2024.07.28 "Daft. Desperate. Undaunted" Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

The phrase "daft, desperate, undaunted" popped into my mind as I talked with a poet/friend about the chaos of my own struggles trying to “ease” my swollen legs into compression stockings. Such things are spoken of with casual confidence by professional surgeons and nurses who do not live inside the ugly bulged up skin of my lower legs? They call such swellings  seromas. Write, said the poet.

Nurse friends suggested that I should tackle this problem BEFORE I arose from my supine position in the morning. Perfect! But what about my equally pressing need to urinate, not to mention the disruption I’d cause my sleeping-beauty spouse. To toss or to turn that was the question. I wet my "dependables" and went back to sleep. Daft. 

                        *  *  *  *

Do you think this might be exactly how the followers of Jesus felt when he popped onto the scene beckoning them to drop everything and follow him? What? Why? What’s in it for me? Are not these the questions most of us would ask when confronted with what looks like an impossible situation?  Would we not laugh?  Would we not judge this stranger daft and desperate? That’s what I thought when my vascular surgeon advised me to bind up the bulbous swelling underneath the skin of my lower legs where fluid had re-accumulated, even after the surgeon had already pierced and drained them. And even when these stockings were so stiff I couldn’t even insert my toes into them without herculean effort and the strength of my nurse/spouse.  

The obvious response would be to say, NO I’m outta here. I grabbed my walker, followed my beloved spouse to dinner, and ate my fill of everything in sight. Desperate.

*  *  *  *

In the morning we got the compression stockings out to stretch them. They are actually now on my legs by dint of will power, humor, loving camaraderie, and downright orneriness. Also, by adding one word to my repertoire: undaunted. 

 

I have more energy. No wonder! It’s all driven from my lower legs straight up to my whirling brain, the one that daily dabbles in mystical cogitations.   

“Apprehend God in all things.” Meister Eckhart (1894-1963), a German mystic and teacher interested in the commonness of things, was considered dangerous in his day. Apprehend means to capture, arrest, grasp in order to appreciate, not as a prisoner but as an object of affection, adoration, and yes, some hesitancy of apprehension.   

Today I will imagine myself apprehending God, catching the tailwind of divine energy.  

2019.06.09 Who Is a Mystic?

Most people would say “Not me!”

Pentecost is the wildest, freest, most voluminous occasion and season of all seasons spiritual. It marks the biblical story of Creation’s awareness of the presence of a Holy Spirit that powers, let’s say, divine activism. GO! She travels far and wide, probing the depths and sowing seeds of hope, healing, and divine Goodness and Love. She/He is gender-free and bright green, passionate red, eye-popping gold and blue-all-over—a genuine Mystic, wisely irrational. 

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes about the Kabbalah Jewish mystical tradition:  “I think what our generation seems to be living through is the realization that rationalism is only part of the answer. I think, I’m not the first one to notice this, that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were perfectly rational decisions. So there’s this sense that religion has to be more than rationalism. Any mysticism offers—it says, sort of like in the corner, ‘Psst, hey kid how would you like a direct experience of the divine? Would that help your religious life?’ A lot of people discover that they’re mystics after all when they’re given that offer.” 

Rabbi Kushner’s definition of a mystic: “A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.” 

I like that definition better than the one that insists on a direct experience of the divine—not because it is more rational, far from it, but because it makes room for the immanence of the transcendent—the divine within us, encouraging and empowering us to trust that hidden unity.

Kushner is a long time student of the Kabbalah. He was influenced by a Jewish historical figure named Gershom Scholem (1918-1982). Gershom rescued this tradition from obscurity.  The spirit of Kabbalah wraps teachings in teachings, wisdom in wisdom, life within life—analogically, like a Torah scroll wraps round itself. Kushner is the Emanu-El scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, and the author of many books.
As a young child I experienced an invisible, inaudible, listening Presence I called God. I chattered. God listened. I learned that I mattered. You could say my words wrapped within The Word. I erred and strayed, but I never forgot the mark that experience left on me. It left me with that “gnawing suspicion” Kushner described: Good lies concealed in any chaos.

Every morning about 4 a.m., the birds begin their day-song before day breaks. They are natural anticipatory mystics, sensing, trusting, and proclaiming the light before it comes. Seeds planted in fertile soil do the same. Tree roots are the same: they hide under layers of concrete sidewalk, yet they push through and grow! GO. So also for tiny seeds of kindness planted in trusting desperate souls. Lions know when to leap and monkeys when to race up trees. GO! Jesus knew when to shut up and when to GO!

