O God of Love
so high above
so deep beneath
you never sleep
you always keep
your heat in beat
Your love of LIfe’s
alive in strife
You love, therefore I am.
I love, therefore You are.
Lyn G. Brakeman
Bovine Salvation
Sturdy Ms Methane
staunch in her pose
She’s not vain
Just full of Methane
See how she stares
Her soft eyes engage
She’s gassing the planet
In peril it stands—yet
We’re changing her repast
De-scenting her gasses
She’s still very well fed
And we’ve nothing to dread
For the gasses she passes
are now Methane-free.
Lyn G. Brakeman
Does anyone imagine that God does not have emotions? I bet it is hard to imagine God’s own feelings, especially fear or anger, if you’re not in touch with your own. Still, we have for so long worshiped a Divinity so dominantly transcendent, so consistently almighty, and so exclusively masculine, that we really don’t know God at all.
The Creator God of the Bible creates natural wonders of Life itself with excessive prodigality and excitement. This God has creative power and shares it radically with all Creation—natural world and human. God wants it all to thrive, and adorns it all with the freedom to do just that.
We, according to ancient story, chose to do the one thing God knows will make trouble for us for the whole rest of our existence: we exercised our freedom to know both good and evil, and to choose either way. We exposed ourselves to evil as well as good, to moral as well as immoral. And thus this little mythic story explains why we have been at odds with ourselves, each other, and God forever and ever, amen. It takes courage to make choices, and more courage to undo or reset those choices that turn out not to be so good. It takes courage to suffer choices we do not make.
It takes prayer and serenity and wisdom and love to realize that the binary God seemed to set up is much more subtle, much more demanding and much more rewarding, precisely because it is NOT a true binary. There is no such thing as a purely good choice OR a purely evil one. This, I believe, is why God Creator warned the Edenic couple to leave the fruit of that tree alone—and why they could not leave it alone.
This little story never happened. This little story always happen. Outside the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem there is this giant sculpture.
The wind was fresh, the earth was young,
the scent of life was everywhere
the garden lay a fruitful dream
and God enjoyed the evening air
Where are my loved? the Maker wooed.
The clay I shape and call by name?
The questions spread through stem and leaf,
but as God waited no one came.
God’s loves were hiding, faces turned,
beyond the reach of breeze and Voice,
aware that sometime in the day
they’d made a dark, far-reaching choice.
The question lingers in the leaf
in barren branch and shrinking pond—
Where are my loves? The Maker calls,
still trusting clay may yet respond.
Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle
* * * *
A wise old owl says: Now, my dears. Do hoot and cheer and never fear, I’m always here.
Another wise owl stays far aloft. I look out for danger and for prey. I’m always here.
Both the guardian and the nurturer seek little easters everywhere. Both equally incarnate the Spirit of Love that simply never burns out.
* * * *
EIN SOF
The first time I heard these words was on our 2012 trip to Israel—a two-week pilgrimage I shall never forget. It’s in my bones. It was sponsored by St. George’s College in East Jerusalem, led by tour guides who knew the land and the language in way that made it come alive. The course was called “The Palestine of Jesus” I shall never forget my experience there. I felt as if I’d walked right into the Bible. Ein sof is one of the phrases I learned there. It’s Hebrew to describe a mystical divinity I can’t possible explain, so I call it God before God—the infinite unknowable known or finite infinitude. You see, it makes no sense and yet we know it s presence. It come in Kairos time. God’s time or timing.
No wonder sweet mortals went speechless when they experienced kairos. It does not submit to any containment or control. No wonder that before long we humans, failing to control Kairos, invented calendars and clock, for chronos, our own time and timing.
We watch a medical television sitcom, set in the busy ED in a big city hospital. Whenever a patient, despite heroic medical efforts dies, the doctors and nurses who have been working so hard suddenly get it. They all stop at once. One doctor calls it. God calls it simultaneously.
“Time of death 13:30” says chronos.
“Time of Life: 13:30” says kairos.
Ein sof.
