2026.01.04 WHAT'S NEW? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The National Geographic honors this season and this new year, 2026, by paying attention to one central question: What do all our usual, even cherished, expectations and traditions mean in the midst of what I’d call just the right amount of excessive CHANGE? 

It is not enough to rebuild everything to get it all back the way it was, especially in the face of soul-shattering events like mass murders, raging rampant fires, wars waged in the name of PEACE, murders of young children in schools, and the politics of racism in the name of divine LOVE?  

We have to build back better using community resilience and, yes, simple lovingkindness, a word I learned as a very young child in my Sunday School class. This combined with exciting stories in the Bible, a book all about people getting into trouble and other people helping them out for no reason except lovingkindness. There was no “principal’s office” to send me to, so lovingkindness stuck to my soul—and stayed.  

*  * * *  

The Rev. Grace Park, associate pastor of Pacific Palisades Presbyterian church, lauds the faithfulness of her congregation. In spite of the destructive fire that destroyed their entire building, they stayed together. Where to meet? They borrowed other people’s buildings and Lo! Divinity was still there, like any good traveling salesperson should be.

Still, what does it mean to be church when you do not have your own building? That is what The Pacific Palisades people kept asking. To rebuild would cost $20 million. This sum was unmanageable. They kept talking and worrying about the future. In the rubble was a photograph, taken by Gideon Mendel, of a bible fallen open, to the Book of Job.

Church is about people, not pews and books and a script, not even a proper denominational title to claim as a name. It is about people gathered together to focus on lovingkindness—everywhere, for everyone, at all times, no matter what!!!  

2025.06.29 ALL Time Perspectives ALL At Once. Lyn Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.    

As a writer of memoir I remember time mostly from the point of view of the past into the present. I’ve paid too little attention to the future. Luke’s gospel tells/warns us never to look BACK but to go forward.

Today in my aging I think that if we do NOT look ahead and move ahead we all, the entire community of Life on Earth, will stagnate collectively. We will eliminate ourselves. No one is able to thrive on memory alone. 

The only biblical writing that suggests such a forward-looking vision is the book of Job. Job has been critiqued and analyzed and “scholarized” practically to death— and yet it remains alive and well! 

I live now in a community of retired whities. We don’t talk about religion, yet when I dare to wonder about it, some people tell me they do not even have a Bible. So get one and read Job, I suggest.  What’s Job?  One resident ordered a bible, found Job and read it. Within weeks she reported with a grin: “Job and I are okay.” 

My theory? The Book of Job contains and lauds ALL of Creation and includes ALL the time values. It carefully and fully articulates the past history of this character, including all the sins and bad stuff alongside every critical perspective possible within Job’s own life, his autobiography. AND it tells us the envisioned future. 

The best part is that scholars and casual readers alike all are fascinated. Job has more written about it—more plays, works of art, scholarly texts, and so on—than any other work of art, literature, music, on and on. It covers ALL the time values. 

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.   

2023.02.23 TOTTERING. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

As I stood at the foot of the Town Hall steps in my small Connecticut town, about to enter to change my political party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, I froze. What would Dad say? He was in my heart, not my politics.  

Over the years Dad and I had bickered about differences. He was a staunch Republican, preaching his fear of more war, apparently all caused by Democrats. I’d argued, then voted Republican. But it was 1972. Everyone paid attention. Votes mattered as much as party affiliation. For the first time I put a partisan label —Democrat—on my voting. I couldn’t vote Republican as usual. I couldn’t tell Dad. How he voted mattered less to me than my affection for him. 

Now in 2025, similar issues face our country. Will we be able to live as if we actually are We the People? Will we have the courage to  stand up straight and forgive political rivals like President Ford did when he pardoned Nixon? Many thought Ford foolish. I thought him courageously compassionate.