In the Old Testament, God spoke directly to prophets who conveyed divine messages—mostly about ways people can help God by listening and looking, especially in the darkest corners of misery to see where God needed help to create life anew. Imitate God, they said. Imitate Jesus the Christ, Christians say. Imitate Holy Spirit! GO!

When the prophetic tradition died out, people feared there would be no more direct Voice of God. Would God be silent? No. God continued to communicate in a new way called the bath qol.  It means “the daughter of a voice”—not inferior to what prophets experienced but more inward/subjective, far-reaching. For Christians, this voice is carried by the Holy Spirit. It is what Jesus heard within himself at his baptism: You are my son, the beloved. GO!

I have heard this bath qol seven times in my life, mostly posing challenging questions, such as what in the world are you thinking of here? These queries were personal wakeup calls for subjective clarity. 

BUT twice, God’s bath qol was more direct.
    -I was in deep distress after being turned down in the ordination process. I had run out of words completely, maybe like Jonah sitting dejectedly under the sheltering plant God provided and Jonah failed to appreciate. Or Elijah sitting outside his cave in misery. Both discerned the bath qol telling them: GO! This is the same voice Mary Magdalene felt within her vision at the empty tomb of grief. GO! To me God said: “No one can take this away from you, Lyn.” This stark truth was confrontive not comforting.  I heard: GO! 
    -And once again when I was fretting about ordination, Godde’s bath qol said:“Lyn I don’t care if you’re ordained.” How rude. I got it. GO! I kept going, unresolved.

Do such experiences make me a mystic?  I don’t know. But I can tell you that I do have the annoying tendency Kushner identified as mystical: "the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.” 

I say “annoying” in part because this tendency annoys my empirical beloved husband who accuses me of missing the obvious ingredients that make things look impossible. I do miss them, but that’s often because I trust there’s something unitive, transformative, gloriously hidden, and emergent—if I can only trust the long slow work of God and my own grit to GO— no matter what.

In sum, I bet there are more mystics in this world than not—a few are clothed in human flesh.

2017.06.04 Yirah

The word yirah (pronounced yir-aw/) is Hebrew for awe/fear/awareness. It does sound a little like a cheer—hurrah. And yet yirah is not a superficial “yippee” that passes quickly, as when you cheer for a sports team to win. Rather it is a sensation that grips your gut with a combination of awe and exhilaration—like seeing a bull fight.

When I went to a bull fight in Spain, I was horrified and disapproving. Taunted by my Spanish hermano in Madrid, I relented when he called me “timid Americana—grrrl.” This was not complimentary. I went with him to the fight. We sat in the cheap seats facing into the sun. Baked and pissed, I waited.

A bull fight is a ritual: hot and fiery, alive with music and the alacrity of picadors on horseback, toreros with sparkling costumes and red capes—the essence of macho eroticism. The crowd, intimate players in this drama, roars and sways rhythmically. Suddenly, I could not resist this dark power. There was something beautiful, sensual, unavoidable about this gruesome dance. I was swept into shouts of olé and toro, toro. I was fully alive.

This was liturgy. This was biblical.

    -like being part of the multi-voiced multitudes of Jews gathered from all the corners of the earth on the day of Pentecost—expecting God’s promised Spirit to show up and make it all  better—lost in divine pulsation, knowing it is supposed to be ecstatic—but it isn’t, quite. Yirah.

    -like being present at Jesus’s crucifixion, a horror-show everyone thought would never happen, despite predictions. This scenario, even now, we Christians reverence and detest and do not understand and cannot forget as we sit in pews and pretend we are not part of the mob. Yirah.

The Spirit of yirah  is one of overwhelm. It can be frightening in a mystical way, as if one’s individual identity will be lost as all boundaries, even those of language, dissolve. The particular is subsumed in the universal. Believe me, Christians, this day we call Pentecost is no simple elation, no little Happy Birthday to the Christian Church. It is is much more, much much more. It’s breath-halting, heart-waking, near-intolerable yirah.

Yirah can cause a whole crowd of people to grow suddenly silent with collective quivering, simultaneously paralyzed and transformed.

My friend and poet Jinks Hoffmann wrote a poem called Yirah in her book It’s All God, Anyway.
The poem catches this mystical mix.

