2023.10.01 "Who Says So?" Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

From the Gospel of Jesus the Christ according to Matthew 21: 23-32 comes one of those tough choices stories we love to hate. It’s about authority and how some things are not really part of the Kingdom of Heaven plans, but if you must………..

One of my favorite rejoinders to my mother when she told me not to do something was: “Who says so?” Of course her greater authority, though highly questionable in my mind, won over—sort of.  I somehow found a way round it when she told me to stop sucking my thumb, an activity of consolation that seemed to me to be absolutely and indispensably necessary to my salvation at the time. After all, they’d gotten rid of the dining room table under which I hid to assert my own authority and to hold my secret one-sided conversations with God whom I’d met in a book. All I had left for my soul’s comfort after that table was gone, was my thumb.  I practically sucked it raw as I grieved the loss of my hideout.  

*  *  *  *

In this gospel story, Jesus asks the Temple authorities where John the Baptist got his authority to baptize people. Was it divine or human? Not easily fooled, they conferred and knew that if they said “divine” Jesus would ask them why they refused the baptism? BUT if they said ’human’ the people would rise up against them, because they understood John the Baptist to be a prophet sent from God. So they answered, “We don’t know.” to which Jesus replied  Well then, neither will I tell you by what authority I do, and say, the things that I do and say. 

Brilliant! 

Now, substitute abortion for baptism for a moment.  You can see, even experience, the authority bind: is it “God’s will aka divine authority,” that we all have equal rights/freedom of will? Or is it by divine authority that we do not murder ever and under any circumstance whatsoever—even under the best, most loving/caring/compassionate/true circumstances. 

                                        ?

Most all our worldwide current quarrels, uncertainties, even murders or executions are about one thing: AUTHORITY. Are you, and can you be, the AUTHOR of your own divinely given freedom—no matter what?  "It depends" really doesn't cut it—or does it? 

2023.04.16 As My Doubt Goes, So Goes My Theological Passion, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

There are very few things or people I care about that I do not first doubt. My rule of life has been: Always doubt first, then always ask questions to check your doubt.

*  *  *  *

Since early childhood, as so many of you know already, I have loved and talked to God and felt loved and heard in return. No one taught me this. My younger sister is  witness to my early habit. The above is not a religious statement. There is nothing doctrinaire about it; nor is it particularly spiritual, full of holiness and zealotry for Christ, my Church, or my vocation. Rather, it is about self-doubt/God-doubt and testing out my personal confidence in God’s existence. My practice grew into my love of the Bible and its stories, and my keen appreciation for the disciple of Jesus, who has lovingly and distastefully, been nicknamed “Doubting Thomas.” Like me, he only sought to make sure, to eliminate his doubt. 

Now that I have written a mouthful of personal truth, I can easily move inward to engage my love of Thomas, the supposedly failed and shamed disciple. Jesus never shamed him! His story is written in the Gospel according to John, therefore it is dated later than the others by at least 30 years. This does not make it wiser, but it makes it more influenced by early Greek philosophy, and perhaps more bold in its assertions of Jesus as the one and only Christ/ Messiah for all. I love and worship Jesus the Christ, yes, and I doubt that such commitment is necessary to everyone’s well-being or salvation.

*  *  *  * 

Scene: as remembered by the Johannine school of writers in John 20:19ff. 

Jesus has died a tragic unjust death by crucifixion. His disciples, except Thomas who was not with them at this gathering, are stunned, grieving, still wondering at the report of Jesus’s appearance to Mary Magdalene, and uncertain what they should do next. They gather, fearing persecution as followers of Jesus, when Jesus appears to them, invites them to touch his wounds as evidence, and offers them peace. He then tells them to receive the Holy Spirit, speaks briefly about the spiritual value of forgiveness as well as the dangerous power of unforgiven “retained” sins. (Today, we might call this process letting go with love.)

Commentary: Now this is brilliant therapy, not to mention a recipe for success in the living out of Jesus’s Gospel/ the “golden rule”—then and now—for which they now will be the witnesses, the advocates, the teachers, the models. It is an enormous and difficult challenge to communicate, not the appearance of a miracle but the commission to spread Peace and Forgiveness. This is the challenge for all of us now in this world, regardless of race, religion, sex, politics, or cultural bias. 

Scene: Disciples gather again, a week later (John 20:26). This time Thomas is with them as they continue to puzzle over the mysterious appearance of Jesus and their monumental task of living out his message. Thomas doubts the veracity of their experience and wants physical proof. Jesus shows up again and offers to Thomas his hands and side, so Thomas can touch his wounds. Proof. Thomas declares Jesus his Lord and Savior. Jesus honors Thomas’ doubt habit and  reminds him not to get “peacockish” about his need for proof, but to consider himself blessed. Jesus adds that there are many who will not have this same opportunity who will also be blessed with great faith.  

Commentary: There is no need to take these stories literally in order to take them seriously. Do not wait for miracles. Do not insist or badger others to be Christian. Divine Love is broad and deep and wide. I doubt it’s tied to any one religion. I have spent many years reading, praying, researching, questioning, and assuring myself that this “doubt” is valid. The message has no restrictions or confinements at all. God, no doubt, is cosmically present to all creation.  

Simply use all your strength, energy, and faith to act with love and compassion, spreading peace and forgivingness to humans and nature along this way of Life. 

