2022.08.28 A Wedding Does Not A Marriage Make, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Everyone has a wedding story or two, and many great films are made about weddings. 

Even the New Testament has a wedding story. No, Jesus did not preside or wed any brides, but he did once miraculously fill wine jugs with more wine to make sure the hosts of the wedding feast (reception) did not run out and that the guests could drink their fill—and then some. That wine “miracle” has been traditionally viewed as one of the first “signs” to indicate that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed destined for messiahship or something even bigger, like Son of God, or a big messianic title such as the Christ. Stated less grandly, however, most weddings are in themselves miracles of love and commitment bonded—by the grace of God or the bride’s mother.  After that you are married and the hard work of intimacy-forever begins.

*  *  *  *

Seriously though, I bet everyone has amusing wedding stories to tell. Here are a few of my own.

-At the wedding when I married my first husband I was so nervous I clung onto my father’s arm a bit too long. I doubt that anyone noticed, and he never said a thing. I just was terrified about this transition from dependence on my parents to dependence to my new husband.  I figured marriage to be a solemnly sworn trap—till death us do part. It was 1961, and my fears were not far off, given the way church and society viewed marriage and the role of women. It is said that love overcomes fear. I wonder if fear can overcome love?  Will a couple grow together— together?  

-At the wedding when I married my second husband, 26 years later, I was more sure of myself in love. Still, I cried saying my vows. My dearly beloved looked terrified. I saw his mustache quiver. My tears were not from fear but from something much deeper, something grief-like, some combination of mystery and miracle. My second marriage is 35 years old and holding—till death us do part. But what is death? If someone has resided in your heart for any length of time, that person never leaves your heart. 

-At a wedding at which I presided as priest in my first parish after I was ordained, I was waiting for the organist to finish her musical prelude, when I poked my head out to view the congregation seated and waiting. What to my wondering eyes should appear, but several little bridesmaids teetering/wobbling on skyscraper high heels down the aisle toward the altar where no one was waiting for them—no groom, no officiant. I had to make an instant decision. I moved quickly from the sacristy out into the sanctuary and headed down the aisle to meet these  lovelies and turn them around. I gently whispered to them that the music they had heard was NOT the wedding processional—their cue to start to hit the aisle.  Turn about and let’s start over, sweeties. 

-At a good friend’s wedding, there was a “guard” posted at the church doors to make sure the groom’s mother did not enter the sanctuary. We knew that if she showed up she would voice a loud objection and create a commotion worthy of going down in history.  Of course there was no clear plan about what this “guard,” a small woman, friend of the bride’s sister, would do to block a raging, scorned mother of the groom, who, mercifully never appeared.

-And one wedding in which I was a bridesmaid, the whole spectacular event had suddenly to be switched from the church to the bride’s home, and from June to January. The bride’s mother pulled off this miracle—smoothing the fury of her husband as well as lining everyone up for a grand procession‚ of sorts.  

*  *  *  *

So you see, there’s no such thing really as a glitch-less wedding. Nor for that matter is there a glitch-less marriage, or a glitch-free love. Love grows and matures slowly as you go, and both people must invest in its care. Take regular stock of your relationship, for it is like a precious child for whom you care tenderly and into whom you invest yourself with hope, trust, and your own vigor. 

The trick is to keep the commitment renewed and renewed and renewed in your heart and with your behavior. Also, get therapeutic help when you feel the marital sag or snag. I think such therapeutic re-fueling is called forgiveness—or God. 

  

    

2018.08.05 Dear us, Happy Birthday!

Dear Us,

On  August 7th one of us will be 80, and the younger and more vulnerable one of us will be 77—snake eyes with sevens! Seven is a spiritual number, traditionally of some magnitude, so we are lucky to have been born on the very same day. Obviously we are not twins, but we are marriage partners.

With the same day of birth we are both Leos! We have roaring leonine moments.

We met first in the driveway of a parish rectory in Maine. No, correction, we first met through a parish profile large parts of which I, the female part of this duo, wrote. It was humorous, even including cartoons and unique. You, the male priest of some years, were intrigued—enough to submit your resumé to an Episcopal parish in Connecticut.

I was on the search committee and not very impressed with your profile. Others, thought you were still young enough (late 30s) to do vigorous youth work. This you listed as a strength, when really it wasn’t your druthers.

The next time we met was on the phone when I called to see if a few members of our committee could pay a visit on Labor Day weekend in 1978. You felt attracted to my voice, something you’ve never been able to explain. Was it timbre, rhythm, my laugh? Did I sound like Greta Garbo or some other siren? Or were you just unconsciously and suddenly caught up into the third heaven, like St. Paul?

