2022.03.20 Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post. 3/20/22

The Bible is a source of frustration to many, a source of wonder to some, and a source of trembling awe to others. To me it is a source of all of these aforementioned states of mind and heart. 

On this Sunday in Lent, the biblical readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, from St. Paul of many words and even more semicolons, and from the Gospel, according to Luke, all artfully bombard listeners with one central theological theme: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, Hebrew for “I am as I am”—no more and no less. I am is God’s personal name: I am I Am. God’s name is the verb To Be, a verb that indicates presence. God is present—no matter what.  

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

Not too many or of us will ever see a burning bush that is not consumed, because fire always consumes, burns up. Nevertheless, many of us see something like a burning bush, something that communicates to us the omnipresence of God as Being itself.  I memorized many omni- words in Sunday School. The only one that stuck to my soul was omnipresence, because it always proved true, even in the worst most dreary or painful times—time in which I could see no way out, no place for me, no clarity for my hopes and dreams. Once years ago I was staring at a liturgical calendar on which the special, holy days—Easter days— were marked in white. Logically, it was the Easter season. Illogically, I suddenly saw all the days’ numbers appear as white. I tried to blink away what I saw, decided I could be going mad, and then, like Moses, shed my doubts. (And did you know that the verb for “shed” is the same in Hebrew as the word used for a snake’s shedding its skin each year, without which shedding the snake could never grow?)  So I shed my doubts and shrugged: “What the crazy hell, it’s all white, every day!” I’m okay. 

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

Just last week I saw a small, round, completely white snowy owl perched atop a tall tree outside our window. I rushed to get the binoculars. We always try to prove our vision, don’t we? But this one was provable. There she was, pure white just waiting to be joined and blended into the big snow blizzard that would be upon us that evening and into the next day.  Then suddenly she was gone. Up and away, she flew, leaving only the impression of her presence behind my eyes. 

Ehyeh asher Eyheh

As Paul writes to the grousing Corinthians, read any of us much of the time: Hey you, stop grumbling. There isn’t much happening to you that has not happened to others. There is not a test you cannot survive, for God will provide you the way out, as well as the strength to bear it. This is often quoted, sometimes flippantly, as if this truth is obvious when you’re in the middle of great grief and fear. Well, it is not obvious at all, and should always be taken lightly and spoken gently with one hand on your own heart  and another hand on the heart or head of the other in your presence. It is terrifying to be present like this. I’ve been with dying people and suffering ones in the hospital, and I want more than anything else to flee. But I remember, I’m not alone. 

Ehyeh asher Eyheh

And in the gospel of Luke (13:1-9), Jesus makes a bit of fun of us “poor me” types who imagine our own suffering to be the worst of all, our own guilt the most unbearable, our own failings the most, well, deserving of grace. Nonsense, Jesus tell them. We all fall to the same fate  equally. Get some new perspectives. Change your viewpoint. Jesus offers a parable of a fig tree that, year after year, has failed to produce. The owner is angry and orders this one tree to be cut down, for it is useless trash. But the vinedresser, the one who cares for this vineyard and knows all the trees and their vines intimately, calls for reprise: Give this one another year. I will hoe around it and fertilize it, and if it bears fruit another year, fine. If not let it be cut down. I am tempted to excise that last line, because I am sometimes afraid of dying, afraid of being useless, think that all my efforts have been fruitless. But then. 

Ehyeh asher Ehyeh

2022.01.30 Holy Scripture—How Holy and Whose? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 1/30/22

I do not believe that Holy Scripture should be taken literally, as if everything that is in it happened just the way it was/is written, as if there is no room for interpretations and ongoing scholarly research, study, and prayerful discernment. 

How can one embrace something called “Holy” without acknowledging as well the grandly attracting Mystery, not for me to attain but for me to receive, love, and appreciate like the rays of the Sun. 

Having said all that, I do take Holy Scripture, which for me is the testaments of the Holy Bible, seriously. In fact, I take it too seriously to take it literally. I love it too much to demean its depths and flexibility, by insisting that there is only one single way to understand its various parts. I value divine spiritual mobility too much to limits its wisdom to a single holy document, no matter how canonized it may be. I also respect Holy Scripture too much to make it the single measure of my faith in God.  

