my dears. Do hoot and cheer and never fear, I’m always here.  

Another wise owl stays far aloft. I look out for danger and for prey. I’m always here.

Both the guardian and the nurturer seek little easters everywhere. Both equally incarnate the Spirit of Love that simply never burns out. 

*  *  * *

EIN SOF

The first time I heard these words was on our 2012 trip to Israel—a two-week pilgrimage I shall never forget. It’s in my bones. It was sponsored by St. George’s College in East Jerusalem, led by tour guides who knew the land and the language in way that made it come alive. The course was called “The Palestine of Jesus” I shall never forget my experience there. I felt as if I’d walked right into the Bible. Ein sof is one of the phrases I learned there. It’s Hebrew to describe a mystical divinity I can’t possible explain, so I call it God before God—the infinite unknowable known or finite infinitude. You see, it makes no sense and yet we know it s presence. It come in Kairos time. God’s time or timing. 

No wonder sweet mortals went speechless when they experienced kairos. It does not submit to any containment or control. No wonder that before long we humans, failing to control Kairos, invented calendars and clock, for chronos, our own time and timing.

We watch a medical television sitcom, set in the busy ED in a big city hospital. Whenever a patient, despite heroic medical efforts dies, the doctors and nurses who have been working so hard suddenly get it. They all stop at once. One doctor calls it. God calls it simultaneously. 

“Time of death 13:30” says chronos. 

“Time of Life: 13:30” says kairos.  

Ein sof. 

 

2016.10.23 Dominus Flevit

As Christian women we are appalled by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's recorded remarks that disparage women and condone sexual assault. Such language cannot be dismissed as “locker room talk.” Mr. Trump must offer public contrition that fully acknowledges the seriousness and depravity of his actions.

The sin of misogyny has caused many of us to experience sexual assault or sexually abusive language that threatened our safety, dignity and well-being.

Christian leaders cannot condone such violent speech about women as a minor mistake or an innocent attempt to be “macho." These excuses teach our young people that such language is acceptable and do further harm to those who have been abused.

We urge all religious leaders to preach, teach and help their communities heal from the twin sins of sexual violence and misogyny. While we are disheartened by Mr. Trump's toxic words, we believe this moment presents an opportunity to teach our daughters and sons that they are loved, and to teach all Americans how to speak out against sexually violent language.
        -Rev Jennifer Butler, CEO, Faith in Public Life.


I signed this letter with little hesitation and then immediately wondered if I should have. Was it “Christian” to condemn another person? Oh well, I thought, it’s in line with the biblical prophetic tradition, and we all know that it’s okay to condemn the sin but not the sinner, don’t we?  Besides, I’m not Jesus.  Even as Lyn, I know that misogyny and the toxins it stokes—violence, rage, profound physical and spiritual pain, and social disorganization—are godless. 

One of the most poignant places we visited in 2012 when we went to Israel was the location at which Jesus is remembered in the New Testament as looking out over the beloved city Jerusalem and weeping. The site is a small chapel at the foot of the Mount of Olives with a dome shaped like a teardrop. Built in 1955 it's called Dominus Flevit: The Lord wept.

Luke’s gospel remembers it thus: “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!”  This lament may reflect the historical destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. A great political mess of contending parties—Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Tax Collectors, Samaritans, Zealots and Scribes—warred for primacy and authority in Jesus’s time. All of these spiritual and political streams buzzed in and about Jerusalem. Jesus was trying to recall their attention to God’s ways of justice, compassion and peace. No wonder he wept.

I weep too scanning the national scenario in the USA right now. I also rage. I’m a woman, and, like most women, I know the sting of misogyny. So does the woman who is running against many currents to be elected our next president.

“As it turned out, Clinton, who began her campaign intent on breaking the last barrier—the glass ceiling—has found her most compelling rationale in her own role as a barrier, a bulwark against the impossible alternative. As I was leaving our interview, she smiled, looked me in the eyes and left me with a casual reminder. ‘As I’ve told people,’ she said, ‘I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.’ ” (Mark Leibovich, “Her Way”, NY Times Sunday Magazine, October 16, 2016.)