So back to the driveway in Maine. I was wearing a dusty pink top and white slacks. (Why do women so often remember what they wore when something important was happening?)  I was flirting. I didn’t know something important was happening. I imagined myself a vision in dusty pink and you smitten. Even now I check online to seek something dusty pink to wear—even a sweatshirt.

Our committee in time interviewed you and elected you the parish rector. It was not unanimous, despite reports to the contrary. Three people voted against you. One later married my sister; one came to be your fan; and the third remained disgusted that your name was Italian and not French 

So it went and so it goes. We have been married 31 years now and happily so. The romantic myth of love at first sight is perhaps bullshit, but still, we were both born on August 7. Stars count.

I bet we're one of the few couples who . . .
    -resist the temptation to binge-watch Grey’s Anatomy though we do watch it
    -rap theology before breakfast
    -cry in movie theaters over popcorn
    -delight in each other’s preaching, but only if it’s from a pulpit
    -fight like lions and purr simultaneously
    -communicate like a tornado and a block of granite in love
    -agree that “Naked Lunch” is a great thing to act out literally for family charades
    -find laughter healing, even at religion, God, theology, Christ, Scripture, and other heavenly hilarities
   -love critters as much as stars, the moon, chocolate, and the kindness of people

   

2017.12.03 Advent of Sexual Harassment?—Always in Season

In the midst of this avalanche of allegations about sexual harassment, I asked my beloved priest spouse: Have you ever sexually harassed anyone?

Answer: Besides you?

What I keep on recalling, not as excuse but as cultural history, is that sexual harassment has been acceptable behavior for centuries. It was almost expected, and both men and women learned to live with it, their roles and rules clear: men pinch and comment; women demure, blush and dodge.  Feelings about it weren’t important.

So had I ever been sexually harassed in my work place, which was in the church? That includes volunteer work.

Once a priest commented on the movement of my body as I turned the drum of one of those old mimeograph machines. He liked to watch it, my butt not the machine. God forbid, I was flattered. I also felt uncomfortable. That was mostly because I worried that my behind was too fat or too flat, or whatever other idiotic body judgment I imposed on my body. Really? Yes.

What I experienced a lot was something I’d call attitudinal harassment. A bishop once towered over me and queried: “And WHO will take care of the children?” It wasn’t exactly harassment but it was shriveling and left little room for my perspective, let alone my answer. His assumption was that I couldn’t leave home. Mine was that my children would benefit from less not more parenting as they grew.  

My role in the church was limited to set up, clean up, ogle the altar, and in time, administer the chalice at the communion rail (a much trickier maneuver than passing out the bread/wafer), read from scripture on a Sunday, and serve on the vestry. I shoved my way along toward more and more leadership roles, ending up as Dean of our regional deanery, until finally the Church voted in 1976 that women could be ordained priests. Full acceptance of women in leadership is a work-in-progress.

Context is important—always. Some of this ongoing mess we’re in is a matter of interpretation, according to different times and different circumstances…and just plain evolution. My dad, for example, was a “mad man” in the 1950s. He had an affair with his secretary. Maybe more, though he was penitent and confessed his dalliance to my mother. What startled me most was that she told us daughters about it. Was that hostile? To whom?

In high school in a Connecticut shore town famous for gentlemen’s agreements (antisemitism in real estate, Christian/white elitism), I observed that lots of flirting went on amidst the cocktail party set. My mother wasn’t innocent. I learned from her that flirting was power—dangerous power. But my mother flirted with style. Is flirting sexual harassment of a sort?  What about flirting in the work place?

But these were the rules back then in the 1950s: men got handsy not just at parties but in work places. Women were supposed to overlook it or find clever ways to avoid office rape. It was a predator/prey culture, the assumption being that boys and men couldn’t help it—all that testosterone you know. Women had to work around it. These have been the rules over centuries, and they remained the rules.

Until 2017?  Well, we’ll see.

The point I want to make is that I still loved my dad and saw other good things in him. He never sexually harassed me with comments or looks. I felt proud when he retired early because advertising was becoming unethical, he thought ie. false advertising.

Plenty of great artists (Picasso for one, Woody Allen for another) have treated women in abusive exploitive ways. Does that discredit their art, their gifts?  How do we separate and sift all this while at the same time reshaping our collective mores/morality for the common good? Gawd, look at most all our presidents! Not to mention many saints and bishops!! Does their behavior toward women discredit their skills and accomplishment?

I’m a big-picture, person, for better or worse, so I see that it is increasingly incumbent on ALL of us to work together to end the abuses across the board born within a deeply entrenched, centuries-old patriarchal system of social organization. What was overlooked by everyone, men and women alike, really is now impossible to overlook. Or is it? American politics, religion, economics, morality across the boards, has been corrupted/contaminated by a silent consensus to ignore or deny unconscionable behaviors. Most painful to me is the fact that all this has as its underpinning the strong belief that women are not people, I mean not really people! 