And yet, I take Holy Scripture too seriously to take it, or any portion of it, as THE Word of God, as if God dictated it word for word, while some speedy ancient stenographer/scribe wrote it all down, or as if its contents and revelations were static, the sole source of divine holy Word to faithful communities.

Still, every Sunday in many Christian churches, worshippers hear the lector say, The Word of God, to which they all respond, Thanks be to God after a biblical reading from anywhere in the whole Bible. Is this word the only holy one?  Or is it just for now? I’m grateful that alternative, more flexible options are offered in our Episcopal tradition, so a reader can say, Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people, to which we respond, Thanks be to God. 

Fulsome holiness, praise, and thanks, are reserved for the portion of the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ from Mark, Matthew, Luke or John, read each Sunday. The gospel gives a special shout out to Jesus the Christ whose story is, well, gospel. Most preachers focus on the Gospel in the sermon. This top billing makes sense, because Jesus is, to Christians, Lord, Savior, Son of God—our raison d’être. But this story is not considered holy for those outside the Christian tradition. Holiness is not just Christians. Jesus was Jewish. Many others have holy stories. 

I am not unique in my thoughts and queries, although I have wondered if I am a sinner, maybe a heretic, fooling myself for the sake of my own egotistical meanderings, ideas that energize and revitalize me. I conclude each time of self-doubt and recrimination by returning to the roots of my own childhood story. My mother read me The Little Book About God by Lauren Ford when I was 3 2/3. (I’m sure of my age, because my sister wasn’t born yet). Mom also told me I was a miracle and a gift from God. I was already inquisitive to the point of annoyance. Hence, when this book and my mother’s own joy collided with my natural curiosity, I just had to meet this God. I found the necessary  privacy for my monumental quest under our large dining room table with a cloth to the floor. There I set up a child’s inquisition for God—something like, I’m here and I want my parents to pay more attention to me, but what I really want to know is who are you? I got no answers, only the sound of my own imagination pounding silently away at God’s absence. God never said a word, nor did God grant any of my several wishes, such as banishing my mortal enemy, the martini glass. What God did do was to listen without advice. This way I learned that I mattered.  

It is to this God that I still pray. This God I followed to the church altar—not to be a bride but to become a priest at the altar. This God I discovered in the Holy Bible, a collection of stories about people to whom God spoke, and to whom God listened.  And it is this God who in time finally spoke to me with the simplest and dumbest question imaginable: Why are you doing this? (I was just baking chocolate chip cookies for my children who loved them.) 

Yet this question awakened me with words I knew were not my own, words that stunned me, words whose meaning I felt compelled to explore, words that brought me up short, that forced me to, well, check out my depressed mood with a therapist. From this God, I learned that not only can God listen to little girls, but God can ask dumb questions, and is no bully. In fact, God waited over ten years for me to address just this one “dumb” question—to wrestle an answer out of myself. I felt as if I were writing my own scripture, maybe not so holy, but my best effort.  

This God is why I believe that small stories of deep meaning come to each one of us, in all religions and all spiritualities, ancient and modern. From such inaudibly audible communications come stories, both tender and fierce, mobilized by Love. This is how I first knew that I mattered, and this is how I still know that all living things in heaven and on earth live, and move, and have their being in God. (Acts 17:28) 

Here’s a story, told about the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a man to whom God spoke in deeply holy ways, ways that engaged his own emotions and questions, ways that shaped Heschel as a theologian who told stories about God as an intimate presence. Both Heschel’s spirituality and his social-justice activism grew from prayer within this intimate God’s presence. There was no separation between Heschel’s religious faith rituals and his politics. To me, Heschel is a spiritual giant, although he was aman short in height.  

