2023.08.27 WATER, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The hardest thing I remember having to learn when I was a child was how to float—trusting the water to hold me up. This later evolved into a spiritual issue: Could I trust the divine Presence/Higher Power I call God to hold me up? 

Swimming has never been my thing, although as a teen, I did learn how to dive into ocean waves and jump off the high diving board holding my nose. I am not that good a swimmer, although I can manage an old-lady breast stroke across a heated pool, and I passed the college admissions test for entering freshmen (1956) to tread water for 15 minutes without drowning. NO idea what their rationale was! Maybe because there was a pond on campus, and maybe it was the era of crazed and sudden awareness of total fitness, not just intellectual/academic.  

Nevertheless, Beverley, my oldest daughter, now 60, has befriended water and swimming in a big way. She is a master swimmer, and long distance swimming is her sport of choice, as well as her pleasure. She swims across lakes and pools with style and elegance. She trusts the water and her own practiced skills—enough in fact that yesterday she sliced into the cold (58-64 degrees) rough waters surrounding Alcatraz, one-time prison placed on an island in San Francisco Bay to deter escapees from trying to escape and surely drowning. 

Yesterday’s challenge event was called “The Sharkfest Swim”. Swimmers can publicize and ask for sponsorship donations to their favorite charity. Bev chose The Red Cross. We donated in her name. I confess that I engaged in gentle worrying even though I trust Bev’s prowess. I also knew there were rescuers on hand. Bev trusts the water. She was accompanied by her friend Geoffrey Matesky, a heroic man familiar with life challenges. Here they are on the plane. 

After the swim Bev wrote: “I’m going to live the shit out of the rest of the time I have in this life.” Such is the headline on her “bucket list”. After training for eight months, Bev took the plunge. There were 600 other swimmers, kicks in the face, sizable waves, and swallowing lots of salt water—but no fins in sight.  Bev came in fifth in her age group and 127th for all women who swam. 

She swam these choppy waters not to escape to freedom but rather to celebrate the joy of freedom for its own sake. Here she is just after she came to shore. 

This mother’s pride is blooming at her daughter’s athletic prowess—also trembling about what she will take on next. 

I too plan to “live the shit out of the rest of the time I have in this life”—though not in the water.

Grit and grace to us both.   

Racing for Life/Slowing for Life, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 6/11/23

Are we racing to catch up with God? Or, is God racing to catch up with us? Either way, we are usually moving too fast, possibly fueled by anxiety, a very efficient fuel when we were young. And now?  

Small boys and big boys love their cars. Speed, control, daring, and too often crippling and death. 

Jesus is remembered as falling asleep in the midst of a storm when the winds kicked up and the boat wobbled, threatening to capsize? How come he says fear not at such moments?  Does he overdo that message of assurance, advice to trust in God when beset with life’s many “waves”?  How can he imagine that forgiveness of our sins matters when all we need is a good car, cautious teenagers, and a paid mortgage? 

It’s antimony—a truth that defies logic. 

Just remember the little paper plate cars you loved that empowered you. Yes, this energy is still in you, around you, above you, and beneath you, as close to you as your own heartbeat. Listen up. Keep on keeping on. Inside, be the boy with his toy cars. Keep driving, beloved.

Boys and Their Cars

Why do boys love cars?

ejective—boom

projective—zoom

propulsive—vroom

I’ve wondered about this a lot.

Could be anatomy

or e’en the academy

But no.

It’s love on wheels.

It’s speed on speed

It’s vrooming

Zooming

Vroom vroom with paper plates

sweeping clean the kitchen floor

Zing zinging with Matchbox minis

Panicked cries when one goes missing

Is there more?

Ah yes,

it’s freedom beckoning

warring duty’s reckoning

There is more, my love,

Just round the bend.

No hurry

Keep driving 

2023.03.05 Dirge With Hope, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

As one whose years are ebbing, I’m grateful that I do NOT have to huddle and fold up, wintry in soul, even though I could receive, if I wished, receive daily ashes to remind me to be humble daily. Soul does not age. Soul simply unfolds. And the dusty path stretches on before me. 

I know people who are struggling to let go of life. It is a life-long natural inclination to grasp for life always. Consider the tiny flowers that manage to grow up against all odds between the concrete seams in a sidewalk or path. I too can be born again and again. 

I pray that God, as Burns suggests, will “assist me to resign” when it is time for me to relinquish this life I have known and still cling to. I will resist. I will weep. I will pray.  I will hug and cling. And I will trust,  just like the birds who awaken me each day as they start their song in the darkness before the sun rises.

WINTER DIRGE   by Robert Burns    

The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,
The joyless winter-day,
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!

Thou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want (O, do Thou grant
This one request of mine!)
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,

Assist me to resign.    

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.  

*  *  *  *

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.”    

*  *  *  *

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.       

2021.05.16 Spring Forth

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.         

                   Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was a short-lived (1844-1889) and short-of-stature Jesuit priest and English poet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He suffered with various depressive disorders, I’d dare call serious right-brainism. He struggled with what he thought was the conflict between his poetic expansiveness and the rigors of humility he felt his religious vocation demanded. Although his life in years was short, his poetry made up for it with a long, if not eternal, lifespan.                

                                 *  *  *  *  

Nothing is so cruel as the brevity of Spring.  As soon as its luxuriant blossoms have burst in full—a feast, a pallet worthy of only one divine Creator’s artistry—they fall to the ground. Rakes, efficient and painful, dispose and depose.

It’s a short reign this precious lifetime—with plenty of sin and sadness, crime and punishment. Choose it all—one tiny bright effulgent blossom at a time. Live it all—one tick of a second hand, one thump-thump of a heartbeat, one tear drop, one death, one breath, deep pure or wheezy raspy—one, one, one, one day at a time.  

I am privileged, being white, middle-wealthy and all, but my privilege is not what makes me happy. I am happy because there is Godde and prayer, and because I love. Love sighs, reaches fingertips, and heaves beside me in bed. Love cracks bold jokes, remembers my dusty pink voice, rages with me at institutional torpor and bad theology, argues vociferously as well.

Love is also within a short drive’s distance, forgiving and passing on more love, all the way down the line to a small boy who makes sure his daddy knows that learning to read is “just not interesting,” and besides, interrupts his play time. Furthermore, he asserts that he did talk in class despite no-talk rules, because, after all, if someone talks to you, you should talk back, right, Daddy?   

Passing on life to life to life to life. That is privilege. That is love. That is Godde. That is One— + one + one+ one—forever and forever.