To speak theologically, which I can’t resist: Sin is a condition that develops when anyone or ones become disconnected from the goodness in themselves, God, and their neighbors. And there you have it. Sin is always in our reach, which is why the system murdered Jesus for not recanting his politics and his image of God rich in compassion for the poor, the sick, the needful, the preyed upon, the underbelly of society—and women. Sin is endemic and inevitable, which is why all of us need to try to be Christ-like, to understand what that means, and to remember that every week in Eucharist we are re-Christified.

Will it be different now, or is it really going to be different now with all the latest revelations and fierce confessions?  I hope so. I pray so. You know my death throes of patriarchy theory. Godde knows!

2013.09.01 Tribute To a Poet and Poetry

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate poet, Irishman, Dublin resident who also taught at Harvard, devoted dad of three and husband of one wife, ebullient raconteur, imbiber, lover of the land, user of plain-talk words that make sense of life and don’t rhyme but have rhythm,  just died at 74— my age.
 


The purpose of poetry, as I see it, being a priest, is to consecrate what is,—simple things like bread and wine, small children, your own fruitless malaise, or the latest obit. You can do it with hand gestures, a smile for no reason, humor, deep listening, a kiss, a poem, like this one by Heaney:

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

2011.04.27 Becoming Mercy

I don’t remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. It wasn’t a princess. Maybe a horsewoman.

Maybe I just wanted to be the apple of my dad’s eye or at least not so much the apple of my mother’s eye.

Maybe I just wanted to be left alone to create—mischief, dramas, daring games with creepy plots, even liturgies—anything my imagination could stretch to.

I imagined God at just three. I was the apple of God’s eye, but I didn’t get the implications till I actually did grow up and into a religious vocation.

One thing I’m sure I didn’t want to be when I grew up was a nun or a priest. Now I am both—sort of.

I was drawn to the richness of the Roman Catholic Mass but found its misogynous politics stifling. Anglocatholic Episcopalians had the liturgy and hopeful politics so I became an Episcopal priest.

To satisfy my earlier Catholic leanings I became an Associate of the Religious Sisters of Mercy (RSM,) a Catholic order. BUT associates, according to their guidelines, are “ordinarily” Roman Catholic—“ordinarily” is a permissive word.

To be an Associate one makes a commitment to live a mercy way of life. Be compassionate and just. Not hard really, but hard as hell some days. A liaison Sister with whom you covenant helps. You keep each other honest to mercy.

I was attracted to the Mercies because their foundress Catherine Macauley, up for canonization btw, had a simple vision to help the poor. "Poor" is not restricted by an economic definition.

The Mercy vision and mission is to work and pray for connection: of the poor with resources, the ignorant with education/knowledge, and the sick with healing. The Holy Spirit Herself is the Great Connector and helps the process along.

This fit with my early Catholic leanings and it fits with my own ministry as priest, counselor, author and spiritual director.

Mercy satisfies my three guiding Muses: Spirituality, Religion and Feminism.

FEMINISM is happy because most of the “poor” are women. RELIGION is happy because many people are ignorant of the graces of sane and good religions and need good prayer guidance and teaching. SPIRITUALITY is happy because every soul is wounded to varying degrees of severity, and we all need healing.

To find out more about becoming an Associate of Mercy go to their website. Mercy Associates are “ordinarily” women.

