2023.01.15 A First Waking, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

So much of what we all hear and see in the news, from our pulpits, and in our biblical stories is basically: WAKE UP people. WE gotta change. There are differing definitions and interpretations about what that change should be, but it’s pretty clear to me that the change is internal, changes of hearts, in the flesh—not rioting and street violence. This is a very tall order given our differences and our attachments to individualISM and INdependence.  For this change we gotta include ALL Mama Earth. We gotta do it IN the flesh. And we gotta include GOD, by every name known.  

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Birthing comes to my mind, specifically, birthing my first child—flesh of my flesh— and my own first-time realization of the power of my own uterus to push life itself from the dark inner womb into the glare of the light of the world. This process was full of excruciating pain and shock for mother and child, and it is I think too glib, or at least it is for me, to toss aside or minimize the impact of the monumental change that takes place at birth.  It can only be completed in and by a woman’s flesh. My husband was present, standing by, watching me groan and howl and push with all my might—for hours, eternity I thought. In this joint creative effort, he got all the pleasure, and I did the work.  

Of course I was overjoyed with my amazing 8 lbs 13 oz squalling infant daughter. I was also terrified, partly at teeny undershirts and huge diaper pins (1963, no Pampers), and partly at the commitment to being a good mother, which meant losing my independence. Yes, I chose that vocation, and yes, often I failed and flailed, and no, I do not regret the ongoing painful intimacy of loss and joy motherhood brings.    

In giving of your own flesh you simultaneously lose the control you thought you had in the running of your embodied life. Child-bearing, more than marriage or vocation, or any other vowed bodily commitment, means signifiant loss of independence—freely undertaken, usually though not always.  The only way to live with this loss is to weep, and in the tears find the necessary lubrication to see Beauty, just as God as Creator shows the biblical heckler, Job: Look. Take it in. All this creation I accomplished without you and for you!! This is where it’s at.

Such profound change is both brilliant with hope and frightening with challenge—all at once.  All I could do was follow my heart and love my dear daughter to the best of my ability. For her, coming into life was the trauma and shock of Being itself, first the slap and scream, then the cleansing, then at last a warm, womb-simulating blanket, in this case pink, and finally her mother’s arms and breasts. (There was no advice on nursing in 1963, and my equipment wasn’t equipped enough. Not wanting to starve my daughter, I fed her with bottled formula, which she loved.) In time there was Baptism in which a big man took her out of my arms (kidnapped), tried to drown her with water (Baptism), then called her “Christ’s own forever” while a whole congregation clapped, and cameras flashed. Shocking! 

From Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet:  On baptisms: ”Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you they belong not to you.”    

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As limited as my personal analogy may be, I imagine that God experiences this ongoing entire mix of pain and joy in giving birth to all life, sharing the divine nature with every living thing, all of which, comically and expectedly, goes instantly out of control. But that’s the point and the purpose isn’t it?  The only way to live with such loss is to weep, and in the tears find the necessary lubrication to see—and love— Abundant Beauty.    

God gives God’s own life into Creation, and in this act of radical sharing relinquishes control over project Life. The best definition of the nature of God I learned from Anglican priest/theologian, John Macquarrie who described God this way:  

     

GOD IS LETTING-BE AND DRAWING-NEAR.       

Just Say Yes, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 8/21/22

There are many ways to be “bent.”

The New Testament story on the healing of the bent woman is compelling. I once suggested to a friend who was riddled with arthritis and, yes, bent, that she pray with this story. I suggested that she read it slowly and carefully, then imagine herself in the story as Jesus calls for her to come forth from the shadows into the light. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Not really,” I said. She did not believe me. I wondered about myself, too. 

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In this story, Jesus was teaching in the synagogue. This fact signals us that it was the Sabbath, and he, the Rabbi, was teaching listeners wisdom for life. Nevertheless, Jesus interrupted himself, and in an almost nonchalant way, called this woman, bent double and unable to straighten herself, crippled for eighteen years, to come towards him.  Are you crazy?—she must have thought, but it all happened so fast. She approached, he touched her and told her to stand up straight. She stood.

Such stories are unbelievably shocking, even scary. And yet, our desire to believe them is intense. The woman herself does not thank him, or apologize for being a nuisance—on the Sabbath no less. She simply gives thanks to God. That’s all. Is that enough? 

Yes, it is enough. 

*  *  *  *

But no! Onlookers start a FIGHT!  Jesus broke a rule—healing on the Sabbath, The Sabbath is to be sacred for God alone. Well, who do they think created this miracle?  Who in this story is “bent”?  