*  *  *  *

Postscript: The Doubter of scriptural note has a gospel of his own, The Gospel of Thomas. It was discovered in 1945 by an Egyptian farmer in Nag Hammadi. In addition, some much earlier (about 200 BCE)  fragments of papyrus with a style and language demonstrated by scholars to fit with the later manuscript, have also been discovered.  The Gospel of Thomas has no narrative but is made up only of sayings of Jesus ie. “Jesus said . . .”  Some of them that Jesus scholars considered authentic include the Parable of the Sower, Mustard Seed, Lilies of Field, and pay your taxes=Caesar’s due. Attitudes toward women and their role are distinctly and rigidly patriarchal, one even suggesting women change their sex, which does not mean have a sex-change operation. This latter patriarchal text is very doubt-free to yours truly, because it is still true.  

What Kind Of Follower Are You? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 7/10/22

Sometimes I feel small and timid. I was told as a child that I was shy—too shy. Truthfully, I am a natural introvert and also, shyness was one way I hid from my mother’s eager attentiveness. Still, sometimes my shyness turned into silence and then to self-deprecation. I wondered whether I was really a mouse and maybe that is why I’m frightened of mice—such tiny, skittering rodents. Why does everyone in comics scream EEEEK! at the sight of a mouse? 

I recall a poster one of my young sons, full of mischief and hormonal chutzpah, hung in his room. It pictured a bunch of hapless lemmings rushing towards a cliff, some already spilling over to their deaths—save one lemming who ran along with the doomed group  grinning, and with a life preserver around his middle. 

I doubt that my son had more than his own biological urges as a pre-teen, but I do know that the poster exactly portrayed his humor and presaged the future of his own humor-bound self-care. Professionals would call him mildly risk averse. I would call him wise.

What is a lemming anyway? A lemming is a short-tailed rodent related to voles, found in the Arctic tundra. Sometimes lemmings actually do commit mass suicide when they jump off cliffs. This is a result of their migratory behavior, driven by strong biological urges when the population density becomes too great.

Webster tells us that “lemming” also can refer to a person who unthinkingly joins a mass movement, especially one that is a shortsighted headlong rush to destruction. That description fits some individuals, or groups, or religions, or whole countries. I felt that reckless when I shed my shy cover and announced myself as a woman seeking to be a priest in the equally reticent Episcopal Church. Inside I felt scared like a mouse, or reckless like this lemming without her life preserver. Lots of loving help got me through.

Jesus the Christ is remembered as calling people to follow. Are they to follow like lemmings? Follow at all costs? Scatter like mice? Jesus also told the parable of a Good Samaritan who, for good reasons of his own, would never be a follower, but who, out of his own tradition, practiced the ethic Jesus encouraged. Jesus had a strong vision of God’s Compassion spreading, connecting beyond our differences: Everyone is your neighbor. We can absolve Jesus of any malice of forethought about his insistence that people summon the courage to follow him—not like hapless lemmings but more like courageous fools for Christ-like compassion. Jesus, however, also assigned 72 elders to go ahead to prepare the way, and told any followers to travel in pairs.  

                                    *  *  *  *

What can absolve us Americans from our own lemming-like culture, our own lemming-like lifestyles—running too fast, not getting very far, making hasty impulsive decisions, overvaluing our precious independence, collectively and individually, often bearing lethal weaponry, and always failing to consider exactly who we are, what it is we desire, why we are doing it, where we are headed, what our purpose is—not to mention tending to go on out there alone and brave without allies?

What will stop us? Will a leader who is wise and compassionate, forceful but not forcing?  Would you follow without fear or self-doubt, even when it appeared as if that leader might lead you into dangerous territory? What if you followed a leader and ended up either dead or radically transformed forever? We all have choices even when we don’t see them. Any choice involves risk. Most choices are driven by enormously inclusive visions, such as everyone’s being a neighbor.   

My son would make sure he was protected before he followed any “lemmings.” I would waffle and hesitate, asking a million clarifying questions before I set out on a visionary quest. No one wanted to follow Jesus, especially into enemy territory, like Jerusalem, or if it meant loving any supposed enemy. He kept going,, not recanting his way or purpose, and they all thought he was as foolish as a lemming. 

Everyone is  different. To follow a vision of any size is never simple unless you actually are a lemming. It’s okay to carry inner tubes, ask a million clarifying questions, take others with you. Life is a grand experiment. I steadied myself in God, and carried many supporters inside me whose voices of love and encouragement I heard, but not with my ears. My most steady companions on my way were my tears—sweet lubricants, healing my impatience and my mistakes, while keeping the vision alive.   

This image below is what I felt like, heading out alone, praying for courage, and determined on a new path, trusting the presence of God, believing in my children’s hearts— accompanied by tears and fears. I kept going like this baby snowy owl—unsteady like a toddler determined one day to fly, and not looking back —much.  

What kind of follower are you?  

2020.10.11 My "Racism". Part Twelve. Sowing Seeds.

I started to attend the Episcopal church regularly. I loved the unitive meal, called Holy, but it didn’t happen every week. Why not? Did they think we Christians only needed to be transfused with Christ’s body and blood monthly?

All this religion. All this prayer. All this church. All these beautiful rites and rituals and songs. No one has a right to any of it. I was learning that rights and duties merged—merged—in acts of simple creative gratitude, like worship. Worship is art for the sake of everyone’s spiritual delight. Worship is, or should be, natural. It just happens, like praise. Birdsong is worship as grand as the huge Mormon Tabernacle choir, or a Gospel Choir of all black people, or a little girl marching about crooning Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, or the murmuring hum of prayers.    