As an Episcopal priest, now retired, I still remember holding my breath in 1976 when the Episcopal Church voted in favor of ordaining women as priests. I had also wept when my long-Presbyterian dad knelt before an Episcopal bishop to be received into the Episcopal Church.

All Creation, I now believe, is non-partisan, politically ordered, and equally blessed. Oh no? Consider the politics of Divinity envisioned by the biblical Job after a lifetime of politicking his particular version of God.  

2023.09.03 Winners? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Do you ever wonder why those who experience deep suffering, for whatever reason are considered “losers” in our current American, if not worldwide, cultural narrative of WINNING? 

I recall an experiment some years ago that was conducted by educators. I guess you’d call it an experiment on reversals of expectations. Young kids were invited to run a short race at the end of which there would be a surprise of some sort. The kids ran their hearts out. Those who came in last and second-to-last got recognized as “winners.”  The uproar was intense, and the conversation about “fairness” even more intense. As I recall, one child was quite overweight, expending every ounce of energy and effort he could muster, to “win”. He did.  Everyone learned something, and I’d wager that everyone still remembers that paradoxical race. I do.   

Still, the more we love to win and fight to win, and start wars to win sovereignty and assert our own values, the more we actually lose. Our heroic self-esteem only lasts for a short time, and then we wonder once again who we are, do we really matter—for what and to whom?  Wars don’t work. 

Q: Who gets to be heroes in the biblical narrative?  A: Those who lose.  

The passionate Israelites, the children of Abraham, the tribe of the Northern kingdom, Israel, lose every battle, yet they are the “chosen” of YHWH—the Jews. In fact, it’s odd the way “losers”— even in baseball, even in Ukraine, even in  Afghanistan, “abandoned” by the U.S.A. in one more failed war, and even Jesus, unjustly murdered—are remembered as “winners” over time. 

Easy to shrug off the question and decide it’s all God’s will—then keep on fighting to win anyway. 

The biblical Job is not satisfied with pat answers that try to silence his fierce prayers. Job’s losses and sufferings multiply in unbelievable ways, causing him to besiege and batter God for answers to his ongoing prayers: Why me? Where were/are YOU?  Finally, God responds—not giving Job the answers to his quest and questions about WHY the “Almighty” divine powerhouse keeps on letting all this bad stuff happen. What does God do?  God takes Job on a tour of all creation—amazing panoramic beauty, sparkling with life abundant. God does not provide a rational, logical, obvious answer to Job’s questions; nor does God address moral issues like winning or losing or fairness or justice. There is simply an enormous revelation of the brilliant huge, glorious enormity of the whole. It’s not about blame or shame, but about  divine compassion. Could God change the way it is?  Would God? 

Can we see, and will we love it all, in spite of our own troubles? I don’t know, but I do know that sometimes Beauty comes my own way and breaks through but does not eliminate all my fears and doubts and struggles and pains. 

“Winners” don’t break open our hearts, “losers” do. It is they who elicit our deepest caring, promote our finest connections, heal sin—anything that separates us from the goodness in ourselves, others and God. The poet gets it. 

THE HOLY LONGING

by  Johann W. von Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,

Because the massman* will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

What longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of love nights,

Where you were begotten, where you have begotten,

A strange feeling comes over you

When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught

In the obsession with darkness,

And a desire for higher lovemaking

Sweeps you forward.

Distance does not make you falter

Now, arriving in magic, flying

And finally insane for the light,

You are the butterfly, and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this:

To die, and so to grow,

You are only a troubled guest

On the dark earth.

Written in 1814 inspired by a German translation of Persian poet Hafiz, labelled mystical and magical and above all “untranslatable.” A rhythmic challenge in English.   

*”massman”means something like everyman or one of the masses. 

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2023 

2021.10.17 Divine Immanence

Leaves fall down and die, and so do souls. Not to be moribund about divinity here, but I am thinking about theology. How important it is to stay aware—and pray aware—like the biblical Job did, of life’s shadowy sides, and God's role in the life of a faithful servant. God didn’t attack Job. Job discovered, or uncovered, God in the hollows of his own pain— the context of near-death dying when he could see nothing but darkness. God offered no explanation but only the divine Presence—up close and personal. It was enough for Job.   

