ADVENT. Who Is She? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 12/11/22

 All it takes is one—some ONE—to start a social/religious/political/cultural transformation, to break long-held patterns of behavior, our “ways” we say. 

This happens when all their stories are told—and retold.  

Of particular interest to me are the stories of biblical women who—ONE by ONE—  mightily influenced the course of Creation. 

Consider Eve, the woman who, drawn by natural curiosity, reached for the forbidden fruit in Eden and started what? She was the first women’s libber/ribber/fibber. Adam of course followed eagerly, looking innocent.  

The late American writer, Joan Didion, once wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It is the stories in the Holy Bible that keep us alive and fascinated with the Mystery of this Divinity of many names—too many for any one religion to own. 

Laurie Metcalf, a movie actor, commented recently about how important the work of a good director, in this case Greta Gerwig, was in helping actors see and understand fully the character they were playing and the story surrounding that character—not just acting out a role. “That clicked with me in a way that was rare. That made it so real to me. It was the first time I was playing a fictional character where I actually was able to think of it as a real woman.” (N.Y Times, Sunday Styles, 12/4/22)   

Would the same not apply to biblical characters whose stories are not fiction, nor biography, but exemplary stories, told to highlight moral and spiritual meaning. Are they true? Yes. Are they literal fact? No. Are they stunningly beautiful even if painful? Yes. They are Schadenfreude—German word built on a combination of shaden (harm or damage) + freud (joy). It is usually understood to mean joy/rejoicing at someone’s else’s misfortune, like secretly gloating at your win or another’s loss as if you deserved all that praise. But what if the power of the joy of ONE could overwhelm the harm altogether? 

I recall a favorite New Testament exam or class question: Who founded Christianity, Jesus, Paul, or John the Baptist?  

What about Mary? 

There was no right or wrong answer to this question, of course. In a God-school exam one had to become an attorney for the defense, or the defensive. I voted for Jesus, thinking that was the obvious right answer for a Christian. But resentment coiled painfully around my gut: Didn’t there have to be a beginning to the beginning? Women, after all, naturally bleed for life— not for war. I filled with bloody joy when I suddenly realized in the deep dark depths of my own body and blood that a woman had to be indispensable to any divine project—Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection—in life and in death, especially one of enough magnitude to save this whole fractured cosmos. 

Who was this ONE in the Bible? Mary. She, with pain and fear and courage, started this Christian faith, this Christmas tradition, this Incarnation, this Christ. She bled for it. 

She was the ONE who labored  in pain and cried for joy. Now we all sing, “Joy To The World” with gusto. 

2020.08.02 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal History, Part Eight. Mattering.

It was THE SIXTIES. I was 21. Who decided I was an adult at 21?  I certainly didn’t feel of age inside. I felt unready for the world. I should, I thought, be doing something activist about Civil Rights. I should march or protest or demonstrate. Shouldn’t I? Perhaps, but—first I should go to Spain. I had been awarded a Danforth Fellowship—money for graduate education, an investment in my future as a teacher of Spanish. I needed more than classroom Spanish. I should be with people who spoke real Spanish, like it was their first language. I found two families—one in Madrid and one in Santander—willing to house a college graduate at reasonable rates over six weeks in the summer. I stuffed a huge suitcase with my whole wardrobe—or at least everything my mother told me would make me both “presentable,” her favorite word, and sexy, my favorite word.  Who knew what I’d need? Who I’d meet? Off I went—terrified.

In one way I was escaping into the world of cultural expansion that my scholarship demanded, and in another way I was pursuing something else. What? 

Chapter XXI.  Job

On the long flight I read a little, stared out the tiny window, ate my snacks, and slept—sort of.  When nervous I often would try to think of a biblical character who felt like I did. How did they fare? What mattered most? What did God want?

