2025.06.08 PENTECOSTAL BIBLICAL DISSONANCE, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

If the Holy Spirit is anything it is full of hot air!  

William Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur Georgia, reminded us all that if the Bible is anything it is off key and filled with dissonance. 

Personally, this is precisely why I do trust the Bible, and its many translations, to leave room for me in it. I can always squeeze my perspectives in, because I do not take every word literally, ipsissima verba, though I take every word seriously.  

Women who experience a call to the sacramental ministry of priest are organized and have been lobbying for ordination in the RC Church for many years, are still hopeful, and still waiting, and still failing to understand precisely why their gender disqualifies them from ordained ministry.

I was at a grandson's college graduation recently. There were many women who have served in executive positions sitting on the platform. 

I also remember the politics and the pressures for a female presidency way back in the 1960s—at an all-women's college no less!!! 

Now I live with my husband at a residential retirement community. The entire administrative staff is made up of women. Let me say that a leadership team that is exclusively female is ALSO not the best model. 

Effective leadership is not either-or, or both-and, regarding gendered pronouns, but rather, it is according to vocational qualifications, educational and experiential qualifications, training, and yes, a deep inner calling, some of us would identify as divinely inspired—none of it bound by gender. 

Thank you, Holy Spirit!  

5/19/2024 PENTECOST. Lyn G. Brakeman. Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

Once I preached a sermon at Pentecost in which I declared that this day when we celebrate the MINISTRY of the Holy Spirit, NOT the arrival of that unitive spirit of God! She has been here from the beginning of all Creation. 

After the Sunday worship ended with a dismissal, a woman came to me and said: “But Pentecost is the BIRTHday of the CHURCH!” I chose to disagree but not argue. 

How in the world could we Christians restrict/confine the spiritual activity of the ONE GOD /CREATOR to one day, one people, one time, one religion, one church, one doctrine, one spirit called holy?  

HUMBUG.  

*  *  *  * 

I am extremely pleased that the Diocese of Massachusetts elected a woman for our diocesan bishop, a first. Her speech was short, sweet and tender. We so need such a voice, such a clear softness without sloppiness.  “I will love you,” she said. 

And Connecticut already elected its first (as far as we know) openly gay diocesan bishop.

Pretty soon the HS Herself will penetrate the Roman Catholic patriarchy too!  The present pope is on it—slowly and surely, trying not to become a dead martyr like Lincoln or Kennedy, et. al. 

As to Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Herself must not, can not, should not, will not be disregarded for Her inclusive non-gendered politics. This Holy Spirit did not arrive on one day, in one doctrine, inhabiting one gender, one religion, dressed in one color, for god’s sake! Jesus was a Jewish man on earth.  The Risen Christ has no gender, no one religion. Plus, we’ve always been smart enough to pray with and to all the Mamas!    

Ya think the Spirit of Pentecost has ONE gender?!   Or ONE religion?   Or ONE doctrine?  Or ONE people?  ONE history or ONE story? Good lawd ‘amighty.  

Get a grip peoples. 

2023.05.28 PENTECOST, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I’ve loved and trusted the Presence of God since childhood, but I’ve never felt the urge to evangelize as we Christians are supposed to, right?  To me Pentecost was/is not the birthday of the Christian Church, nor the arrival of the Holy Spirit for the first time ever, but rather a stunning advertisement for the steadfast loving Spirit of God, present broadly, deeply, and wildly to all sorts of people the world over. Will they all be Christians? Not likely. Will they all be endowed with divine grace? Yes. Is that enough salvation? Yes. Is it the only way of salvation? No.

*  *  *  *

Recently at a sacred music concert taking place in an enormous church sanctuary, a listener turned to me and said bluntly: “What’s a mystic?” As if I knew! People ask clergy the most annoying real questions just because we are clergy. Clergy are NOT God, thank God!  

Still, the question got me wondering: What IS a  mystic really?  

A prayer practitioner. 