Bumper sticker wisdom informs us: “Shit happens”.  Another bumper sticker carries another wisdom: “Grace happens.” But you never see this latter one, do you? The point is that both of these are true, and God is in both the bright and the shady, both the gloomy and the happy—and everything in between, the liminal area where most of us live most of the time. 

I get seduced easily by the happy joy-bomb, the happily-ever-after parade. People want to follow such pied pipers out of town, taking the rats with them. That’s what they thought they were doing I suspect when the early Jews followed Jesus. He tried to warn them, saying wet blanket things, such as: I’ve come to serve not to be served. OR I’ve come to die, not to live happily ever after. Yet they keep on following and asking. So do I.

A rewrite of an old Methodist hymn text popped into my mind recently, in part because I have been praying with someone who is going blind and who thinks VERY little of God. “Why did He make all this great world and then let it be so ugly and full of bad people?” she asks. I make all the obvious arguments for freedom’ed love, but I too wonder. Then these words came:  

Lead me, Lord, lead me in thy righteousness

Make thy way plain, within my heart.

Love me, Lord, love me in my weariness.

Love all my fears. Take me within your heart. 

Tune, 1861:Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley.

Text: The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021

Within these words, I retrieved and, dare I say, resurrected, the early theological doctrine defining the divine nature as Immanent—oh so close. We, both church and culture, in America, are dancing and dashing after the Transcendent God who we assume makes everything better by a sleight of divine magic, simple as kissing a “boo boo” all better. We have betrayed the doctrine of Immanence. We have created God in our own image.

The father of poet E.E Cummings, Edward Cummings, a cleric of vigor and punch, preached from the pulpit of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. He scared his listeners half to death, saying: 

“The kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden, it’s inside you!” 

The poet and son, Edward Estlin, was devastated when his father died in a car accident in the 1930s. He paid homage to his father in the poem, entitled, “my father moved through dooms of love.” 

Dooms of love.

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021  

2018.05.06 Creation Praise

Creation Praise
. An early Celtic prayer

I offer Thee
Every wave that ever moved,
Every heart that ever loved,
Thee, my Creator's Well-Beloved,
Dear Lord.
Every River Dashing,
Every lightning flashing,
Like the angel's sword.
Benedicimus Te!
I offer Thee Every Cloud that ever swept
O'er the skies and broke and wept
In rain, and with the flowerlets slept.
My king.
Each communicant praying,
Every angel staying
Before Thy throne to sing.
Adoramus Te!
I offer Thee
Every flake of virgin snow,
Every spring of earth below,
Every human joy and woe,
My love!
O Lord! And all the glorious
Self o'er death victorious,
Throned in heaven above.
Glorificamus Te!

From Calvin Miller, The Path of Celtic Prayer (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007), p. 96

A sturdy and relentless theology of Creation, aka cosmology, is crucial right now. We need to stop arguing differences, to appreciate both diversity AND the wholeness of God’s creating. We need to do this in order to collaborate to save our one small unit of divine cosmic creativity. Such a perspective has been present in the Celtic tradition for centuries, as the above prayer illuminates.

Hearing the Creation story in Genesis always gives me a spiritual boost. It’s majestic, bold, and grand—a poem of overwhelming inclusivity and diversity. We pay lip service to diversity, yet it terrifies us. Still, God potentiated all this Wonder, culminating in beings made in the divine image—humanity.

BUT . . . did Godde create a hierarchy of being? Humanity immediately fell prey to such a notion and acted on it—men at the top, of course. All religions downsized Creation's wholeness and rank-ordered humanity and all other matter for the sake of power and control. Some things good and others bad. God's idea was that ALL of it was GOOD. This can't be said enough. 