The ancient tale of Job popped in and out of my mental musings. Annoyed, I tried to push Job away. I wanted something soothing, and sweet, and loaded with certainty. Job, plagued by loss, illness and trauma, ceaselessly badgered God, and all his friends and family, about his righteousness rights. He’d been good, so did he not deserve a life free of suffering? Didn’t God, being divine and all, have a duty to explain divine policy?  Job’s wife suggested he curse God and die—not such a bad option, I thought. All Job’s friends and experts of the day offered justifications for traditional righteousness theology: Job must have done something bad to deserve his suffering. But Job would have none of it.

All this was very far from my own experience—but not far from my emotional state. I’d been faithful and tried to follow the traditional and expected ways of my day, yet I felt torn. I had no great sufferings like Job, but like Job, I wanted God to show me the absolute right way. Honestly, it felt again like wanting my birthday party and wanting Carol Lee to be there—both. I could not have both. Both mattered equally.

I mentally marked all the details of Job’s protest, so I could return to them. But right now the plane was preparing to land. They announced the time. It was early morning. I set my watch. I rehearsed in my mind how I would, in flawless Spanish, ask directions for a taxi to take me to my Madrid address.

I closed my eyes and suddenly laughed inside: God did listen to Job’s kvetching, did not solve Job’s moral dilemma, but did  show up to parade Job all through the Creation—a huge panorama of  wonders, all living things, even a leviathan. I didn’t know what that was, but it was big. 

A grand vision like that satisfies religious types—like me and Job. Apparently Job himself mattered more to God than all Job’s woes.

Donde está la linea de pasajeros por  . . .   Right this way, Miss.
    

Chapter  XXII  Qué hay?   

What’s up? That was my favorite expression in colloquial Spanish. What’s up? It covered a multitude of not-knowing-what-to-say moments, such as an invitation from a married man to join him in bed.  Qué hay? I said, feigning ignorance. I added in broken Spanish that in las USA we did not do such things—a giant falsehood and myself a prude, but it worked. The man receded.

In Spain I encountered ‘those Catholics’ on steroids. Everyone was named some version of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, or all three. I spent more time kneeling on unpadded wooden kneelers than I wished. I learned traditional prayers in Spanish.

In Madrid, my host home wasn’t ready for me when I arrived so I stayed at a daughter’s house. Her overweight husband sweated profusely hauling my huge suitcase up two flights of stairs in their apartment. I felt uncomfortably American. I made it to my host home in a couple of days where the Señora welcomed me with abrazos. There I encountered a Smithie, another daughter in the family who adopted me, and a son named Paco, a nickname for Francisco, who dragged me to a bull fight.

Madrid is a beautiful city. Like most European cities it has large plazas where people gather for chats and drinks. In las USA we squish every ounce of concrete sidewalk together—no public space for social time. I learned to order cerveza (beer) and Cuba libre (rum and coke).

In Madrid, I gained weight. I didn’t realize that the main meal, which was as late as 10 p.m., consisted of three courses. The chicas or chachas (young girl maid-servants) kept removing plates from each place at the table, and moving other plates in, salad last. I loved it all and ate it all. When I went home I was almost the size of my bloated suitcase. I had, as my mother instructed, bought a mantilla in case I got married, and planned a strict diet.

In Santander (a town in northern Spain, and now the name of my bank), the Señora (there was no Señor) clapped loudly to summon everyone to the table for prayers. I learned to pray to Mary which felt strangely liberating. She was taking on flesh. I still say the Hail Mary every day in Spanish in my own prayers. God wasn’t constrained by gender, or at least, the spiritual energy generated for Mary was as much or more than the energy generated for the He-God.

I fell in love with a young man named Pépe, a nickname for José. He wanted me to stay. I thought my Spanish wasn’t good enough—a lie to protect my self-uncertainty. I cried all the way home on the plane.

In Spain I grew. There in this Catholic country I felt the immense capacity of God to imbue every wooden pew, every precious prayer, with I didn’t know what. But I was pretty sure that God did not create a one-size-fits-all universe. Who was I to decide that someone didn’t fit, including myself?  My image of God stretched beyond race, gender, and nationality.