Pop-up answers seem foolish, I know, yet they are the kind of answers that force my attention away from my ego and all my educated answers. A prayer practitioner?  

Who, what, where, when, and why? 

WHO is a prayer practitioner? Anyone hoping, perhaps longing, to deepen their relationship of love with self, God and neighbor.  

WHAT is prayer? Being silent, preferably in solitude, while willing to open up to inner thoughts and feelings, to listen for God in your soul or notice God sitting on the branch of a tree. 

WHERE? At a place of deep quiet usually but not always at a monastery or a convent, run by monks or nuns whose ministry is to provide and maintain space and hospitality for prayer practitioners. 

WHEN? As soon as you admit to yourself that you need well, to know what the hell you are doing with your life.  And when you decide to sign up for a silent directed retreat for 3 days, then for 5 days and eventually for a whole week or 10 days. And when you submit to talking about your innards with a wise and trained Spiritual Director who listens and makes suggestions about things to use from Scripture or, annoyingly, recommends more silence. That’s when you take a walk, fume to God about all this damned silence, return to your room and sleep like a champ. 

WHY?  Because I said so.  On my first silent directed retreat, I stared for a very long time at a huge portrait of a rose. I loved its sheer size, its astounding beauty, elegance, and all its petals. I went to the greenhouse and asked if the man I met there was the gardener, just like Mary Magdalene had asked the Risen Christ who appeared to her as she wept at Jesus’s empty tomb in the gospel story in John 20:15.  In my case, this guy in the greenhouse actually was the gardener. He gave me one rose. I took it back to my room and dissected it, one petal at a time. The bright red petals were strewn all over the floor. There were only about 29. I left the petals and slept. The next day I returned to the chapel where the rose portrait hung. This time I noticed its long stem. There were thorns, sharp and pointed all along the stem on both sides.

 The thorns were hard. I frowned.

The petals were soft. I cried.

The petals far outnumbered the thorns.  I laughed.

  

2021.05.23 A New -ISM To Consider: Single Storyism (Pentecost, 2021)

Look. See. Taste. Smell. Touch. Feel. Intuit. Speak. Praise. Repeat.

What Wisdom is the divine spirit of communication/communion creating now? NOW.

How hazardous it is for me to take the biblical story of Pentecost literally, as if the shocked and bereaved followers of Jesus were suddenly overtaken by rushing winds and tongues of fire, not to mention preaching prowess. Thus empowered, they preached in such a way that foreigners from all over Judea heard, understood, and proclaimed the good news of this new savior Christ in their own languages. Their babbling ecstasy raised such a ruckus that onlookers thought they were drunk. Many Christians still call this bash the birthday of the Church.

When I was four my whole extended family, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins gathered to celebrate me. Their whole focus was on me as they toasted and sang and showered me with attention. I received gobs of gifts, including a favorite doll, still intact after many repairs. There’s a photo of me sitting at the head of the table, wearing my pointed birthday hat and a special new pinafore, and trying to eat a huge piece of birthday cake. I was in tears—too much well-meant pentecostal hype for me. Being overwhelmed, even by God and the love of many, can be traumatic.

I do believe that the depth and breadth of the Holy Spirit is beyond my comprehension, but the image of “drunken” charisma spawns doubt not faith in me. Joy, yes, but I’ve survived enough drunken bashes in my life not to invite another, even metaphorically. Persuasive evangelism and conversion happen in many ways, I know, yet sudden unanimous conversionary zeal and ecstasy gathered up in a party is just not my style, and I do not think Pentecost, metaphorically or not, is the birthday of the Christian Church.

My experience tells me that there are many different stories about ways the Spirit shapes each of us. God after all has no way to us but through us. Everything created is always becoming, not like a new dress, but as a matter of sentient Life breaking forth through a single Creator known by many, many names, and incarnations, and stories—all valid.