They then, and we now, fight about miracles, about Jesus being God or a phony actor, about her condition being God’s fault or will, about it being her own fault in some way, (or today, some would say it was her childhood trauma), about the authenticity of scripture itself, about Luke’s political agenda trying to persuade the Gentiles about Jesus’s godliness by making it all up. 

I think that the very worst perspective on this or any miracle is to override its splendor with self-aggrandizement: Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. In other words, I did something wrong that qualified me for a miracle. Bad me. This habit of self-deprecation is common, and it is anti-theistic, leaving little or no room for divine action, no matter how that comes, no matter how dark, how sinful. How much almighty energy will it take to break through such sinister pride? It takes a miracle!  

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And even when such a miracle takes place we often take the credit for it, as if we ourselves had created this miracle‚ by “fighting” no less. Our language is revealing. The poet Ocean Vuong in his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, wonders about the overuse of warrior language for everything: “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?" Vuong asks. Instead we use violent language, as Vuong notes, citing some reactions from his fans: You killed that poem. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph., I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party. “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knocking ‘em dead.” 

Even in the biblical story violence erupts. They can’t believe the bent woman is straight, so the onlookers start a FIGHT—about rule-breaking for the sake of a bent old woman, no less. And we too, alas, remain addicted to the need for explanations, preferably our own, and yes, violence in word and deed.

Who in this story is bent? 

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What to do? Well, do not go passive or give up in the face of impossible adversity. Even the dictionary tells us that the word “miracle” comes from the  Latin root mirari, to wonder. If you are able, find ways to join WITH—co-operate—using your natural gifts, medical care, therapeutic help, friends, family, prayer, whatever is creative for you—including the unexpected, WITH an inexplicable miracle when it happens. God, it turns out, transcends science, logic, reason, fights, religion, politics, ritual, even our love and prayer. So just wonder.

The best definition of “miracle” I’ve ever encountered, is one offered by Anglican theologian and priest, John MacQuarrie (1917-2007), pictured below: “A miracle is something we are grateful for.”  Simply so. 

So rejoice!  Something incredibly good, small, unforeseen, inexplicable, eccentric, impossible, yes, miraculous, will happen. Just say yes.

And, because there’s no one worldly source, including yourself, to thank, thank God as the bent woman did with her prayers. Then straighten up and walk on. 

    

2015.02.22 Anita

“You gotta see this great new movie we just saw last night. It’s 'Anita,' a terrific docudrama about her story up to today, narrated by her voice.”

“Mom, you’re obsessed with Anita Hill!” 

 “You’re right. But she’s one of my heroes.” 

Obsession might be too strong a word, but close. I suppose my daughter remembered when her mother sat glued to the TV in 1991 listening to Hill tell her truth to the “hill.” And her mother is still talking about it. Then it was a brave new thing for a woman to do. It still is.

It’s sweetly ironic that three of my most valued heroes are black women:
    -Rosa Parks (1913-2005), the quiet woman/civil rights activist, who, in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, refused the bus driver’s order to give up her seat in the black section of the bus to a white passenger, and catapulted a movement, already in the wings, onto the national stage. There are no rights without duties, and Parks didn’t do her “duty” and was arrested.

     - the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, first Anglican woman bishop in the world, consecrated in 1989 as Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts, who, though urged to do so, refused to wear a bulletproof vest and jumped-started the institutional church into its next right move toward gender equality. A comment, about a contraption like the vest doing nothing for a woman’s physique, has been attributed to Harris. If she didn’t say it, she probably thought it.

      -Anita Hill, attorney and retired professor at Brandeis Law School, who, when summoned in 1991, agreed to testify before the Senate confirmation hearings to approve Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice. Hill told the truth about being harassed by her one-time boss, and gave rise to the issue we now call sexual harassment.

 

 Thomas was voted in by a narrow margin, but many women took up the cry for justice with vigor and humor. Pat Schroeder ( House Representative from Colorado, 1973-1997) captured the question and the quest: “How can you be a congresswoman and a mother? I have a uterus and a brain. I use both.”)

 Damn, I wish I’d said that to the church when I was questioned about being a mother and a priest!

I don’t know why my three chief women heroes are African American. I certainly admire any and all women feminist pioneers in the movement for gender equality, an issue which, to me, supplants and overrides all the particularized divisions we fight over (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.)

It may be that these stories, such a stretch for my well-honed white Anglo-Saxon privilege, made me weep, touched my heart so deeply that I knew that this was the stuff of everlasting heroism, something to follow. I call such heroics, spirituality: when something taps into my core, where I believe God dwells, and makes me explode. Pow!  Then I shout or write or turn activist in my way.