While I was in Spain my mother wrote me letters about what a nice boy Bill Brakeman was. She took him out to lunch. She was plotting my future. It was impossibly controlling, but I was leaning this way myself. I wanted the kind of intimacy that only a family of one’s own can give. Besides, Bill Brakeman was an Episcopalian and my type, and Job, in the end, got a new wife and kids. 

When I came home my mother asked me what Spaniards were like. I thought for a minute and said: "People are people, Mom, the same the world over." It was a bit naive but nonetheless true.

2019.02.10 Three LIttle Words—Silently or Aloud

According to song and poetry, love is a many-splendored thing. Love is all you need. Love makes the world go round. Love, according to the Bible, is a divine commandment: Love God and then love your neighbor as yourself. (I would say love your neighbor AND yourself.) Love is stronger than death sings the biblical poet in the Song of Songs. It is love between us that heals and saves.

When I was a kid the first love-talk I got was from God. I was a toddler curious and curiouser. I set out on my own. My mother’s brand of hovering loving threatened to drown me, and my father’s loving silence to erase me. My mother had told me I was a gift from God who loved me. What kind of love was God’s? In a sanctuary of my own making under a large dining room table I chattered silently and aloud until I knew I mattered. This experience I named God: silent, invisible, wordless, powerful—the hum underlying my very existence. God listened without critique or demand. 

I love you is God.

On the day of my ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church in 1988, my husband of two years, also a priest, preached the sermon. I was afraid at first to ask him, because this day was so subjective. Did he have the objectivity to do a sermon? Did I have enough emotional control to listen without a faint or a gush of tears? 

The theme of the day wasn’t me or my ordination. It was the angelic Annunciation to Mary that she’d get pregnant with a kid who’d take the world by storm, a son! I was not going to take anything by storm, nor was I going to have more children at my age. But, like Mary, I was terrified that someone or something might mess up this day. I wanted to flee.

I tried to persuade Dick to tell me what he was going to say, but no go. When he got up to preach I hoped he wouldn’t look at me, so I put my head down. Dick does not usually look directly at people when he preaches but away so he can manage his thoughts without a manuscript. I thought I’d be safe from emotions. But when I heard his voice I had to look up. He looked right into me and almost through me as he spoke. I do not remember a thing he said, which sounds insulting, but it is not too dramatic to say this felt like an annunciation moment.  I was locked into his gaze and he into mine, as if we were alone and ready to make love—or already making love.

I love you is a sermon.

Writer V. S. Naipaul writes: “No one cares for your tragedy until you can sing about it." All singing is operatic when you give it your full and best voice while you are caught up in the most dramatic of plots. Writing a memoir is the same. Such powerful singing and writing allows the singer/writer and the listener/reader to fall in love with the tragedy and sing or write it into life everlasting.

I love you is an opera and a memoir.

People gather in church communities to pray. We praise God, listen to biblical wisdom in readings, hymns, prayers, and homilies, leading to a sacramental communion meal called Eucharist. The priest who presides issues an invitation on behalf of Christ:“Lift up your hearts!” We respond: “We lift them to the Lord.” These words connect us with God and each other. They set the tone and put structure around the uncontainable Love that is God.

I love you is community prayer.

As a writer I seek the right words for what I mean. Often they elude me, or too many come at once and I get a pile-up. True confession: I adore adverbs, often condemned, because verbs do the job on their own. Love is a verb—and more.

I love you is adverbial— truly, madly, deeply.

The first time I said I love you I felt instantly terrified and elatedly free. I’d said it before as a teen, but with the manipulative idea that I might get the high school boy I had a crush on to say it back. He didn’t. And with my first love, my first husband, I said it for real, and he said it, and then suddenly it meant sex. I say the three love words often to my children and grandchildren. The short-form “Love you” has its place, but it doesn’t replace all three words together, a carefully complete sentence with profound meaning.  When I say I love you now to my present husband, it usually rises from a sudden internal power surge, like the electrical impulse along a wire. It doesn’t matter whether I hear them back, I still feel elevated. And as I get older and closer to death these lovely three words arrive more frequently, gain depth, and communicate spiritual truth.