I’ve noticed that we are quick to attach -ism to a phenomenon. Ism reminds us to pay attention to something important. That’s positive, however, -ism carries with it the danger of spawning a fanatic, a single-minded purist, a rigid proselytizer, or worse, a violent warrior who rarely talks and listens but easily fights. Isms can endanger the becoming process. For example, my own waking up process led me to feminism—the general need to pay more attention to the growth, maturation, and full value of women beyond domesticity and at all levels of society.

For me, feminism encouraged my desire to grow beyond being a stay-at-home wife, mother, and homemaker. It meant focusing my spirituality, getting a seminary education, and pursuing ordination as a priest of Word and Sacrament—a traditionally all-male vocation—in the Episcopal Church. I never burned a bra or shot a bishop, but believe me I seized my mid-life awakening, my free-to-be womanhood with wild  “pentecostal” abandon. I hurt my children and others. I soon ran headlong into church politics, chose resilience over shame, and engaged in a long, painful fight toward ordination, one I almost gave up. Some wounds are still in need of healing.

I’m glad Christianity has no -ism attached to its name, although Christian evangelical-ISM encourages Christians to believe that their religion is THE ONLY ONE TRUE way, as if one version of divinity offered some kind of guarantee of spiritual correctness, if not salvation. To absolutize this one way, one gospel, one story has led to the painful politics of exclusion with its obvious extension into hatred, violence, blind devotion, even war. It doesn’t do much for divinity or humanity.

Racism is currently an upfront focus in religion and culture. It doesn’t simply mean bias against people of color, which is bad enough, it means that ONE race—the white one, the right one— has self-selected as dominant, its story the ONLY story worth honoring, teaching, telling, and privileging. This phenomenon holds true for other -ism-bound words: sexism, heterosexism, able-ism, individualism, colorism ( skin whiteners, really?), truism, individualism, and yes, American-ISM. I am a patriot who loves this country and detests patriotISM. PatriotISM can create peace and/or war.
            *  *  *  *

Associate Professor of New Testament and Ancient Christianity at Yale Divinity School, Michal Beth Dinkler, is offering a summer course, “The Danger of a Single Christian Story.” The title made me shiver with hope. Could someone else be wondering like I am? 
 

Her talk was inspired in part by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie’s  2009 TED talk,“The Danger of a Single Story",  in which she tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice —and warns that “if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”

Dinkler focuses on the variety of stories in the Bible itself and on the four different canonical gospel narratives. The tendency in church and academy is to try to merge these four. But the stories about Jesus are different. What if the Christian imagination is restricted when we believe there is only one right way to understand Jesus stories? Or only one right way to worship God?

Well qualified with natural curiosity and her willingness to pursue theological education at an evangelical seminary, Gordon Conwell, and at Harvard Divinity School, Dinkler critiques storyism. She has landed at Yale Divinity, a non-denominational seminary.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “It was like, wait a minute—there are all these different people who say they are Christians but believe very different things than I did at the time,” she said. “I had to think, ‘Am I going to double down on what I believed before [Harvard]? Or am I going to open up and allow for these differences?” The Holy Spirit itself prohibits such limitations. 

“Every retelling of a story is an attempt to persuade in some way,” Dinkler said in a recent interview. “And these four gospels show us the importance of context, for the person who is telling the story and for the people to whom they’re telling it. Coming to any biblical text and trying to force it into one kind of truth is an unimaginative way of understanding God’s work in the world. The New Testament itself tells us that diversity has been present amongst followers of Jesus since the very beginning.”
 

I love Jesus the Christ and all his teaching and ways. He is not an -ism; nor am I; nor is the Christian story. I appreciate Dinkler’s  critique of Single Storyism. I am, gratefully, not a Christian-ist.

2020.05.31 Pentecost. Whose Birthday Is It?

Pentecost is NOT the birthday of the Christian Church as many have been taught. Pentecost is a much bigger, grander, and far-reaching bomb of a holy day.