In 1968, Heschel was engaged in protest marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. One Sabbath his brother protesters and friends, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Heschel’s apartment and were greeted with this welcoming exuberance: “You are just in time for the last bit of disengagement from the world we have to change . . .  Shabbat!”  Heschel let Coffin hold the ritual spices and King the candle while they chanted the prayers, smelling the spice box and collectively drinking a sip of wine. Then Heschel told Coffin and King the story of the wise men of Chelm who deliberated over whether people grew from the feet up or from the head down. The answer was neither. Quoting the va-yetel el echav, he said that individuals grow from within and eventually move beyond their own egos towards other people. “Here’s to the world’s outgrowth of selfishness towards the humanities . . . L’Hayim!”  The Rev. Daniel Berrigan a Roman Catholic priest, called Heschel’s practice of uniting prayers and social action for justice “an ecumenism I could take seriously.” (p.195 Abraham Joshua Heschel. A Life of Radical Amazement, biography by Julian Zelizer, 2021)

Holiness belongs to everyone everywhere always. 

It grow from within. You’ll recognize it. 

2021.12.26 Beloved Ass, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 12/26/21

I know it is the day we remember to remember St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr (after Jesus and a million others of course) but we do as the liturgical calendar indicates. All I think of when I think of St. Stephen is the phrase about the newly fallen snow— “deep and crisp and even,” or even-Steven, from the carol “Good King Wenceslas”. The 1853 lyric was written by Anglican cleric and hymnwriter, John Mason Neale, who was interested in restoring Catholic saints’ days. And so he did. Later critics called his work “ponderous moral dogma.” Still, combined with the lively thirteenth century dance carol, the legend and Neale’s doggerel lasted. Here is how good this legendary King Wenceslas was to poor Otto who survived the cold by following in the king’s footsteps—literally:

"My liege," he said, "I cannot go on. The wind freezes my very blood. Pray you, let us return."

"Seems it so much?" asked the King. "Was not His journey from Heaven a wearier and a colder way than this ?"

Otto answered not.

"Follow me on still," said S. Wenceslaus. "Only tread in my footsteps, and you will proceed more easily."

The servant knew that his master spoke not at random. He carefully looked for the footsteps of the King: he set his own feet in the print of his lord's feet.

*  *  *  *

 BUT . . .  I am not in a martyring saintly mood. And our New England snow-dusting is shallow, soggy and splotchy, unlike Wenceslas’s snow. I’m still wholeheartedly wrapped up in Christmas with all of its intrigue and Mystery and melody. I wanted to find an iconic animal for Christmas as the bunny is for Easter. My dear husband grinned and said, “The cattle are lowing.” The image of a mooing cow didn’t quite do it for me. I mean I spent many summers on a dairy farm and used to watch milking and udders. Cattle, my ass, I  whispered to myself. 

I sought something with more continuity, even doggedness, like a faithful companion for life, something more romantic but not gooey romantic or sentimentally sloppy. I thought of my beloved merry husband, but, you know how corny that is. 

What? Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Yes! Cattle, my ass. That’s it!—my inspiration, hidden in my whispered sarcasm. 

Here is an image of a faithful ass, a small donkey, well noted in the Christmas story and the Easter story. In ancient times, the ass was a cadillac. Who was it that hovered near the edge of the wee manger crib, making sure that the babe was safe from harm? And who was it that, coaxed along by Joseph with his walking stick, hauled the pregnant mother Mary over lonely sand dunes to escape from the cruel terrorism of King Herod’s antisemitism? And who again was it that offered his worn old dull dun shaggy coat to carry the adult Jesus into Jerusalem to face unjust accusers and eventually death by crucifixion?  

It was the beloved ass who made the whole story portable, possible, and indelible. Why? Because I’ve been there. I’ve seen those sandy roads and hills. And because that’s what I try to do, too.  

©LynBrakeman, 2021 

2019.11.03 How Can A House Divided Stand?

Saints and sinners live side by side everywhere—in every home, town, city, nation, country, church—and in every soul. When you know and embrace this wisdom your house will not be divided.

What happens, though, when ignorance and evil conspire to become institutionalized?

Recently, on the nightly news commentary show, Greater Boston, we heard an interview with French artist and filmmaker François Ozon. He talked about his creative process in making a movie about the abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. The film is based on true stories and real people and is entitled, “By the Grace of God.”