Later in my studies I fell in love with Irenaeus of Lyons’s famous saying: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” I had that phrase calligraphed on the invitation to my ordination to the priesthood.  I still believe it, but thanks in part to the biblical Job I have a new vision. When the faithful Job lost everything he had, except his insistent faith, he prayed—harangued—Godde to answer for the excess of calamity on such a faithful servant. God, more patient than the impatient Job, finally appeared to Job and walked him through the whole of Creation.

Once again awed, I learned that divine creativity was boundless—and ALL of it is the glory of God.

Jesus the Christ preached Love, period. This embrace includes ALL creation. Jesus might be horrified at how exclusive Christians have made his name.

The work of Jewish scholars, like Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, is essential to make us aware that we Christians do not need to buy into anti-Jewish translations of scripture, or Christian chauvinism, in order to assure the uniqueness of our Jesus.

As I approach my ninth decade, my body warns, “maybe not” while my mind says, “yes you can!” I slow down, take time to observe as much as I can. I relish the small things more than ever—all good, all Glory, all God.
    -A tiny ant makes its way along the edge of my home altar, stopping occasionally to wave its sensory antennae before it crawls up to join Jesus on the cross—a wise and foolish ant.
    -A frantic squirrel nibbles at the edge of a discarded sandwich crust. Alert, it drops the crust and dashes to a perch in a nearby tree. Five minutes later the squirrel returns, knows exactly where that crust has dropped, retrieves it, and resumes its “communion.”
    -A small boy speeds on his scooter down the hill in the playground; he is thrilled; his dad sees he will be unable to stop before he reaches the edge of the trafficked road ahead. Dad dashes.
    -A baby in church practices her newly discovered extended squeal—a siren of praise.
    -The redbud tree in our yard bursts into bloom, its bare branches popping with dark pink blossoms. They weren’t there yesterday.

Godde, save us from exceptionalism: Christian, human, even American. Glorificamus Te for  the whole shebang.
     

2015.10.04 Go With the Flow—Or Against it.

Have you ever been scorned for going against the flow, doing or saying something different from the ways things are going or the way everyone else is behaving? I’m sure most of us have had such an experience.

Yesterday we attended a workshop: Now and At The Hour Of Our Death: Medical Decision Making At The End Of Life. It was led by Episcopal Deacon, Daphne Noyes, and Christine Gryglik, R.N.  I am grateful for the huge packet of resources I came away with. Death is no easy project! There’s lots to do to make sure your dying is, well, sort of in control.

More deeply I’m grateful to feel accompanied by a laughing and loving faith community, all of whom will die. Me too. Just to know you’re not alone is enough to face death with dignity and carry no assumptions about anything,  no matter how many plans you make………..  Oh yes.

When we left I felt disgruntled and irritated and as if I already knew and had done most of this stuff— all sure signs that I was plain scared and pretending not to be. Denial in tow, however, we headed straight to CVS to get flu shots and updates on the latest pneumonia vaccine. It helped. I even wanted a lolly pop to reward my bold effort to grab life for all its worth, which is considerable.

Thanks to the science of physics, about which I know very little,  I know that occasionally something completely random and unpredictable happens to make the word “inevitable” near obsolete.  It make us sit up and take notice. It is when a whirlwind suddenly gets whirled in a new direction—a brief moment when things do swirl back against the flow.

Current popular wisdom consistently advises: Go WITH the flow. I’m lousy at that. I wonder if God makes counter swirls?

The teenager’s room won’t pick itself up, so you do it yourself, out of despairing smoldering rage. It takes less energy than nagging without results. Same thing applies to trying to get someone to stop destroying their life with an addiction. A counter swirl happens when the teen does it herself, without complaint, without being asked and then keeps on doing it week after week. It happens when the addict chooses abstinence, from whatever the substance or behavior of choice is, and can’t tell you precisely how that choice was made. Usually they can cite numbers of factors, none of them governing the exact moment of turning against the expected flow.