Think Mystic Flame, Mystic Wind, Cloven Tongues. Think crowds in the hundreds, Jews gathered to celebrate the 50th day after Passover Shavuoth—liberation and plenitude. Think crowds of thousands— Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Pamphylia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, Gentiles and Jews alike—all assembled, eager to experience Divinity. The huge guest list itself is the meaning of Pentecost in Acts—all drawn to the hearth of God's heart.

We dare not downsize this Spirit, nor confine it to certain sacraments administered by “fatherly hands.” Nor can it be claimed by any one religion or national group. It is the Spirit of deepest contact with the Divine, believers and non-believers. Pentecost is the birth of Internationalism—the spirituality of Democracy.

In 1918, theologian, Vida D. Scudder, said that Peter’s first sermon, carried a democratic message: “To you is the promise and to your children and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord God shall call . . .”   The struggle between nationalists and an international ideal was very much part of the story of the early church. How big will we be? How far is our reach? Who is part of this institution and who is not?

Peter, a nationalist, was overcome by the Spirit, which gave him breadth of vision. Nevertheless, he went right on opposing Paul and insisted on circumcision as a condition until the Spirit re-programmed his institutional tapes and shook his soul alive. That’s the goal of Pentecost. Even proper Anglicans get permission to shed decorum and explode with exuberance. 

Flowing from this Pentecostal Spirit are gifts. The first is Tongues. I once heard a woman speak in tongues in a parish church. To my shame, I silently condemned her as mentally ill, simply because I, sane and sensible, could not understand her language.

I was abashed to read Scudder’s interpretation of The Gift of Tongues as the Gift of Sympathy. Sympathy? Yes, feeling for the feelings of another. Tongues means to understand without language. It is the gift of knowing-by-soul, not by words. Habitually, we translate everything into our own language to validate it. I remember my thrill when I first read something in Spanish without translating it into English as I read. Tongues signifies that every stranger and alien, through the pentecostal Spirit, understood God’s revelation in their own language without translation.

When I went to Spain to live with a family, people talked so fast I couldn’t understand a word they said, in spite of my big fat college degrees! I felt scared and left out—alone. Too embarrassed to ask them to slow down, I just listened and watched until I caught the energy, the animation. I felt the people before I comprehended all their words. When I came home my mother asked me what the people were like, and I said: “People are people, the same everywhere.”

Habitually, I break things down, analyze meanings, develop my own arguments and opinions. That’s fine, but there is also a wordless language. Ask any baby. They all speak in tongues. And we listen, babble back, caught up in a transcendent moment of nonsensical connection.

To transcend one’s body is orgasmic. It’s not a sustainable state. For a moment you are both inside and outside yourself, experiencing a mystic self-transcendence, speechlessly beyond the comfort of intellect. Some of us cry out—O God—in such moments. 

When I went to a bullfight in Spain, I felt this transcendence. The howling crowd swayed side to side, following the energy of both toro and torero. To parse it was impossible. To make it mentally accessible impossible. So I lost my mind. I swayed with the rhythmic pulse of Olé. I had no objectivity, so I simply got lost in pentecostal exuberance. My olés were for the bull, but it didn’t matter. The crowd rose and fell in one piece—as one, just as Jesus advocated.

Try not to be offended that I put Jesus, and sex, and and the cruelty of bullfights together. All analogies fall short of Pentecostal immensity. Beyond the birthday of one religion, Pentecost summons us to recognize and realize the intimate transcendent oneness of all living things.

In church Christians gather to receive humble wafers and hear: “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” possibly with the addition, "may it keep you in everlasting life” These words are not death sentences; they  do not mean we have to die or fly off to heaven to be with Christ. They mean that right now we are embraced by Infinity—IN God.

Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Presence, I believe, is always, always these things:
    -unitive not divisive
    -expansive not contractive
    -connective not disruptive
    -inclusive not exclusive
    -impartial not partisan
    -potent not passive
    -creative not destructive   
    -international not national
    -interdependent not autonomous

Pentecost is not the Birthday of Christianity. 