I love you is heaven-on-earth, assumed, consuming, forever immersive. 

Susan, a woman colleague and friend about whom I recently wrote, died tragically from multiple internal injuries caused by a tree branch propelled by heavy winds shooting through the windshield and into her body. During her hospital stay she longed to speak but couldn’t. After 4 torturous weeks of trying to speak her needs and her love, she mouthed silently to her beloved spouse of 45 years: I love you. Then she died.

I love you is the last word.

2018.01.14 Open-Hearted Girls

Countless prayers of faithful people
weighted in a cumbrous world
found an answer as an angel
met an open-hearted girl.
Not a master of a palace
where the airs of empire swirl,
nor a young and hardened warrior
but an open-hearted girl.

This lovely Michael Hudson text was written with Mary the mother of Jesus in mind, but I certainly know many open-hearted girls. Do you?

As I write this I'm thinking of one in particular, because it’s her 55th birthday. She is my oldest daughter, Beverley Ann Brakeman. She was born with much effort and also some “lucky” statistics: born on 1/13/63 at 1:13 a.m., weighing 8lbs13ozs. She was a big baby. She’s still a big presence, not in size but in vigor—and she has an open heart. (No significance to the Police van in the background:)

I remember how terrified I felt when I was birthing my first child. It hurt so much I thought I’d die. I’d prayed for a daughter, but in labor my only prayer was: “Let it be over!”  In time (too much I thought) my daughter was born. One look at her squished-up face, her perfect wee head nearly swallowed by a mop of black hair, and hearing her voluminous howl, opened my own heart forever—and ever.

I also felt anxious. I was even scared her small arm would break when I put the little undershirt over her head. My OB said: “They’re not as fragile as they look. You’ll be fine.” I was of course in love with him, or in thrall of what he did—forgetting to give myself any credit for enduring a long drug-free labor. All I felt was embarrassment because I'd thrown up all over my poor husband, standing anxiously by. I recall lamenting my intestinal expectoration because it landed all over the great sweater I had knit for him all by myself. You think weird thoughts when you’re in pain.

And I worried. Could I do this? Could I be a good mother? To these natural questions there is only one answer: NO. I’m not cynical. I’m just realistic about the vulnerabilities of parenting, especially for mothers, many of whom, at least in my generation, were handed a list of requirements for this job—omnipresence, omnipotent lovingness, and possible omniscience—qualities traditionally attributed to God, ironically called “Father.” Even my mother told me: “Being a mother is the highest destiny for any woman.” 

None of my stress was, or is, my fault, or Bev’s. It’s just how it was, and still continues to be, for many mothers and daughters. I listen to mothers struggling to balance their own needs, their vocations/careers with being a a mother. I recall once a woman priest in a group say: “Well, that’s it! I simply can not be a good mother and a good priest at the same time.” 

Still, Bev grew up and so did I. We have grown up together. Our hearts have opened and closed and opened again to each other through the years. We stitch it up with understanding and forgiveness and move on—because we both are open-hearted, both mothers to two daughters, both passionate about social justice, both tell the truth in love.

Happy Birthday, my beloved daughter. You are a blessing and I love you.

2016.0508 Sweet Mothering Energy of God and Prayer

I open my eyes each day to images of my children. I murmur: “Dear God, fill me with your love and grace and bless my children, (I name each one) with grace, power, faith, love, and peace. I consecrate myself to thee for their sake they they too may be consecrated in truth—thy word is truth.”

I lifted some words out of Jesus’s farewell prayer in John 17. I don’t pray them so my kids will go to church, although that’s not a bad idea. I pray them that they may know deeply the sweet mothering energy of God in their lives. My children are the soul of my heart.

From the New Testament writings of the Johannine community, I know that the divine mothering energy of God is not restricted to women or biological mothers. Jesus prayed for his “children." They remembered that he prayed for them, and for all of us: I in you and you in me and we in them and all are one—an unbreakable net of en-wombing love—sweet mothering energy of God.