What matters to God, really?  Would I find that in church? I went to graduate school at Columbia in N.Y.C. where I got my Master’s degree in Spanish language and literature, still searching for God and myself, still wondering about my racism and God’s vision, feeling sure that words mattered as much as sacrament and song in true worship.

I was married and the mother of four lovely children. I was still searching for God’s will—or mine, whichever came first. This might be the first time in my young life that I tangled with a moral dilemma that had no right answer.

Chapter XXXII. Motives and Consequences—Another Pungent College Learning

The professor, Miss XXX, walked slowly, so slowly you could call it deliberate, into the Ethics class to deliver the first lecture. Would she make it onto the dais? I thought she was either too ancient to care about ethics, or had lived enough life to be close to a guru on the moral life. Either way, I remember exactly her first sentence of the first lecture: “In making ethical decisions, which is more important, motives or consequences?”  She added: “Please prepare an essay with your own thoughts on that question and have it ready for next week’s class.”

This old woman was nobody’s old fool. I wrestled with that question day and night. I thought there had to be a “right” answer. This was an Ethics course, wasn’t it? I argued for consequences, imagining all the innocent people hurt in car accidents, or in wars, or in love.

I remembered that Bill Brakeman had been very badly injured in a car accident. I remember the phone call from his mother; I remember going to visit him in a hospital off of Den Road, in Rye, New York, just over the Connecticut line into New York state. Bill had been driving home from the big city where he had gone to hear jazz and was hit by another vehicle. I have no idea who was at fault. All I knew was that Bill was very badly injured. I stared down at him, pale and in pain, in that hospital bed. Not sure of a thing except my own shock, I bent over and kissed him lightly on the lips. I thought but do not remember saying: I love you. Bill’s recovery was very long, so long it delayed his going to college by a year. He had been a year ahead of me in high school, and now he would be a year behind me in college. God, I was glad he lived.

Years later I would decide that motives outweighed consequences. I think I got that from the Bible. God was often portrayed as a voyeur into human hearts, and people often changed from within, like Job. I decided that what happens inside a person has a lot to do with God—and motives.

Chapter XXXIII. Who Is The Greatest?

Memory: Once in junior high school a teacher posed this question to a bunch of upturned but blank faced seventh graders: Who was the greatest man in the world and why? I hated the WHY!  I knew enough not to put down my father, which wouldn’t have been quite true anyway. I wrote down Abraham Lincoln. Why? He freed the slaves of course. I learned that my answer was void of any historical complexities, but the teacher cleared up my confusions—and failed. There was no freakin’ right answer! Later I thought the church’s answer would have been Jesus of course. I didn’t understand that one either, but I recall a twinge of guilt that I had not put Jesus down.

Would I now? Would Jesus have freed slaves? Surely he died trying. Jesus’s cruel death was inevitable given his political vision. So was Lincoln’s.  Jesus acquired the messianic title Christ after his followers woke up years after his death to the image of God he proclaimed and lived. Lincoln had no such a title though he was a devout Christian. Still, one does not have to be a Christian to be a christ.

Both men, strikingly, were “men of sorrow acquainted with grief” as the great messianic lyric (Handels’ Messiah) tells us. Lincoln didn’t smile much. And Jesus is not remembered in the New Testament as laughing and smiling either.

     

Both of my chosen heroes told parabolic stories with a punch, stories that pointed without GPS directions, stories that confused and transfixed. These stories were provocative and told not to convert but to create—to stun, astonish, make something new, motivate people to do something new, something true. Parables are motivated by greater goals. My choice wasn’t such a miss.

Chapter XXXIV. The Sower

Jesus’s Parable of the Sower was told to listeners living in an agricultural culture.  A sower goes into a field to sow seeds with the obvious hope that some of the seeds will take root, grow, and supply food enough to feed hungry people.

Those who remembered Jesus and retold his parables, orally and later in writing, knew that he had a habit of not explaining them. Jesus hoped his stories would seed the kingdom. Lincoln too sowed seeds he hoped would become a country. BUT, in this parable, Jesus, or Jesus according to Matthew’s gospel, gives in to nagging disciples who beg to know what this parable means—exactly. Please, please, please. He succumbs to the lure of consequential ethics. He details the different qualities of soil, each one descriptive of a human condition—too dry, too rocky, too distracted—none of which yield a fruitful harvest.

Just like when a parent gives in to a nagging child, Jesus’s usual strategy of not explaining got sabotaged. His immediate followers, then and forevermore, obsess and compete. Whose soil will yield the best growth for the vision of God? Right away they, and we, lose sight of the main character in the story: the Sower.

The Sower, a metaphor for God, continues to sow and sow and sow. That’s the idea. That’s the grace, the point. This is not a parable about divine condemnation, rejection, or self-improvement. It’s not even about the sin of competitiveness for self-gain. The silent sower, whose sack is never empty of seeds, keeps sowing—without ceasing. God is extravagant with seed. If your “soil” is too arid today, seeds keep coming. There is no end to such potentiation. And no discrimination. I pray to the Sower.

Sow me, Sower
Sow your seeds.

In the beginning, I am fertile—flirty, fruitful, foxy
Any seed is mine. Every seed bears fruit.

In the middle, I try out soil-types—obsess about my own—until
    I harden against any seed
       waste seeds, ignore others,
    arid with indifference,
                  thinned by busyness and grief,
        bloated with pride or affluence
The Sower deftly sows—all seeds mine, all soils me.