YIRAH

The hiccup between
here and there
now and then

is less

than a full breath
when you know

you cannot trust
your ground,

when you know

there is no-one,
no thing,

between you,
your life and death.

When you stop,
there is nothing
to do
but be aware of
how damn exquisite
how damn awful
is all is.


The feeling this poem first generated is me was puzzlement. I couldn't parse the words. Angry, I read it over and over. I looked up everything, trying to contain, interpret. Having no control is scary.

I even tried Google where I discovered that a Rabbi, Alan Lew, had defined this word. He at least is immersed in biblical Hebrew. He’s also a Zen Rabbi with a mystical bent and the author of One God Clapping. (No, I did not go to Amazon to order it.) According to Lew, one meaning of yirah is “the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to inhabiting.” 

This is being IN God—a bit of what I felt at the bullfight and what I feel reading this poem —hanging among the stars helpless yet not dead. I am myself and not myself.

How damn exquisite and damn awful it all is. It all is—this particular moment of knowing and not knowing who the bejesus you are, and yet you are.

Yirah. 

2014.08.10 The Politics and Spirituality of Music

Music is the language of the soul—of all art, really. This winter we went to Symphony Hall for a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert—so good for the soul that we trudged through rain on walkways that were often blocked by melting snow puddles that had turned into small “lakes.” What we do for Beethoven!

We treat ourselves to four concerts a year on Friday afternoons. We go with the white-haired crowd, a condition from which we are not exempt. I must say that this senior audience is by far the most appreciative crowd I’ve ever seen at a concert, excluding perhaps a hard-rock/pop one, to which I’ve never been. We oldies don’t screech, but our ears are still working, and we’ve not  forgotten how to clap and rise to our feet for brilliance, and shout out, Bravo! Brava!

I’ve learned from reading program notes that great music, though it may transcend the machinations of politics, is not immune to political passion. 

We heard Anne-Sophie Mutter play a Dvorák violin concerto. Her virtuosity was beyond my imagining. I never thought I’d hear myself say such a thing, but I wondered if her physical beauty as a woman detracted at all from her musical performance? Mutter is blonde, slender and shapely. She wore an electric blue gown—strapless, body-hugging, and with a train. I did hear some intakes of breath as she swished onto the stage, one from my beloved husband, before she played a single note. She is shaped like her instrument, only better, and it was hard to tell which was the more breath-taking—altogether pleasing to ear and eye.

I had a familiar nagging question: How much does the appearance of a woman (dress, hair, body-shape and weight) enhance or detract from the gift she is giving, and should it? I don’t know the answer but all art, especially performing art, is relational, therefore I imagine anyone's looks play a role in the pleasure an audience derives. Of course an artist is judged chiefly on a performance. It can’t be schlock. But appearances matter, and Mutter was a wow on both counts.

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, Eroica, by contrast, was performed by musicians, all dressed in basic black, as tradition demands. The effect, nevertheless, was every bit as stunning as the electric Mutter.

All of it was soul food.

I’m not a professional music critic, yet I felt Beethoven’s passion—spiritual and political in every note. (He was not bad looking either:)

Beethoven originally wrote the symphony for Napoleon Bonaparte when he was First Consul. Beethoven was impressed by Bonaparte and likened him to the Roman consuls. Beethoven’s friend, Ferdinand Ries, saw a copy of the score’s title page on which Beethoven had written at the very top Buonaparte and at the extreme bottom Luigi van Beethoven. What would have gone in between Ries didn’t know.

When Bonaparte declared himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven flew into a rage. “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now, he too, will trample on all the rights of man  and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” He tore the first page in two and threw it on the floor. When the symphony was rewritten, it was published with the title, Sinfonia Eroica.

Beethoven was considering a move to Paris. The Bonaparte name on his symphony might have helped. He wrote to his publisher: “the title of the symphony is really Bonapart.” But realistic concerns of the time prevailed, given the strained relations between Austria and France, and Eroica prevailed. 

In the end, Beethoven’s politics, like his music, transcended the particular. The Eroica Symphony is heroic. It stands for all heroes of any time who take offense at power politics, oppression, injustice, and dedicate their lives and their art to compassion and goodness for all. Music gives life.

Conclusion: soul has not just to do with inner mysteries, but with outer appearances, individual temperament, and the politics of the time.  Mysticism expanded.