I confess I find our Sunday intercessions to be flat. One person recites and, for the most part, no one prays, or has time to collect their prayers. Perhaps we should simply paraphrase Jesus’s great intercessory plea that we all be one, because we all are in God, say it, then leave a long contemplative silence to let it sink in.

When I kneel at my home altar, I focus on an icon of Mary with Jesus her child. To me it is beautiful, though it’s not. It’s an aging, faded print in a scratched plastic frame which has lost all capacity to stand erect on its own. I pray to Mary: “Sweet mothering energy of God come into the world with wisdom, encouragement and nurture.” These three: wisdom from the mother-root, not just advice, encouragement from its Latin root meaning“heart,” and nurture—feeding, cherishing.  Occasionally these three come together in one moment, and everything changes.

My son John recently told me of such a time for him. He was a young man lying in a hospital gravely ill and awaiting surgery. He said he heard me and another woman reciting Psalm 23 at his bedside. He suddenly felt sure he would live, wanted to live. I have no recollection of such an incident.

Everyone has the capacity to mother and all of us have mothered. Everyone knows what a hard job it is to mother: to slither back and forth between the strong desire to hold close, protect and save and the strong desire to let the beloved be free to grow and go forth to find their own way—or at least get outta your hair.

I learned a lot about divine mothering love and prayer from Mary. Mothering Jesus had to be hell. He was always in trouble, much of it dire and all of it serving God, not his family. Mary doesn’t play a big role in biblical story. I bet that’s because she was all the time in prayer for Jesus.  I bet she taught him to pray, and I bet her prayers made it into his heart, bringing wisdom, courage and nurture.

I first met Mary in Spain where I spent time in the early 1960s with two families, one in Madrid and the other in Santander—then a smallish fishing town in northern Spain…..now my bank. In Spain, Mary was more popular than Jesus. I spent much time kneeling on concrete-hard kneelers praying to María. I internalized the popular piety. It filled some emptiness in my religious soul.

I realized what a loss many Protestant churches have suffered by cleansing their worship, sanctuaries, and prayers of Mary. It is a loss to the full image of divine love.

The Santander Señora was a small woman, a dynamo of religious faith and a fiercely loving madre. Nightly, she’d clap her hands, tiny shofars summoning the family to prayers. We all jumped to attention and hurried to the dining table where we stood around as she prayed aloud—the evening dose of wisdom, encouragement and nurture. All the children were named some version of  María: Mari Pilar (after the Virgen de Pilar) whom we called Pili, Marisuca, and a son, Josemari, a twofer combination of José and María (Joseph and Mary.) Suca  was the nun-designate, quiet, pious and impish.  Pili was wild and free and destined for multiple motherhood. I think Josemari was destined for the care of Mama—till death would them part. All our prayers were to Mary.

In Spain I fell in love with Mary. I came to know her as a primary mediator of the sweet mothering energy of God. From Mary/María, I learned, too, how hard mothering love can be—how hard it is for God. Sometimes you have to stand by and watch your beloved suffer.

2014.02.02 Holy Scripture: Proclamation and Story

Holy Scripture is holy precisely because we can’t pin it down to any one point of view, no matter how hard we try—and oh, we try, oh we try.  

Scripture is made up of proclamation + story. The proclamation is always the same, something like, God is still around, faithful. For Christians, the proclamation is Jesus Christ is Lord, and no other—not Caesar, not your money or possessions, not your best beloveds or your passions, not your work or works, not even your religion. 

I'd say that Christians dare to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, exactly because in that birth, life, suffering, ignominious death, and beyond, we perceive God's faithfulness and thus we have hope, no matter what.

Hope is my favorite spiritual gift and virtue.  It is vast, spread beyond what can be known, always open-ended. Hope embraces all things, all the contrasting complexities of life, all futures, and all possibilities—the holy and the unholy. Hope can see in the dark.

Biblical stories are vehicles, accompanying the singular proclamation. They tell us how real people live the proclamation out with hope. The proclamation has power, yet so also does the story itself. We often discover that our own stories find place in these ancient stories. 