At the ending time
    I don’t care—nor lie nor fake nor die
         —nor try to be sower seed or soil alone

Sower, seed, and soil—just so.

Sower, sower, double my order. Thank you.


Chapter XXXV.  Formation
 

I learned from all the sources that have formed me over time. I didn’t realize this at first, but now I see that most of my seeds came from Scripture and prayer conversations with the Sower. I was seeded to believe that no one was excluded from divine seeding—no one. Such conditioning would become my armor against racism, even in a white-privileged world. I could see that this way of living was NOT the way of God. Simply so.

“Lincoln will not return from the dead, even as a ghost, but his broadly balanced democratic  pluralism may be all there is to rescue us yet again.”  New Yorker, 9/28/20, Adam Gopnik “Better Angel. An Abraham Lincoln of His Time, and Ours.”

Jesus the Christ appeared to many after he died. We are STILL working on Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps these two greats will collaborate—for kingdom, for country.  

I must note this: Neither one of my chosen heroes slipped into racism or exclusionary rhetoric along the torturous way of promoting a unitive vision—although both men were white, Jesus with a semitic edge, and privileged, Jesus with rich friends who provided consistent hospitality and some financing of his campaign.



 

2018.04.22 Iggy, Pierre, and Me—Intertwining Stories

On February 4, 2018, I delivered a homily at the memorial Eucharist for the Rev. Pierre Wolff, Episcopal priest, Jesuit-trained, and my spiritual director for fifteen years. I began my homily, which was a letter to Pierre, with a quote from the founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), a soldier, born in Basque Country, now Spain. Ignatius, while recuperating from his wounds, experienced visions of Christ. The soldier in him helped the mystic in him design the ingenious Spiritual Exercises. 

        “We are created to live in God’s love and life for all eternity.”


I am not a soldier, a mystic nor a genius, yet my spirituality was deeply formed by two geniuses—one I knew well and one I knew by proxy. Their stories and mine intertwine.

Pierre Maurice Wolff was born in Marseilles France on November 2, 1929. He lived through the second world war, served as a French Jesuit priest, giving the Spiritual Exercises and retreats to the Sisters of St. Joseph and lay people. In the early 70's, Pierre came to the States to do the same type of ministry with many communities. In 1988 Pierre married Mary; they made their home in Wallingford, Connecticut. Later he became an Episcopal priest, continuing his ministry, and authoring numerous books. His first book May I Hate God? is a favorite of mine.   

Here is  Pierre "hating" God.

I began my memorial homily with Ignatius’s words, because Pierre had drummed them into me. They were the Principles and Foundations of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. “We come from God/Love; we return to God/Love; we live in God/Love supported and sustained every moment of every day,” Pierre said. The spiritual life was not a journey with a goal, but rather an everyday process of living, breathing, being IN that Love. I agreed—intellectually.

It was 1989. I had just been ordained an Episcopal priest. I had done retreat work with Pierre since 1983, and had just officiated at his marriage to a former Sister of Mercy, Mary Morgan—another whopping story for next week’s blog. I had fought with the Church Jesus did not found. A chaplain colleague had told me that if I wanted to get to know Jesus I had to get a Jesuit. Then she had one for me, one fresh from France no less. Fantastique et merveilleux.

Now I was ready to meet Jesus on the ground—beyond my sentimentalized Sunday School Jesus, simperingly sweet, and born Christian. As a chaplain in an alcohol/drug rehabilitation treatment center, I had to get the God-thing across without mentioning God or anything religious. Thus  . . .

I was to pray daily for an hour. An hour? Who prays for an hour all alone and in silence? Pierre gave me some scriptures to use and told me to jot down my feelings in my prayer journelle. First feeling, anxiety; on its heels, anger. I groused to myself: I’m a working woman. I have a job! I have to be there by 8:30, latest. I say my prayers in the morning and evening, but a whole hour? I go to church every Sunday. Come on! 

God was silent.

My resistance persisted. Prayer was an almighty inconvenience. Every single day and for a whole year? I felt sure God would not want me to interfere with healthy sleep, let alone my job, ministry of course. I shelved this prayer assignment, feeling quite righteous and right. Never once did I consider actually praying to God about my angst and pique. I would ask Pierre to alter the schedule. A reluctant pray-er is worse than a reluctant suitor. And so, amen.

Then one evening I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m., an hour before my usual wake-up blast. I don’t know why I did this, hardly remembered that I did until the next morning when the alarm went beep-beep-beep—staccato summons. I jumped up, padded into the bathroom, splashed water in my face, moved quietly and quickly, so as not to awaken my husband, into the bedroom we weren’t using as a bedroom.  I sat down in the comfortable chair and stayed there for an hour—quiet and alone. This was my first personal experience of a miracle—sheer grace. Nothing within my conscious reach could have made this happen. Not me.

Pierre, whom I now saw weekly, wondered tactfully if God made this happen. Where was my stubborn independent, first-born sassy self?  Had I made a mistake and turned obedient?  Nonplussed, Pierre gave me instructions: scripture readings to pray with, which meant not just skim. “You will keep a chart of your consolations (uplifting feelings) and desolations (the downers) and also make two columns, one labeled "daily life" and one labeled "prayer life." What is happening in each? The parallels were uncanny.