Is it that dire? I don’t know, but some days it feels that way as the delusional scenario of individuals and groups “building proud towers which shall not reach to heaven . . .” (Hymn #573, Laurence Housman) unfolds.

Still, I’m not one to sit around. I’m powerless, not helpless. SO: I sign petitions like the one above. I pray with specificity. I order books for grandkids. I write to steady my convictions in hope.  I remember I am a Christian and  I remember dominus flevit.  Tomorrow I will vote for Hillary and get my little oval “I voted early” sticker with the American flag on it.

I'm voting for her because she is practiced and practical. Second, I'm voting for her because she has stood her ground and managed to avoid serious head bleeds from glass ceiling shards as she pokes through a barrier that needs breaking. Finally, I am voting for her because I am not afraid of her.

I am voting for her, because I bet, that behind the necessary defenses, she weeps.

2016.03.06 A Woman Unseated But Undaunted

Renée Rabinowitz, a lawyer with a PhD in educational psychology, is the plaintiff in a discrimination suit against El Al Airlines. Her experience of discrimination provides a test case for liberal advocacy groups dealing with disputes about religion and gender in Israel’s public places—including the wild blue yonder. In December Dr. Rabinowitz suffered the unpleasant experience of being asked to move her seat on a plane because an ultra-Orthodox Jewish male passenger did not want to sit next to a woman—for religious reasons. (New York Times, “The Saturday Profile”by  Isabel Kershner, 2/27/2016)

“Despite all my accomplishments—and my age (81) is also an accomplishment—I felt minimized . . . For me this is not personal. It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am an older woman, educated. I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?” 

Is having escaped the Nazis in Europe  as a child not sufficient credential to entitle Dr. Rabinowitz to honor, divine and human, forevermore, gender or no gender? With feminists I believe that the personal is political.

When we were in Israel in 2012 we noticed the ultra-Orthodox Jews, also called Haredi or Hasidic. They lived in cloistered communities yet stood out, mostly because of their dress: black suits/coats/long skirts, head coverings for women, and black fedora hats and long dreadlocks for the men. Ultra-Orthodox men hung out in clusters in public places and walked hurriedly, scurried you might say. We were instructed not to bother them or make fun of them, a bad habit that helped to keep Jerusalem boiling. I was obedient, but did gawk a bit.

God, according to Isaiah 66:2, refers to the Haredi: “But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, the one who trembles at my word.” (Haredi in Hebrew.)

Now I would not mind being honored in such a way by my God. I would even tremble. These religious people are as sincere as I am in wishing to please God and live in reverent humility. However, their culture of separatism is easily confused with elitism and seems the very opposite of right-sized humility. I’d respect modest dress codes but wouldn’t expect to be invited by a flight attendant to change my seat because my female gender was offensive.  

Dr. Rabinowitz is not alone in questioning such exclusions. The advocacy group needed her case to show that El Al had internalized the commandment, ‘I cannot sit next to a woman’. When any biblical mandate is internalized it gets under your skin, becomes unconscious—toxic within and dangerous from without. I am quite sure that it is no sin to be born a woman, although I can find that in holy writ.

Reading about this case, I thought of Rosa Parks, another woman unseated but undaunted, arrested in 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. Parks spearheaded the civil rights movement in Montgomery Ala. against racism and segregation. Racism and sexism are closely linked and both are matters of public safety and health, not to mention religious spirituality.  When President Obama unveiled Parks’ statue to stand in the Capitol building, he said:  “In a single moment with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world.  . . . She takes her rightful place among those who shape the nations course.”

One day there may be a statue of Dr. Rabinowitz  in Jerusalem where she moved from the U.S. about ten years ago. She says she is not anti-Haredi and one of her grandchildren is of that persuasion. “The idea of having a Haredi population is wonderful, as long as they don’t tell me what to do.” There are prejudices she does not like in her beloved land. The El Al flight attendant engaged the Haredi man in a conversation about the seat/gender issue. “The flight attendant treated me as if I was stupid,” Dr. Rabinowitz said, “but that’s a common problem in Israel if you don’t speak Hebrew. They assume they can put one over on you.”