Ozon spoke about his well-curated decision to make a movie, rather than a documentary or even a docudrama, about the pedophilia crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in France. He got actors to play the parts of the priest, those who exercised ecclesiastical authority, the adult men who'd suffered abuse as children, and their families in Lyon, France.

THE STORY

All the victims had remembered in silence. One man began to search for the others. They found each other, shared their shame and their stories, and were able together to effect some change in a centuries-old rigidified, hierarchical, religious institution. How did they accomplish this?—through the power of truth, collective action, mutual support, media, and the secular legal system.

All of the men had been part of a scout troupe led by one parish priest who was sexually attracted to children. The narrowing of the focus plus the dramatization of the issue made it flesh, made it real, and therefore palpably credible—much more so than a docudrama would have. 

Although this film is in French and has subtitles, the dialogue isn’t complex, and the subtitles are not bothersome.

MEANINGS

Besides a sinking heart, I felt a rising rage AND an expansive hope after I saw it. There is much more to this trauma than meets the eye. 
    -This is NOT as simple as an indictment of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. It is about centuries of patriarchal power abuses and coverups, involving complicit men and women at all levels—saints and sinners all.
    -It is about the politics of money. 
    -It is about confusing the Church with God, commonly called idolatry. 
    -It is frighteningly connected to what is going on in our nation and the world right now.
    -It is about ancient wisdom: words of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke way back in the first century CE: A house divided against itself cannot stand. (Mk. 3:25, Mt. 12:25, Lk. 11:17) You don’t need a personified figure called Satan to know this truth. 
    -It is about the ultimate value of breaking the silence and the shame that engulf addiction and related compulsions, diseases that keep full healing out of reach for too many. 
    -It is about tragic, treacherous exploitation of the best of religious values: forgiveness and divine compassion, and the Mystery of the Holy within and among us. 
    -It is about a terrifying exploitation of the Gospel: Jesus himself loved and touched little children, did he not?
    -It is NOT about priests who are evil, but about priests, such as the one in this film, who repeatedly ask for help for their mental illness and get refused. It is about priests, such as the one in this film who, when confronted, confess over and over. THEY TELL THE TRUTH.  (This is not about all priests of course, but I had one such priest as a client some years back. He had been stripped of everything, including his pension. I saw him for free and felt about as powerless as he did, except to proffer forgiveness divine. I did not know how to psychoanalyze his disease or help him, but I knew moralizing wasn’t helpful at all. He knew that too.) We need more research.
    -It is NOT about pedophilia, because that means love of children NOT sexual love with children. A better word might be pedo-predation.
    -It is about calling Holy that which is Evil.
    -It is about the inability to see saint and sinner at once.
   

OUTCOMES   

The amazing work of this small group in Lyon realized one big legal change: the statute of limitations for seeking reparation or accountability for such predation has been extended in France from 15 years to 30 years. That is restorative justice and hopeful. When we work together, give up our unholy divisions and collaborate for the good of all, we can change our system. Their work continues, and despite complexities, there’s hope for the pope.
   
Without question, this film dramatizes one of the most painful death throes of patriarchy. If you have ever tended to someone who is dying you know what death throes look like—jerky, often lasting for days and weeks, painful to watch. The only thing to do is to be patient, present, take lots of breaks, have people who will listen to you, and pray without ceasing. You are hurting more than the one in the throes. If you are faithful you will trust the outcome and the divine hope within it.

TITLE

See the film to catch the fullness of the power this phrase evokes: By the Grace of God.

BIBLE  Remember the story of Zaccheus, the money manager/tax collector/business man who intuited something sacred going on with  this Jesus and his teaching? The crowds pressed, so Zaccheus went up into a tree to see Jesus as he passed by. Jesus spotted him, glanced up. Their gaze locked. Ever wonder what Jesus saw in Zaccheus's eye, and what Zaccheus saw in Jesus's eye?

WISDOM 

Remember always to ask: the grace of God according to whom?
A divided house cannot stand, but it can be rebuilt.