I used graph paper and drew soaring ups and downs. One of the first scripture passages to pray with was Jeremiah 13, something about girding the loins, with a loincloth no less—or more. You can imagine where that took me! I was deeply uncertain about my vocational direction, was newly married for the second time, still sought the perfect orgasm, and prayed like mad that all my kids would still love me.

Still, it took time for the whole truth of this God/Love to, well, sink in. I no longer, ever ever again, would imagine my faith life as a straight-lined journey with God at each end: Creation (coming from God) to Resurrection (going to God) and not so much in the middle, the daily trek and grind. Or, if God was in the middle it was by some kind of intervention that felt miraculous. Jesus the Christ would, it turned out, have much to do with the murky middle. I hung in with him, walked with him, stayed IN step with him.

You know what assured me? One little word in Ignatius’s sentence: IN. I knew God was IN me but I’d never thought of myself being IN God—and not only IN God’s love but IN God’s life as well. This was Ignatius's genius. The mere mention of his name awakened Pierre, even in his old age and fading mental capacity. He would enthusiastically exclaim: “Ah this man, this Ignatius, is a true genius, Genius!” I have no doubt myself.

Try as I did I could never figure out exactly how Ignatius’s prayer exercises worked, how the seemingly rigid, almost military, structure of simple biblical texts, coupled with an hour of prayer each day, worked to shape and transform my soul.

Genius means this: a qualitative blend of love and intellect that passes from one to the next and never dies. Such genius is never the property of a single person. It is mobile, its wisdom eternal. 

Here is Ignatius, whom I affectionately call Iggy.

I think Iggy looks like Pierre. Well maybe not quite, but allow my projection. That's a necessary psychological strategy for all hopeful spiritual aspirants like I was— and still am.

      “We are created to live IN God’s love and life for all eternity.”

2016.02.14 Turning a LIfe Around?

I know I should be Happy Valentine-ing it so Happy Valentine's Day to all you dear readers. I do love you, ya know.  And love, even in its smallest, funniest expressions, least expected or traditional, does turn lives around.

A man in treatment to recover from addictive disease once told me that he hated love because it was so gooey. I asked him what he loved, and he burst into hearty laughter, saying: "Gooey caramel candy covered with melty chocolate. Better than a beer!" And there you have it.

When things turn around there is usually a tumult of reaction, inside and out. It can be a new direction you decide to take, a new understanding of a relationship, a sudden humorous take on what you thought was sacrosanct or right for you. Or a new way of thinking about God and your relationship or your language about God. 

On Thanksgiving in Maine, 2014, I wrote: "Along the Kennebunk beach road looking out to sea there was a sunset so spectacular people stopped and stared; people pulled their cars off the road and jumped out with their i-phone cameras to snap a shot. Reverse selfies!— turning the camera's eye away from the self toward something much grander and more beautiful." Such a switch is refreshing in this age of selfie-ism.

Beauty will save the earth, I'm sure. It arrests us, even those in the midst of despair or in the grip of evil. All it takes to turn a life around is one moment, followed by a lifetime of hard work and commitment. Watch for the moments. And by all means feel free to project theology onto them.Such beauty may be a beckoning.

How do you know what is transcendent and what is immanent? Whether God beckons you from without or within?

William Temple,  one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944) wrote a brilliant book called Nature, Man, and God. I read it years ago in seminary and didn’t understand much, except that I never forgot the way Temple fused aspects of Divinity which our tiny minds inevitably separate: the close presence of God, immanence, and the distance of God, transcendence. Is God far away or is God as close to us as our own breath? Can we have one without the other? Nope. Temple wrote about the transcendence of the immanent and the immanence of the transcendent. We’re stuck with both together at once. (Temple's mind was not blurry like this image:)
Christians see this fusion in Jesus the Christ. Look for it in yourself, too—or in Nature or Music or Humor or any prayer. 

I  know a woman who calls God “Honey".   She regularly loses her keys and other small possessions that matter to her and prays: "God, Honey, I lost my keys again. I was sure I left them right here. Any ideas?” Then she bustles about and usually finds what is lost.

My one-time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested that I find an affectionate name for God, something to down-size divinity, draw it close, like a lover or a teddy bear. (My comforting god was my thumb which I sucked mercilessly as a child.)

Overwhelming almightiness and superpower dominance is admirable of course in a window, or miles away at the high altar, or in the towers of cathedrals, but I wanted to touch and feel and sense—and name with affection. I tried calling God sweetie, then darling, my mother’s favorite term of endearment, but nothing stuck until I thought of beloved. I don’t regularly call anyone else that, but for God, whose love I’d been taught was too vast even to imagine, let alone hold onto, and I can imagine anything, Beloved seemed close enough.

Henri Matisse, born in 1869, in Le Cateau, France, had no interest in art. He went to law school in Paris and never visited a single museum. Had it not been for a case of appendicitis, he might never have become an artist. Bedridden for several weeks during his recovery, he took up painting as a way to pass the time. It was a revelation, a turnaround. He said, "For the first time in my life I felt free, quiet, and alone ... carried along by a power alien to my life as a normal man." At 22, he quit the law to begin work as a full-time artist. He was a revolutionary who dressed like a bourgeois, and he once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”

Don’t worry if you don’t think of Godde like everybody else. Just find a way for you. Just make it your own. Then see how it feels when you behave toward yourself and others exactly as your god-image behaves. You might find out it's pretty much as you want to be treated yourself. 