Pray then click. www.sistersofmercy.org

The Priest Wears Dangling Earrings—Still

Just three known-to-me times in my twenty-some years of being a priest, active in parishes, counseling, spiritual direction and chaplaincy, have my earrings made the headlines in someone’s mind—once for scandal, once for shock, and once for delight.
The Episcopal Church voted that women could be ordained in 1976, a very good year for church and USA. I was ordained in 1988 after some struggle, but women were still not regular fixtures at parish altars. We just didn’t look right. To some we were an offense.
When I started celebrating at the altar in my first parish in Connecticut I wore the correct uniform except for one thing—my dangly gold earrings. They were delicate, teardrop-shaped like a fish, the Christian symbol after all, but they raised eyebrows. No one said anything to me personally but by Monday morning the moribund, covered with dust and cobwebs Suggestion Box contained two slips of paper. We knew there was new life for this old box because the messengers had carefully left the edge of the white message paper sticking out of the slot.
The messages were for me. One note said, “The priest should NOT wear dangly earrings,” and the other one was like unto it. I gave them to the male rector, told him they were for him, went home, fumed to anyone who would listen, asked Godde what to do, and wore buttons not danglers the next Sunday and several more until the people knew me and liked me behind my danglers. Then I wore the danglers again without comment. It was okay to be an anomaly but not wise to flaunt my gender ornaments in anger and just to mock others. Motives count.
The second time my earrings drew comment was when I officiated at the wedding of my former spiritual director, a French Jesuit priest who had left his country, his religion and his order to marry a sweet young thing named Mary. He hadn’t left his Roman Catholic priesthood, just transferred into Episcopal priesthood. A priest is a priest is a priest. Okay for him to have me officiate but the shock for at least one Catholic wedding guest jumped unbidden out of her mouth. “Look! The priest has earrings!”
The third time my earrings became the center of someone’s attention was in the yes of a six month old child at her baptism. She was screeching, her parents blushing and shushing when I reached for the child to get it over with quickly. Suddenly she stopped her wailing and stared at me with smiles and coos. That was just before she grabbed at one of my danglers and yanked. In spite of the endangerment to my ear everyone laughed. How cute!
The moral of this story is that dangling earrings can be dangerous, but isn’t that true of all adornments? They stand out, command attention, turn heads.
Scripture has a tradition of adornment. Godde adorns with beauty those whom society casts out. Godde raises them up, saves them from the muck of human degradation and abuse, calls them beloved, and dresses them in garments of fair linen, and fits them for halos—and the women get dangly earrings.

Memoir Musings Part One: Wilderness

Today the Christian Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation. In the biblical story a young girl Mary had a vision of the angel Gabriel and heard in her heart an invitation, an announcement, a deal: conceive, bear and nurture a son named Jesus. In return for her female gifts her biology and her commitment to a hard journey (Jesus wasn’t an easy son you know,) God promised blessings for Mary and for her son. Mary said yes.

Today is also the twenty-first anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest in the Church of God. It’s Mary’s day and my day too, a good time to begin to tell you how my own call to say yes to God’s invitation to me.

* * * *

I’ve been writing all my life, most recently at length about my spiritual journey, trek really, from child to adult, girl to woman, and edging into old woman, with most of the focus on my middle years—thirty-five to fifty-five roughly.

What, I pondered, would be the right word to describe what it’s like to be moving, sometimes without consent, toward maturity? Mind, body and soul are all involved—not one holds back, not one dominates. Growth spurt seems too mild. Mid-life crisis lacks luster, too psychological. Transition is shopworn. And paradigm shift is for things much bigger than me. Liminality works but is close to spiritual cliché.

Into my mind popped wilderness and a quote: “The wilderness is where the child learns to love the mother more than the milk.”

Wilderness? A bit tired among the biblically literate but when something pops in like that I don’t resist much. Wilderness catches the ambience of a mapless pilgrimage, going nowhere and everywhere. Lost.

To learn to love the mother more than the milk? At a literal level, I don’t resonate with this wisdom. My mother didn’t nurse me or my sisters, thought is was “disgusting,” not part of her class or day. But of course milk and mother are metaphor for what life is like in wilderness time.

My wilderness was wild but it wasn’t hot or dry like a desert. There was plenty of water although nothing slaked my thirst. It wasn’t uninhabited, not bleak wasteland but teeming with people, places and things, forces driving me from within and whipping me from without. Tumbleweed.

I don’t know how I got into my wilderness or exactly how I got out. I careened through it tethered by one slender thread: I wanted with all my heart to be ordained a priest and celebrate the Holy Eucharist. I kept trying to persuade the Episcopal church, then (1970’s and 80’s) in its own wilderness of change—shifting words, hymn tunes, genders, and all manner of traditions.

My campaign began officially in 1977 in the diocese of Connecticut. I with five other women—the very first female aspirants—applied to enter the ordination process. We were “legal” now, voted so in 1976 by the General Convention, our legislative body. Fifteen women pioneers paved the way. In 1974 and 1975 they were been ordained priests outside of canonical authority. Roman Catholic women are doing the same now. (Such efforts remind me of the valiant and herculean way grass makes its way up through concrete taking the tiniest cracks as invitation.)

But since we Episcopal women had been accepted by vote, we thought we had an open door. We were thrilled, triumphant, and naive about the difference between the vote counts of our “congressional” delegates and the more invisible slow heartbeat of church officialdom back home. The numbers didn’t tally.

Before I applied for ordination I had entered and was lost in my personal wilderness, trying to break free from societal roles and rules for women, but this ecclesiastical wilderness was vast, harsh and sometimes toxic. I was rejected twice by “Goliath” after which I descended into the hell of my one million three hundred thousand internal demons—echoes of parental demons now mine— all proclaiming me inadequate.

I kept on–no promise, no blessings, no mother, no milk— driven by my soul’s adrenalin.