Some people call such Mystery moments the grace of God, or a miracle. That’s what my mother called my birth after three miscarriages. I went with the God part and rejected miracle status.

Such events seem to reverse the law of physics which says that energy ever seeks lower levels flowing from more ordered states to disorder, dispersing over time. It’s called entropy and comes form the Greek en (inside) + trope (transformation).

Transformation, ironically, is a powerful and positive word in the field of theology. In the Bible, and other religious scriptures, God is seen as a creative force, a restorer of order, a reverser of entropy from within chaos, often not in ways we can predict. The Christian idea of Resurrection, the transformation of death into new life, is one such example. I rather like it.

Inner transformation, change of heart, is what faithful people seek and pray for, as in the transformation of the inner chaos of addictive disease, mental illness, climate change, patterns of social violence such as we are experiencing right now in America with arbitrary gun violence and deaths of innocent citizens in the absence of laws that would regulate gun purchase and restrict gun use to hunting and sport. Faithful people pray AND write their congressional representatives asking them to craft such legislation.

Things are spinning out of control. Who will dare to initiate a counter spin? Who will dare to spin the current political paralysis in a new direction?  Who will defiantly thrive? It will take sacrifice.

Think of the image of a whirlwind. Meteorologically, a whirlwind is a complex chaotic system suggesting not pure chaos but rather the turbulent emergence of complexity at the edge of chaos. 

Now think of the story of Job in the Bible. It is a story of Job's suffering, supposedly at the hand of God, but clearly having nothing to do with the sufferer’s integrity, faith or character. Job begs God for answers about his suffering and gets none. He spins in a unidirectional whirlwind of moral, spiritual, emotional, and physical pain—unconsoled and with no answers about his plight and God’s refusal to address his grievance.

And yet………..Job does get something. He gets a strong vision and very strong spiritual experience of the divine presence which speaks to him right out of a whirlwind. In his vision, God escorts Job throughout all Creation, wonder by stunning wonder. Job is awestruck, both by the breadth of the vision, by how little he knows, and by the intimacy of the divine Presence at his side. Job is spun in a new direction and is invited to go on with his life in spite of all his losses. To put it in a mundane way, Job gets an entirely new perspective on life and is freed from his OCD panic. We do not know how or why, just what.

Job’s story is symbolic, yet it is so true to most earthly experience that it feels literal, historic. Job’s story is not just about suffering. It tells us, as does Jesus’s story, that there is a God who speaks out of whirlwinds and makes counter swirls.   

Oh Godde, I know you don’t dole out death and illness, but I’m putting in my request anyway for more good years of life—specifically I want my eyesight, most of my hearing, and most of my mind—oh and my fingers to type with.  Intervene with a counter swirl if  you want to. Thanks for listening. Amen.

2014.03.02 Whirlwind Theology

Have you ever wondered if Godde was in the whirlwind as much as in the still, small voice? Ever thought of God as chaos? Oh no, God is order and harmony! God subdues chaos. God speaks, and presto!—there are firmaments, stars, all kinds of vegetation, critters galore, and finally the piece de resistance: Us!  Ta daaa!

That’s what I grew up believing. Chaos is bad, but luckily, God always brings good order out of bad chaos. It was not until, what do they call this age?— my ripening years, that I questioned that view. What if chaos were not endemically bad?

I said this once in an EfM group and a friend who later was ordained priest had a strong reaction. In fact she exclaimed loudly, “Oh no. God brings order out of chaos. Chaos is not good at all.” I shut up. I could understand her point of view as a recovering addict. AA often turns God’s name into an acronym standing for G(ood) O(rderly) D(irection).

So there!  Yes, but.......does that mean Matter is endemically bad and Spirit is its remedy? 