I am grateful when I get depth charges, like this. The deeper issue Hill also identifies is gender equality. It was not Anita’s testimony that helped us move forward; it was the public voice that took up the message and kept it alive. “I just made a scene. You all made it a movement.”

True heroism is when the message inside a personal moment of truth bears truth beyond the one who experiences the moment. It’s a pay it forward phenomenon. You can see it in the Hebrew prophets and the gospel messages in the Christian testament. 

Hill speaks about her decision to “leave home” to write her book, Speaking Truth to Power. She had been so traumatized by the harassment (my word) she received from the all-male squirmy panel of senators when she told the truth about experiencing her own sexual harassment from Thomas, that she couldn’t wait to get home.

Home meant the bosom of her large supportive family in which she thrived as the “baby sister,” youngest of thirteen. Home also meant her state: Oklahoma where, she said, white and black culture coexisted in a way that honored the past while simultaneously living into a new kind of future. Home meant she would be cradled, both privately and publicly. Home meant being affirmed, even cheered— and a place to heal.

But home, as necessary as it was to Anita in 1991, couldn’t last. She discovered that it was sheltering, and also limiting—too protective a climate in which to launch a book, advance her academic career in law, social policy and women’s studies up north at Brandeis, and continue to fuel what she had started. (She has written a book on this topic, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. “I found my voice in 1991, and I won’t lose it,” she said.

In one scene, Hill was asked by a tearful member of an audience, “How do you deal with fear, I mean through it?” 

“What caused me to be fearful, my testimony, was the right thing to do,” she answered.

 

How does one know what the right thing to do is? You don’t. There is only conviction with passion—and doubt. It helps if your one voice in the crowd is echoed by other voices from the crowd, even if they are few, and even if they are faint.

One such voice was that of the twelve-year-old daughter of Charles Ogletree, Professor of Law at Harvard. Ogletree was present at the testimony. He supported Hill and had his doubts, too. One evening his daughter called him to say: “Daddy, I’m home watching Anita Hill on TV.”  “You shouldn’t be watching that,” said Daddy.“I know but I am. I just wanted you to know I believe Anita.”

I believed Anita, too. I still believe Anita. It’s hard to watch and listen to her and not believe her. It was harder then to listen to Thomas pulling the racial discrimination card to defend himself as if he were the real victim here. The issue was not race, it was gender! 

I believe in my daughter, who tolerates my obsession, and who is a gifted lobbyist for legislative justice for labor. I sense her conviction about justice is more than a job.

I call the film, 'Anita'  a miracle unfolding. The late Anglican theologian, the Rev. John Macquarrie defined a miracle as something unstoppable that happens for which we feel surprised and grateful.  Or . . .I wonder?  Could a miracle also be something God is doing all along but of which we suddenly become aware—and appreciative.

We know a lot more about gender equality than we did in 1991, Hill said. “We are on the verge of something monumental. Now I can retire.”

2013.01.30 God Is Paradox

Karen Armstrong, noted scholar, former nun, and religious historian and theologian, once said in a talk, something like: “Where there is paradox, there is always God."  I thought that seemed true, because my experience is that when two things that don’t easily go together come together to awaken and surprise, it startles me alive. But I wondered why God couldn’t just be straightforward. 

I have found out, by hard experience and plain accident, that whenever I let go of trying to possess God, I find God. For example, I prayed frantically to be ordained, and that God would work on bishops. I was so importunate that I finally heard God say, in sweet exasperation, “Lyn, I don’t care if you’re ordained.” Set me right, and set me free.

Now I am praying with some importunity that I will finish and order my memoir, first, and then that it will get published. One blear day it occurred to my overly conscientious mind that this memoir might be simply another one in a long life-line of achievements I’ve amassed to feed my ambition and esteem.  The thought was so upsetting that I took it to prayer, worrying that I'd turned my spiritual journey, maybe God too, into a notch in my ego's belt. 

And God, when I confessed, said: “So?”

So what, indeed!  God's power is in humility—not control. Sister Wendy Beckett, artist and theologian, says” “Some Gods are worth letting go of.”  The omnipotent God is worth letting go of.  Anglican theologian John MacQuarrie’s metaphor for Divinity is Letting-Be. I love that.

In the beginning of Genesis, God’s choice to create humankind is a self-limiting and paradoxical choice. The Creator God lets go of being God in any traditional sense of that word.  Why?  For the sake of letting-be. God want to be in relationship, more than to control destinies.

I pray for it all anyway, of course, just to keep in touch, as I would with anyone I loved. And always I am strengthened for whatever may come.

We pray for a rescuer and we get a lover.