“Wheresoever you go, go there with your whole heart.” -Confucius

A woman who is struggling through rounds of chemotherapy for cancer, without remission, asked for prayer just to stay with the treatment. She said humor helps. She also said that a fresh new day with the sky pure blue and the sun in full shine mode, even a winter day, raises her soul  She has had many blood transfusions and calls herself Vampire Jane (not her name).  "Vampires are strong. They get good blood, right?" Right.

And I can not resist sharing a couple of typos. Mistakes, even unintended, can break right through fear and tension and the most violent of prejudices and differences, everything that mandates against going out on a limb, everything that causes us to fight.

Occasionally the institutional Episcopal church goes out on the limb and doesn't fall off the tree—yet.  After the Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, was elected bishop in New Hampshire in 2003 there was plenty of flak.

Maine's Bishop Chilton Knudsen offered "listening sessions" at every congregation she visited after the controversial consecration of Robinson. People could come to talk, ask questions, even kvetch—and also listen to each other. The bulletin in one parish read (Freud would love this one!):  

"After the service today, the bishop will remain in the chancel for a listening session to hear your comments about the election of Gene Robinson. You are welcome to stay and share your thoughts with her. If you don't wish to stay and meet with the bishop, please heave quietly."

“Be not sad, surly Allah is with us.” Surely Allah is, along with all of Allah's other divine names and images, is with us. It is we who are "surly" and we who "heave"— and we, too, who can turn lives around.

2015.10.25 Addiction. The Body of Christ. The Paschal Mystery.

What? Who? is/are the body of Christ? There may be as many takes on that spiritual question as there are Christians, or antichrists. I don’t know. I just know that when a tragedy happens I need my Christian faith. I need it because at its center is a human person who suffered great injustice and stayed faithful to the God of compassion he preached. We Christians name this pattern of life the Paschal Mystery: the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Myself, I would have betrayed God and saved my precious hide if I were as alone as Jesus. But I am not alone, I am part of the mystical body of Christ and the gathered community of Christ on earth. It holds me and saves me and by it I can endure my own paschal mysteries when they come.  

Back in June, 2015, a newly installed Episcopal bishop in Maryland, while driving intoxicated, struck and killed a bicyclist. Then she left the scene of the accident and fled to her home before she returned to the scene where she was arrested.

Publicly in church, I prayed well-established community prayers for the dead, for the suffering and for healing. Personally, I prayed that divine mercy would embrace the grieving family and the disgraced bishop and the whole church reeling from the impact.

Deep down privately, my prayer went something like this: Damn, this bishop is a woman! This could set back the cause of women in the Church and make religion look like a sham to the outside secular world. Damn!  Also help Heather get sober and keep some dignity and faith as she adjusts to her utterly altered life. Get her a merciful judge. And, for Christ’s sake, wallop the General Church with large doses of addiction awareness. Please!

Addiction is a life-threatening, soul-demolishing disease. When left untreated it destroys families, society, and faith. Treatment for it is life-altering, inevitably transformative—and demanding a “greater jihad” which means a very strenuous spiritual effort, mostly internal against temptations too fierce to manage without the help of others and the grace of a good God.   

It struck me, as I’ve prayed about Heather Cook, and the whole tragedy, that the basic ingredients of the Paschal Mystery were present in this situation, and further, that the basic ingredients of this mystery keep on happening over and over— in my life and yours.  
    -sacrificial death accompanied by excruciating suffering: actually two, one biological (cyclist, Tom Palermo, 41, father of two) and the other spiritual (Heather Cook, now deposed from her church office and facing manslaughter charges in the hit-and-run killing of Palermo.) 
    -context of inevitable sacrifice: a system crippled by ignorance, fear, and rigidity, both religious and cultural, in Jesus’ day as in our own. No wonder Jesus talked about the unconditional love of God, and no wonder Pontius Pilate wondered what truth was, and no wonder we today continue to misappropriate both truth and love. 
    -theological distortions: blaming one victim and finding the other innocent, and/or projecting “blame” onto God, who, in Jesus and in each one of us, did die—not for but because of our sins. Is not the whole body of Christ injured and responsible?  The Church betrayed its own body.
    -resurrection: the final ingredient of the paschal mystery offers a glimmer of hope and grace, because it is an act of God no human can imagine or accomplish. In resurrection theology, Heather has a chance to emerge from addictions treatment and imprisonment (sentence of maximum 20 years and minimum 10 years) sober and in her right mind, physically and emotionally.  And the Christian Church has an opportunity to educate itself deeply and, for God’s sake seriously, about the disease of addiction and its partner, co-addiction.

It’s telling, and ironic, that the Bishop retired of Maine, Chilton Knudsen, a recovering alcoholic, has been appointed to be an assisting bishop in Maryland. This is not just to do business as usual but to speak in this diocese, and beyond, about addiction and codependency and the dependency dynamic in the Church. The diocesan bishop of Maryland has already hosted  for all clergy in the diocese a mandatory day of conversation with Bishopn Knudsen.
   
She began the conference with these words: “The sin of the Episcopal Church is codependency.”
   
Codependency, defined experientially, is loss of self. It happens when people who are affected by the behavior of active addicts do NOT understand a thing about this disease and consider it a moral choice rather than a treatable disease. Like any disease, treatment requires an addict’s cooperation. Out of well-meaning ignorance and yes, love, codependent people become diseased themselves, exhausted by trying to get the addict to stop drinking or drugging and failing by all means of persuasion or threat. Toxic feelings such as guilt, rage, helplessness, despair, fear, and worst of all, impotent love, consume them. Sometimes they resort to substance abuse to numb painful feelings. They cannot control the addict any more than the addict can control the substance that possesses him or her. (N.B.: The job absenteeism rate for spouses of alcoholics is higher than it is for the addict.)