Under pressure from lawyers, the airline offered a $200 discount on Dr. Rabinowitz’s next El Al flight. They argued that the flight attendant had explained the whole thing and assigned the plaintiff a “better” seat. Oy!

With time to ponder these things in her heart, Dr. Rabinowitz agreed to litigation. “This whole idea that you cannot sit next to a woman is bogus.” She cited orthodox scholarship to support her point of view.  “When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman? Our heroes in history were not modest little women.” Dr. Rabinowitz cited the biblical warrior Deborah, the matriarch Sarah and Queen Esther to name a few. I would add the New Testament  Mary—faithful Jewish woman, mother of Jesus, mother of the Church, blessed and holy— to her list. She pondered Christ in her heart and questioned God—no modest little woman. 

Pondering things in one’s heart can be dangerous, liberating—or both. 

2013.09.04 A Gethsemane Moment?—Write About It

Last week I had what I VERY loosely call a “gethsemane moment.”

Naming my blues after the agony of Jesus in the garden is highly pretentious but it came to mind as I prayed and reflected about what had happened to make my mood take a plunge from buoyant to dregs for no reason that I could see. Nor could I imagine why Gethsemane came to mind.

New Testament gospel stories tell us that Jesus went with his disciples and followers into the Gethsemane garden to pray on the night before they entered Jerusalem to confront the powers. Most of us know the enormous anxiety that accompanies even a small confrontation which is conflictual. Dangerous!  You want friends around you to encourage and support you. Jesus was no different. He begged his three best friends to stay awake with him in his darkest hour. They fell asleep! Such friends! Such utter and ultimate feelings of aloneness. Such abandonment. 

In my "gethsemane moment" I felt alone with thoughts like: no one calls, no one cares, I have no use to anyone, no purpose, belong nowhere, on and on in a morass of dramatic irrationality. I also felt physically exhausted, not tired just spent. I prayed for insight. Nothing. I called friends. Not home. Dick out for the day.

I was tempted to condemn my feelings; instead I focused on Gethsemane. I'd been there just two years ago when we went on pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine.

Gethsemane is a small garden outside Jerusalem. It is tended in very loving, and I might say excessively protective, ways by a group of Christian monastics. Tourists are not allowed into the garden unless they have arranged for special permits and then only in small groups.

We Episcopalians walked around the garden and gazed into it over the iron fences. Olive trees line the road to the garden. In Jesus’ day there were no Christians and no tourists—just olive trees. Five of them are 1880 years old. They evoked worship in me. They are huge, gnarled, majestic, preserved in their ancient beauty, like guardians of Mystery. I wept. AND these old olive trees still yield fruit—very significant because olive oil and its products are the mainstay of the local economy in Israel today. The word gethsemane means olive press. 


To soothe my "gethsemane moment" I ate dark chocolate and read the day’s comics. Then I wrote because it's what I do.

Three insights emerged.

1)  I was missing my manuscript, my memoir, my story, my life in words, years in the making, but most intensely labored over in the last year almost every single day for several hours. The day before I’d delivered it to an editor. Her skill and work will take over for now. At first I felt an uplift, like a weight dropped from my shoulders. But the next day my mood plummeted. I was grieving.

2) It’s good to exaggerate feelings, blow them out of all proportion. It brings them to light so you know exactly your own state of mind and heart.  Such purposeful exaggeration keeps you from judging your feelings as silly because you already know they are overblown. So I let them be.

3) My feelings were nowhere near the depths Jesus must have known. Gethsemane came to mind not so much because Jesus felt similar aloneness, though he did, but for the sake of the olive trees—images of time, memory and aging, and the knotty wisdom of necessary bereavement.  

Irrational, yes. Ridiculous, no.