It is the Birthday of Creation.

   

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.

2018.05.20 A Spirit-Filled Occasion

On Pentecost Sunday, everyone wears red, or shades of red such as orange or purple or pink. These are colors of fire and passion; they symbolize the energy of the Divine/Holy Spirit—She, if you must have a gender.

On May 1st I spoke to a college class called “The Psychology of Spirituality” at Southern Connecticut State University at the invitation of Dr. Jessica Suckle-Nelson. I was surprised and proud that a college would offer such a course. Two and a half hours with vibrant, curious students, and I had the time of my life. I began with deep feeling energy and practice and moved to religious mysticism.

Your spirituality is what pumps you, brings you alive, gets you going. It’s about the depth dimension of life—what matters most to you at the deepest level of your being, that sense you get when something touches you in your soul, the place inside you where your spirituality resides. Spirituality is a charge, as crucial to your well being as your pulse is to your heart. There are just three basic spiritual needs common to us all: to be heard, to be listened to, and to belong.

To support my own ideas, I added a brief quote from Gardening the Soul, Soothing Seasonal Thoughts for Jaded Modern Souls by Sister Stan, Irish Catholic Sister of Charity: “Belief is never far removed from unbelief. Love is never far from hate. Hope is only a short distance from doubt and joy lives side by side with tears.” 

That’s it! That’s Spirituality!—the amazing capacity to be truly wholistic, to hold feelings we normally would designate as opposites together in one heart. Most importantly, this spirituality keeps us from quickly condemning others, encourages listening and compassion to help us meet our own and others' needs.  AND, it’s close to Jungian psychology, a theory that makes room for the presence of divine energy as a motivating energy in human behavior. I had the psycho/spiritual thing nutshelled!

This occasion started with a granddaughter Gillian, 22, who texted one day: “Hi Grammy, I have a question for you.” It’s tantamount to a Bible-sized miracle for a grandchild to text or call, so I called back right away. She asked if I could come to her class. The teacher, Dr. S, had talked about difficulties Episcopal women had getting ordained, and Gillian volunteered that her Grammy was among the first groups of women ordained priests in the Episcopal Church. Dr. S. is an Episcopalian. Such a perfect storm of wonders!

“Dick, will you go with me and drive, and let’s also take Gillian out for a quick supper, OK? I’m excited and nervous.” “Sure,” he said. “Wear your God Is Not a Boy’s Name tee shirt AND your collar.” I love him.

I was excited that a young audience had some small interest in Spirituality. I was nervous about communicating the sluicy category. How could I leave poor unpopular God and religion out? I could. I did it for many years when I worked as chaplain at an alcohol/drug treatment center.

What I learned from this refreshing spiritual experience:
    -This group of 18 twenty-something coeds were eager, open-hearted, respectful, and bright. I will never again lump college kids into stereotypes that suggest they are all politically aggressive, irreverent, anti-religious, or indifferent.
    -This group wondered about negative spirituality. If it was personal could it be negative? Their definition was too self-centered, individualistic. Spirituality is personal but not private or unique. Groups have shared spirituality—energy that motivates behavior.
    - This group was highly diverse racially, sexually, and spiritually—agnostic, atheist, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and a former Buddhist nun. Diversity challenges identity and belonging: Who am I? Who are you? Where do I belong? I wonder whether the current well-documented high levels of depression and anxiety in college students are in part related to a sense of real or imagined loneliness? The move from tribalism to a common humanity and a common good in which everyone is included and equally valued is, well, good and fraught.
    -Most students pressed for answers. I gave them ideas and stories. To be spiritual is to hold possible answers right next to the next set of questions, which surely will arise.

Whether they thought I was nuts or not, they gave me a round of applause, scooped up my calling cards, and one young man suggested they applaud Dick, whom I’d introduced as my driver who could only speak if I called on him. They’d all laughed. Humor is essential to healthy psychology and spirituality. My beloved driver/husband grinned then drove me—exhausted, heartened and bursting with hope—all the way back to Massachusetts.