I lived all these things. I did all these things. I tried all these ways. It took years for me to realize that I was worth saving, and that I wasn’t pathological just because I tried to save. AlAnon was a group where I heard my story with variations—over and over. I felt accompanied. I came away not feeling crazy or alone. There I learned how to detach with love (hardest ethic ever in the world!) and how to take care of myself. Working in an alcohol and drug rehabilitation hospital I learned to listen with compassion to the stories of addicts themselves. I learned as well how to intervene, with love, yes, and with conditions that were not empty threats. I had to discern in myself just what I would live with and what I would not, and what trade-offs I could make. I had to get sober myself. I lived my own paschal mystery.

The Mystery behind the paschal mystery is one of tension: all the ingredients pull against each other; they fight each other, yet all of them are necessary and inevitable for recovery. I tried to have it all without the dying or too much sacrifice. But if all the ingredients are not held in tension, including the hope of resurrection you can’t see, the stability of the whole system (marital, individual, bodily, faith, soul) will implode and die anyway.

Everything is connected and works together for the good. No accident. A grace unearned.

What spiritual/theological issues come to mind for you about addiction, the Body of Christ, the Paschal Mystery?

2014.07.27 A Nun On The Bus

Last week we heard Simone Campbell, SSS (Sisters of Social Service) speak about her vision to work for dignity and justice for all people and her experience as a practical contemplative. Campbell is an attorney, lobbyist, executive director of Network, and the author of the book, A Nun On The Bus.



To say that she is a good speaker, would be to understate it. She is all flamed up with vision and praxis. The symbolic story in Exodus about the voice of God calling to Moses from a burning bush is her biblical metaphor for the voice of God: something quite ordinary that you see every day suddenly flares up. Moses' bush-voice begins with a statement of compassion: I hear your people’s cry and their needs. I’m aware of their suffering. I know. (The verb form of know in Greek used here is the same as the form for the intimate knowing that happens in sexual intercourse.) Whoa! There follow a suggestion, just when Moses is the most turned on, something like: “So now I am sending you to Pharaoh.”

What? Not me! I can't stand Pharaoh! I'm terrified of his power. I have no voice. Moses mightily resists.

Campbell said that transformation begins at the point of intersection between a vision of total compassion (through deep listening) and an equally forceful resistance to it. Head straight into the resistance to find the dangerous truth.

What do you resist the most? What do you eschew? Who gets the blame, self or other? Who or what would be on your “mistakes of God” list? (Campbell has a list. Some politicians are on it.) Who or what point of view would you have the most trouble dialoguing with?  What do you resist accepting, trying to listen deeply to?

Confession: I scorn Christians who think Jesus the Christ is the only Name, the only, authentic access to Godde. If I head into my resistance to this point of view I discover my impotence, my fear, my vulnerability, my anger, and my limited ability to change fixed mindsets, let alone accept or love those of such mindsets. BUT. . . I do think I could listen. Hang in til you find common ground, Campbell said, and from there build bridges. She was trying for common ground with Paul Ryan—not exactly her "type."  

About ten years ago or so, I tried to set up a dialogue between my liberal parish and a neighboring parish, which was rooted in exclusive Christian theology and politics. I framed the purpose as loving our neighbor’s and received assent for my proposal from the rectors of both parishes. I even recruited dialogue facilitators. It turned out that one of the rectors failed to help bring about the dialogue, causing it to collapse. Soon this rector left the parish to start his own ultra-conservative one, taking a lot of the moneyed with him. I can only assume he never intended to dialogue. All he wanted to do, he had said, was to preach Christ— his own point of view, his own Christ. (Is there such a thing?) We had common ground in our love for Christ; it just wasn't enough to build a bridge. 

As a pastoral counselor, I sometimes saw couples and families.  I would first invite and listen to each person’s story. I tried for experience, and usually got interpretation, according to each point of view. Usually everyone was doing the “Eden thing”— blaming everyone, including God and the snake, for their own pain, powerlessness, and anger at the unhappy dysfunction. Then I’d try to find a common ground—just one thing they all could agree upon so we could go from there. Sometimes we never got to the common ground. Sometimes deep listening was blocked and the vision of radical acceptance too much of a stumbling block.

If anyone wept, I knew there was room for the vision to begin. I would follow the tears. Tears would happen at the intersection of rugged resistance (fear) and deep listening that led to broken hearts, opened hearts, radical acceptance, and yes, good old love hidden underneath bushels of powerless resentment.

Campbell proclaimed that we are all in this project called life together! 100% of us in church and society. When she and others decided on a road trip to spread the vision and help the poor, no one later remembered who thought of that idea. No one remembered, but the flame came upon them from somewhere.

The practice of justice for all is, Campbell believes, the vision and story of the corpus of Holy Scriptures. She's not a contemplative, although she has a daily meditation. Contemplative meditation stills her (like when you stop shaking a snow globe, the snow settles, and suddenly everything in the globe gets clear.) The practice daily places her on the path of compassion, and fuels her for the immediate task of, in her case most recently, meeting with Congressman, Paul Ryan, about his budget and to lobby for immigration reform.

Their common ground? All they could agree on was that they shared a passion for their country—such as the passion shared by me and the rector had for Christ.  