The Rev. Martin Smith on a recent retreat spoke of the “new gnosticism.” He meant the dualism,  between matter and spirit: the all good and all-powerful Spirit and the all-bad, inferior helpless, if not formless matter. Smith announced provocatively, “I preach Materiality.”

I have preached relationship theology. On odd Mondays I get fearful that I’m arrogant, making humanity near-equal with divinity. Humanity and divinity are not equal or the same, yet there is an up close and personal connection—like a mutuality of desire working together. Sometimes, however, I think we humans assume that our own will is very far from, if not opposed to, Godde’s will. I wonder. My essential will is that I may be as healthy, life-engaged, and full of compassion as I can be for as long as I may live. God’s will? Likely the same as mine for myself. You?

One could get all ego-centric about this symbiosis, but beware. The view of opposing wills and desires sets up a dangerous and false split between spirit (all good and all-powerful, named God) and matter (formless and worthless in itself, named Man...nary a woman in sight). Over time in religious traditions and beyond, God became masculine and superior, and Matter became feminine and inferior. This is ungodly politics, and for an ungodly number of centuries. 

Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University, in her book, The Face of the Deep, A Theology of Becoming, makes a well-supported case that biblical creation is a beginning. The beginning is a relationship between the heavenly/up-there and the earthly/down-here that will evolve and unfold in many complex ways over time. Matter matters.

I'd say we are not divine, but we are divinely equipped to stay in this chaotic relationship.

Novelist Chaim Potok began his novel, In The Beginning, “All beginnings are hard.” Well no kidding! Remember your first day of school, first date, first cooking disaster, first realization that your kindergarten teacher actually went to the bathroom, first experience with death? My first labor pain, my first birthing, my first book. A friend of mine remembers the first time a date exposed himself (flashed it all)— his “subtle” way of asking if she wanted sex. At 12, she was so appalled at the sight she threw up all over the poor guy, and his member.

If, as Keller and other scholars suggest, evolving life is dynamic—an always-unfolding process of non-linear multi-dimensionality. We have a model of perpetual becoming—a theology of becoming. I find this appealing and scary.  Is nothing secure? Who is in charge in this model of permanent becoming?  It feels like a whirlwind—all churned up. 

A whirlwind? Wait.........didn’t Godde speak to the biblical Job out of a whirlwind? Yes! Job wanted to know where the heck God was while he, a good righteous man, suffered and spun in the torment of his own pain and fear. And the Lord spoke finally to Job out of a whirlwind. I’ll be damned! My relational line of thought wasn't half bad. But a whirlwind?

“Whirlwinds in meteorology are complex chaotic systems that suggest not pure chaos but rather turbulent emergence of complexity at the edge of chaos.”   

Complexity emergent, just the beginning of something new—all the time? So chaos is not pure, eh? So this is how Spirit and Matter interact? 

Listen up! The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

2013.07.14 Ask the Beasts: Spirituality and the Evolving Earth

“Ask the beasts and they will teach you;
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth an they will teach you;
           and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among those does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing,
    and the breath of every human being.”  (Job 12:7-10) 

Yesterday at Boston College I heard a brilliant talk by Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, professor of theology at Fordham. She used as her biblical text the above passage from the biblical book of Job.

Poor old Job, impatient for a change in traditional theological thought and having to suffer further because of righteous friends who kept insisting that his sufferings and loss must be divine retribution. Just search your soul, confess, repent and be right with God, they said. 

NO, NO, NO said Job, you’re full of claptrap. I did NOT cause my misfortunes. I am innocent. Just ask the beasts—and every living thing. (This means plants, animals and people—all)

So how do all these living things answer? 
    Their science story: We all evolved over 3.5 billion years. We are all connected in a grand molecular/biological schema on a tree of life and continue to modify, branch and diversify in order to grow and multiply. The more diversified we become the more success each species will have in life.  One beast has evolved with no diversification—the horseshoe crab. One plant the same—the jingo tree. Some of us, of course, will die out.
    Their theology story: We all owe our origins in existence to God. God will transform us into a new creation, a future of life with God who never abandons. Most importantly, God sustains us moment to moment—creatio continua. This is the Tree of Life, home of every living thing.