As to my beloved Gillian, she had sparked the energy of her classmates with lots of questions to help her Grammy keep things moving. She also owned her agnostic approach and persisted with her agnostic questions. How do I know I’m spiritual or when something is spiritual? I told her that not knowing was scary and spiritual. Do the best you can and trust.

Later I texted her this: Chiqui, when you sing you connect to your depths, your soul. And everyone who hears you, even if no one is there but god or a tree or a squirrel, connects to spirit and feels a moment of uplifting hope. “Bidden or not, God is there.” Jung said that. Thanks for being you. Sing always. I loved your class, and so did Grampy Sim. ……. I added a healthy compliment of emojis. Here is Gillian serenading our family at Christmas, 2017.

And here is the cross they gave me in thanks, made by Dr. S and her husband.

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. 

2016.08.05 A Pentecostal Family Weekend

I  just got home from a family weekend. The term alone—“family weekend”—conjures up about every reaction, from groaning dread to breathy hope. Such occasions are archetypal—fondest hopes and worst nightmares inextricably bound. Many hilarious movies have been made about THE family weekend.

Our family is normally abnormal: mom, stepfather ( already not the “real” thing”), 2 daughters, 2 sons, 2 daughters-in-law, one son-in law, five grandchildren, aged 16 to 2, a teenage friend, and four dogs.

Our family weekends used to be more frequent. We’d relapsed for good reasons, and now we were trying it again. It was  my idea. I’d thrown out the suggestion gingerly—the understanding mom to perfection. Waffling doesn’t get very far, so I persisted. “Does this mean a lot to you, Mom?” someone asked. “This means the world to me,” I said, for once omitting: “BUT I understand how busy you all are.”

We set our rules: a date in spring all of us could make, a place that would accommodate 15, no more than 4 hours away for any of us, with 5 bedrooms (not all bunk rooms) with bathrooms, a comfortable gathering space, functional kitchen, and affordable. My son researched and reported back his findings with online sites we all could inspect.

I had high hopes for this weekend. My mind was cautious. My heart had thrown caution to the winds and beyond.

Miracle #1: he found us a place in N.H. that met all our requirements + a working fireplace. Miracle #2: everyone weighed in favorably. Only one granddaughter couldn’t come, and we missed her.  Miracle #3 took more time: collecting the rent from everyone.  Miracle#4: grim, cold weather turned sunny on Saturday.

Miracle #5: The weekend was everything I’d hoped for, despite an infestation of ticks, several mice, a rustic ski lodge, OLD and used, full of holes, but clean and spacious, some loss of sleep the first night. I slept like a baby. The actual baby, at first, did not.
 
We laughed like crazy, loved each other like crazy, ate together, played rousing games, engaged in some quiet serious conversations as well as in raucous clowning, including an inflated golden crown for anyone who said anything silly or stupid. Here we are: The Glorious Frontenac Ski Lodge Gaggle, minus the bear, the ticks, and the mouse.

On the way home most of us texted back and forth, extending the humor and good feeling of the weekend. I wrote: “No ticks or mice can daunt love. AND it’s Pentecost/Holy Spirit Sunday. We felt some of her stuff.” A text flew back: “Church nerd?”  All of this was accompanied by many creative emoticons, including ones of ticks and mice.  

I guess we know each other well enough at last to appreciate, not just tolerate, individual quirks and differences. You laugh like crazy and come away crying. Family weekend are mixed blessings which are essential to your soul.

And yes, when the real world settles back in on everyone's shoulders, all of its pains and are still there. Still, we made a memory worth remembering. No one can take that away. 

P.S. On Monday morning Dick, known as Sim and Grampy Sim, was getting dressed when I spied a small black thing on the back of his right leg.  I yelped and told him to hold still, which he found hard to do, being "in a hurry." Sure enough, it was a TICK, a N.H. tick who had followed us home. How sweet. I plucked the tick off and she or he is not in sewer heaven. (Thank Godde we don't have a dog!)  We wept with laughter.