Take the story in Luke’s gospel (2:22-40) about Mary, the young mother of Jesus coming to the Temple, as tradition demanded, to dedicate her firstborn son to God, in remembrance of how God  had delivered all the firstborn sons of Israel from death at the hand of King Herod. 

Envision a new young mother, probably exhausted and anxious but obedient to the demands of her religious tradition. She likely felt possessed by a love too consuming to describe, a love that made her also feel possessive. Mary, I’m sure, felt excited and nervous as she clutched her child. Probably most of us have felt such possessing/possessive love for someone or something. You could crush it with your ardor.

Enter old Simeon, a very old man, stranger to Mary. He took the baby from her arms, blessed him, and then in an aging cracking voice chanted a strange old hymn as he rocked the babe in arms.  
   
    Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for
    mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all
    people, to be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
     

What was Simeon saying? He continued with a grim, fearsome prophecy: this child will open the hearts and minds of the people (a dangerous thing to do) and many will oppose him. And . . . a sword will pierce your own soul too, dear woman.

How horrifying to Mary. What does this mean? Where in this story would Mary find hope?

Perhaps in the figure of Anna. Anna, a much ignored figure in scripture and sermon, is 84. She was married and widowed after just seven years. She’d never left the Temple—60-some years of worship, prayer and fasting. That’s faith! Anna came forth after Simeon to praise God and prophesy the redemption she’d recognized in the child.  

Anna was a woman who had experienced crushing grief, yet she held onto her hope in God and God’s faithfulness. She’d survived “hell” and kept hope. Without knowing it then, Mary saw in Anna all the virtues she herself would need going forward. I think the presence of Anna brought hope into Mary’s heart.

I knew an Anna once, an old salt who had lived long by the sea; it was in her bones. She was raspy and grouchy and often preachy. She had received a mail order degree in theology from Oral Roberts University—very conservative. Like the biblical Anna, she hung out around the church most days. She took the Bible literally, every word. If it weren’t in there it simply weren’t! She and I were of different minds yet we both loved the stories, and we could chuckle together. 

One day this contrarian told me as she pounded her fist into her hand: “Ya know. I was dead set against the ordination of women.” (I braced myself.) She continued, “But I converted.” (I felt inflated, imagining myself part of her conversion.)  “Ya know what changed my mind? It was old Anna in the Temple. I read that story over and over. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if an old timer like that could come into the church and preach prophecy then I guessed it was okay for all women to speak in church.”

An old woman—a story—a light—a hope—a christ—our God.

2013.01.20 Weddings in Cana of Galilee and Massachusetts

When we were in Israel in June, 2012, we went to Cana of Galilee, just north of Nazareth. There is a Byzantine Christian Church in Cana erected in the 6th century.  Cana is the site of the biblical story about  the Wedding at Cana the place where, according to the gospel of John, Jesus performed his first miracle:turning water into wine when the wine ran out at a wedding feast.  If I were going to do a miracle I might have chosen something less dangerous, more dignified. 

Our group of pilgrims went into the convent garden to read the story aloud and to hear our professor tell us about its historical, cultural context.

 Here is what we learned about wedding customs in the Palestine of Jesus.............
     A whole village celebrated a marriage. It would have been a Tuesday, the third day of the week, the day set for marriages. The festivities lasted 2 weeks. So maybe they would need all that wine!
    Many guests at a wedding celebration were not invited. Were they crashers? No. All first-line members of the family were automatic guests. You had to expect your Uncle Oswald at your wedding, whether you liked him or not. AND, each family member brought 15 additional guests with them! 
    Mary, Jesus’ mother, was not an invited guest because she was a family member. Jesus as well, and he would have brought his disciples at least, and maybe a few anonymous women. Today we have problems with wedding costs and guest lists disputes. It can be a real hassle and expense, but in that day the custom of hospitality set the rules.  Y’all come, for days and days.
    But.............women and men had separate parties. Let’s say the women drank too much wine and Mary, a family member, was approached with the news. Since all family members were responsible for the hospitality. Mary would be expected to provide more wine. She would have to go home to get more, or to the store.  Instead she went to Jesus.
    In going to her son, Mary transgressed a social boundary. 
     Jesus was surprised to see Mary on the men’s side. “Woman,” he said, “what are you doing over here?” He isn’t rude, just astounded.  His mother had broken a strong social tabu.The plot thickens. We can begin to see why this is a miracle story, a reversal of expectations.
    Jesus had a choice: come out as who he understood himself to be, or send his mother away in disgrace for breaking a rule which, socially, was like breaking the sound barrier.  He took care of the wine shortage with a miracle. He followed his mom’s sense that now is the hour he should come out, show his true powers. She knew him well.