Johnson's core point was that all living things evolve, thrive in the same intricately connected ecological web, and are in the hand of God/the Lord—now and forever.  Divine creativity is active all the time or there would be no world! AND, "pay attention to biology!"

In ancient times science and religion agreed on these convergences. Darwin was a faithful scientist, a beholder of every living thing. Unlike some righteous religionists (like Job's friends) Darwin shined praises on the minutiae of biological life in a way that brought about his theory of evolution.

He wrote "...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." He marveled that the bone structure of the human hand (for grasping), the mole’s paw (for digging), the fish’s fin (for paddling), and the bird’s wing (for flying) are all exactly the same skeletally. 

So what happened?  The history is too much for me to go into here, but you might say the same hubris that motivated the putative apple caper in Eden caused humanity to forget that it was only ONE species among every living thing that God held in hand.  We placed ourselves at the top of an ascendancy scale. We're still doing it! Recently the Occupy Movement made witness to such hubris.  Johnson's case, however, was that we humans have left every living thing except ourselves behind, discounted, outside of our concern and God's as well. 

How will we heal this rending?  Ironically, by not paying so much attention to sin and the spiritual state of our own narcissistic souls and looking out the window at the whole order of which we are one part. "LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!!" Johnson said. "We need a robust pneumtology."

It is She, the Holy Spirit who in our Christian Nicene Creed is called "the giver of life." The Latin words mean vivifier.  I can't resist commenting here that I would so love it if we could at least stop referring to the Holy Spirit as HE in the creed. Please! Three men on top—too much. 

Tears came to my eyes more than once as Johnson talked about the Spirit— the spiritual radiance of  plants and animals as well as human beings. 

LOOK OUT THE WINDOW. LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF NATURE. GET OVER YOURSELF.

A few irresistible wise tidbits that beg to be heard:
    -Creation is a cosmic event.
    -Deep Incarnation means that God in the flesh goes beyond Jesus' flesh, even beyond human flesh,  and into the flesh of the whole natural living world—every living thing again. Flesh ( Greek sarx)  means everything that is vulnerable, perishable, fragile and transitory. That's the whole enchilada.  
    -The Exultet Christians chant at the Easter Vigil begins with: Rejoice all earth...(not all humanity)
    -The extinction of a species means the end of birth (Darwin) 27,000 species are lost each year!  We are a species!
    -For Christians: Jesus is made of the same molecular dust as we all are. In Christ’s resurrection the earth itself arose. Resurrection redeems from DEATH, not just sin!
    - Birds have the power to fly; for the ancients birds went where humans couldn’t reach, so the bird, symbol of the Goddess of Love, became the symbol for the the divine Spirit in both testaments of the Bible.
    -There are two bibles: Nature and Scripture
   
If the Church is too tied into the resources of corporate wealth to divest from fossil fuel investments, then the Church is irrelevant and voiceless, as mostly it has been already.  (NB the United Church of Christ has just voted to divest, and so did the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.)
 “If you push for such things, you may end up despised,” Johnson said with a compelling grin.

When I went home I rushed to Genesis and back to the Garden of Eden. I knew all about the good and evil morality tree whose fruit was death.  But wasn’t there another special tree?  

YES.... in Genesis 3:22: the tree of life. The story gives us a glimpse no more of an opportunity for humanity “to reach out his/her hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 

We can perpetuate the schema of the great Darwinian/ biblical Tree of All Life.  The beasts and all green life ask no less of us than to act now to save the earth, to help God’s creatio continua.

Is NOW the time to reach with all our might and wit and resources for that tree of life and save all earth—and ourselves with it?

IF NOT NOW, WHEN?