 

2015.05.24 Telling Images

When we catch glimmers of mutual reflectivity between divinity and humanity, we exclaim, Holy.......

Creator Spirit is on the move—to connect, vivify, and potentiate life-giving energy everywhere, like a "big bang" in the soul of God. Schrapnel spills out all over the cosmos. You expected cozy-comfy? Connections happen between and among very different things and people—suburb and city, black and white, artist and engineer, executive and street beggar, religion and science, politics and politicians, east and west, enemy and enemy, on and on. By such connections we are transformed;  category-driven assumptions fall away; and something new happens.

Here are four illustrative images:

The first is traditional with a twist. It is identified as Mary of Nazareth after she has received a strange proposal from a large male angel named Gabriel. What I love about this image is that it is honest. This image is semitic; no cosmetics take away her history and lineage. The image also goes beyond literal history to show a woman alone “pondering these things in her heart,” as the biblical story says. Mary’s “Yes” to the invitation to enter the divine life in a particular womanly way was not a quick, codependent, aiming-to-please assent.

The second is a photo taken by professional photographer, David Pacheco, from inside St. Mary the Virgin Church in New York City. The church is on 46th street just off  Broadway—a community with a big heart, deeply embedded in the heart of the big city.  Its doors are always open for people to come into the dark quiet beauty of the sanctuary. Pacheco entitled his photo, “Stained-Glass Forty-Sixth Street.”  He took it through an ecclesiastical window with small leaded panes. It seems as if the colors you see on the city street come from the stained glass in the window, but the window is clear. The colors reflect instead onto the clear window from the lights and signs on the street. It is a perfect image of the church that belongs to the city and the city to the church. It reminds me of the Latin phrase, Urbi et Orbi, which denotes the papal address and apostolic blessing, developed in the 13th century by Pope Gregory X, given at Christmas and Easter to the city (urbi) of Rome and the entire world (orbi).

 



The third image is also city-bound but on-the-fly, this time in Boston. It is an aerial sculpture made of the finest high-tech rope, created by artist Janet Echelman, designed by engineers, and financed by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, a non-profit organization currently committed to using art to lure visitors to the park.  And this is a huge piece of art, weighing 2000 pounds. It’s a net, just like fishermen use. Jesus uses the image to describe his hopes for the catch the Spirit will make to populate the reign of God. Echelman went to India to paint. Her paints and brushes never arrived, so she spent time with the fisherfolk and learned how to make knots and nets. 

This net is gossamer, composed of  many colors, fastened to the top of city scrapers. It's kinetic, shaped by changing patterns of wind and light; it waves over the Greenway, till October anyway. At night it is illuminated; all the lights in area office buildings are, by agreement, turned off to enhance the illumination. Urbi et Orbi  again.

The artist has not yet named the piece but has described it as  “monumental softness” and “it’s about imagination.”  Like any art, it depends on viewers’ projections. I can’t wait to see it in person. For me, it evokes the divine connective spirit—a true glimmer.

Finally, a verbal image created by scholar-theologian-cosmologist, Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, of Fordham, in her book, Quest for the Living God. No better words have I ever read about the Creator Spirit:

"To sum up: ecological theology proposes that the Creator Spirit dwells at the heart of the natural world, graciously energizing its evolution from within, compassionately holding all creatures in their finitude and death, and drawing the world forward toward an unimaginable future. Throughout the vast sweep of cosmic and biological evolution, the Spirit embraces the material root of life and its endless new potential, empowering the cosmic process from within. The universe, in turn, is self-organizing and self-transcending, energized from the spiraling galaxies to the double helix of the DNA molecule by the dance of divine vivifying power."

My left brain can not understand this, but my soul instantly did nip-ups when I read it. Can't explain.