Campbell spoke with vibrancy and humor. She told poignant stories, saying that ideas were important but that ideas alone could keep us talking and debating forever—while people starved and children died in poverty. Congressman, Pete Gallegos from San Antonio, TX. was ready to address a group of reformers about immigration policies when suddenly his small son waved vociferously and shouted, “Hi Daddy.” Then he ran up and into Gallegos’s arms—like a veritable burning bush.

Gallegos canned his prepared speech and shared instead how he came to change his attitudes about immigration reform: in the delivery room when his son was born and he suddenly knew he would give his life for this little child and fight FOR his freedom to live a stable life, not by fighting against another child's freedom. In that moment, Gallegos knew that he was every parent. He knew the hope and the hunger and love of every parent.

Children and parents flee across borders to the US and other countries. They run from violence, economic and physical. They run for a vision. They run for their lives. US border guards found the dead body of a woman under a bush. When they unfurled her body they discovered that it had been curled around the body of a little child. (Think Hagar in the desert with Ishmael. Then think of a God who provided them a well.) The story made me weep, broke my heart. Oh Godde!

Immigration reform is not THEIR issue; it is OUR issue. Nuns rode the bus for "faith, family, and fairness"—for ALL people everywhere, the 100%.

Do you remember when the Church added an alternative to the Nicene Creed?  We used to say: “I believe . . .”  Now we say, or should say, “WE believe . . .”

“We are all called to be a burning bush in a hungry nation,” Campbell declared.

And I would add: we are all called to be a burning bush in a hungry church, starving for wholeness, unity, deep listening, and radical acceptance.

What bus will you take to see “pharaoh”?

2014.06.15 Trinity? What's That?

Who knows? I try, anyway.

It’s an early Christian stunt, not to divide Divinity up into equal parts like ancient Gaul, but to describe distinct spiritual experiences of the one living God, important enough to name each separately yet to assert that each never exists apart from the whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is both. Godde as dynamism creates all life, ignites all life, and connects all life—all the time, all three. Trinity is the Christian name for God. Here is a lorica, a Celtic symbol associated with St. Patrick and the hymn we sing to the Trinity.

A lorica was a breastplate, armor that covered the chest. Today we might call this a bulletproof vest. Biblically, it is symbolic of the armor of Christ, an internalized protection against temptations to succumb to maleficence. (Ephesian 6:11) Here it is, according to Augustine of Hippo.

Each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one.

Say this very fast and you might feel dizzy.  What might it have been like to come up with  this idea?

The small group who knew Jesus well didn’t come up with doctrines immediately after Jesus died. They had no ritualized funeral, no rich collation. I bet they did what we do: sat around and talked about the one who had died, shared memories, cried and laughed. Time passed. Like us, they didn’t forget. You don’t when you really love someone.

Eventually, I guess someone came up with a strange idea:  What if Jesus the Christ was divinely human? After a silence, they all chimed in at once.
   
    Are you kidding? There’s only one God. 
    Yes, but . . . 
    Crazy heretic!
    Well, he was kinda special, healing and all. A mensh (Yiddish: person of integrity and honor.)
    Who asked you, woman?
    All his oddball teaching, too. Oi vey!
    The authorities killed him for that, so shut up already.
    Holy maybe, but not divine, not God. 
    I’m going home. Come on. Why are you all sitting there like stones? We’re all meshugga. (Hebrew for idiotic, nuts.)
    Or, it’s a miracle.
    Sheesh!
    Wait. Listen. If Jesus was divinely human then so, just by being human, are all of us.

They sat motionless. If Jesus was a divine human, then so are we?

With a staggering degree of imperfect simultaneity, this tiny band breathed: O, my God.
             (This is what you say when you recognize God in something.)
                                               

Still, who, in fact, would sign on to such an idea? Some did. Some ran like hell. It’s the same now.
   

Yet these beginners kept breathing their idea. The news spread, as all good gossip must, spirit-motioned or not. We could say that’s how the Trinity got going and took off.  

OR, we could stay with St. Augustine who later identified this idea as something they’d always intuited: God is simultaneously Lover, Beloved, and Love itself. 

OR, we could ask the beasts. Remember Moley from The Wind in the Willows? Here's a Trinity/God story.






Mole and his best buddy Rat cruised the river in a small boat on an errand of true mercy. Their good friend Otter, despite strenuous efforts, was unable to find his lost baby son, Portly. Despair possessed Otter’s heart. Rat and Mole instructed their friend to sit on the river bank and wait. The two entered treacherous waters pulled along by the sounds of piping. Rat was transported by “this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.”

Mole, more empirical than Rat, heard nothing and rowed on, Rat all the while exuding rapture. Then Mole heard and was transfixed. Soon “the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again.” They moored at a small island patch. “Then suddenly Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near.” Mole is smitten.

In summary, the two followed the music and met a demi-god piping a panegyrical lullaby. Nestled asleep between the hooves was the round pudgy little baby otter. They awakened him and returned him to Otter who had waited “in dumb patience.” (Now ain't that a truth?) Otter gave a joyous bark and ran to embrace his tiny “prodigal” son.

The rescuers struggled to understand what happened, exactly. The Vision had vanished, the music replaced by bird songs. “For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness.”

But what does this mean?”asked the exhausted little mole. Silence. His friend, the weary Rat, was fast asleep.

The grace of Jesus Christ, the love of Godde, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you, each and all, all ways. Amen.