This story suddenly was no longer about water into wine, or even about the symbology of divine abundance, or the sanctity of marriage, but about daring to defy, to break down the gender barrier completely—far more dangerous, far more costly, and far more holy even than hospitality. Mother and son defied custom. This is radically prophetic they did together, out of mutual respect and love—and their knowledge of the divine hope, not for wine but for social change. 

My jaw dropped open. This old story came alive for me in new ways, just by knowing its culture and custom.  Never heard a Cana sermon with this radical prophetic message.

What Mary started is how social transformation begins.

It reminds me of the transformation that Chief Justice Margaret Marshall started in 2003 when she delivered her landmark court ruling that allowed same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Mitchell cited higher values: “a public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family.” Marshall’s words are read at many same-sex marriage ceremonies. They are gospel to many, even those who claim not to be religious.

But here it is in our ancient scriptural text and in the 21st century in another setting and culture entirely: God’s bold, ongoing spiritual work of transformation toward oneness. 





     

2012.07.04 Tender Icon of Hope

Worship in London on Sunday before we left for home was beautiful, although full as always with He's and he's and Hims...and lots of Fathers. 

The parish, All Saints Margaret St. does not let women priests celebrate. Clergy are working on it slowly but surely. Building rehab came first of course. And it is elegant.

I tell you, despite great music uplift and Eucharist and a good sermon,  I felt excluded from both humanity and divinity by the all-male language for things holy/godly.

And there was the gospel read from Mark, chapter 5,  in which Jesus heals the daughter of Jairus, president of the local synagogue,  and calls the girl "daughter" .......AND the hemorrhaging woman whom he also restores to health and the human community. TWO females included into community, religious and social.  So what is wrong with this picture in so many of our churches?  

I do think it will take a healing miracle of Jesus to bust up two of the two most recalcitrant idols in most liturgical churches: pews and language.  Social justice thrives outside the walls, but what about justice in the worship language?  OK, my soapbox again. 

I was myself healed from my ire as my attention was captivated watching a young family with 2 small daughters, maybe 4 and 2.  And a baby doll.  The 4year old cared for her baby and never complained. The 2 year old slept and only peeped when Mom tried to apply a brush to her knotted hair. She deftly avoided the brush by swiveling her head fast.  

The 4 year old in time asked her dad to lift her up so she could see. Her attention was riveted on the lovely statue in front of her of the BVM (not the latest car but, for those who might not know, the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

The statue represents Mary as Queen of Heaven all crowned and majestic, her right arm supporting Jesus, of toddler age. He holds an orb as if it were his ball to play with and his right foot and right hand swing out and point outward towards the observer. Go!  

The little girl began to swing her foot in and out, (imitatio dei,) a feat that looks easy in statuary but didn't quite work for Daddy's grasp.  Down she came but later Daddy took her up to see the votive candles in front of the Mary and Jesus statue and with great patience and care showed her how to light a small candle carefully, then place her coin in the slot.  She nodded vigorously and pointed up to Mary.  She knew something. God knows what:)

Flesh and blood icons are the best.

*******

Happy and blessed American Independence Day. We are lucky. Despite my critiques I am patriotic.  America, home of the mostly free and the occasionally brave, my home.  We struggle still with the vision of equity and democracy

And pray for peace and inter-dependence for Israelis and Palestinians......... and for all those who have courage to serve their country and still ask dream of a war-free peace.