2018.08.12 Art Is Memory

"Art is memory. It is the excavation of so many memories we have had - of our mothers, our best and worst moments, of glorious experiences we have had with friends or films or music or dance or a lovely afternoon on a sloping, green hill. All of this enters us and, if we are artists, must be shared, handed over to others. This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  Martha Graham, modern dance artist (1894-1991). Photo portrait by Yousuf Karsh, 1948.

We are in Nantucket, a place of memory—over 50 years of it. Everyone’s memories are different. Everyone’s creative expression is unique. Everything passes into memory. Nothing will ever be the same. Graham calls this progress. I call it the way of the Spirit—creating, re-creating, re-membering, over and over and over again in multiple shapes and sizes.

Isn’t this what the art of Scripture is—re-member, re-create, re-call, re-invite?  Nothing is new and everything is new, generation by generation of interpretation. Know where you came from and hand it all over to others. That’s how it lasts. Graham sank into a major depression after she left ballet. Her wisdom came out of this darkness; she re-created her art and her life in choreography until her death in 1991. 

Is this what Mary of Nazareth did when she found herself pregnant? She raced off alone to see her cousin Elizabeth. What woman would set off on such a difficult and arduous journey in that vulnerable condition? Wasn’t Joseph available? Oh, that’s right he didn't know yet. This unbidden state of affairs had to be frightening. We don't know if Mary was depressed, but the story tells us she felt a familiar spiritual assurance before she fled into the hills.

I remember a time when I thought I was pregnant and wanted to flee like Mary. I was in high school. I was going steady with the man who in time became my first husband. We shivered in fear—together. He would call me every single day to check on my menstrual status. Our code was: “Are there carp in the H’s pool?” Really! No meant I had not gotten my period, and yes that I had. If I answered yes we planned to sneak into the H’s pool, a neighborhood rarity in the 1950s, and take a big fat illegal bloody swim—quietly in the dark.

That’s how crazy we felt at the prospect of our tender young lives being possibly over, or at least so disrupted that we would be rent asunder by parental rage, or worse, divine wrath. My mother caught me sobbing, so I confessed my fear. She sent us to the local GP who told us the facts of life—again. Then he suggested that our fears had caused us to imagine a scientific impossibility. (We hadn’t even had intercourse, just got overheated, and imagined the worst, something like the sin of the biblical Onan who spilled some sperm, but in our case we imagined that such spillage could defy the law of gravity and travel upward and into my womb.) 

The kindly doctor might as well have been God, because his word alone dispelled our fears, and, miraculously, induced my menstrual blood the very next day. Mary of Nazareth discovered that Joseph would marry her, and that her elderly cousin had an irregular, postmenopausal, pregnancy.

My story isn’t the same as Mary’s, but I re-membered hers and re-created it in my own. As Graham wrote:  “Art is memory. Artists have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  That’s what God the Artist does.

Scripture is art, and art is memory, and memory keeps us alive and dancing.

2016.07.17 Wake Up!

A funny thing happened in church today. I was the preacher but I didn’t preach. I identified a stand-out theme in the biblical readings, which I called WAKE UP!  Briefly I outlined it: 
         Old Abraham woke up fast when three strangers with angelic credentials showed up to let          him know he and Sarah would have a new son at age 100++ And Sarah split her sides. They woke up.
    The author of Collisions, (that’s Colossians!) burst onto the scene with an amazing proclamation, “Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” This was hardly a new idea to this author. He’d heard it all before, yet this idea woke this writer up for the first time.
    And what about the old familiar, tried and true story of Mary and Martha in Bethany with Jesus? Sigh. Nothing gets old or dull save we make it so, yet this one was drying up. Was there a wake-up call in this story? What was new here? I wondered.

You know when you read to a small child you can see God. They love this story and beg you to read it again—and again—and again—until you want to throw up. But you read it over and over, because you love this child, and because you get to share in the wake-up face: eyes lit up, delight spread all over the face—every single time. It's contagious.The child eventually knows the story enough to turn pages at the right places and says all the words even though they can’t read. The story becomes the child’s own story. It’s gospel—incarnate, a scriptural process.

I imagine this is how the Holy Spirit works the biblical texts into our flesh in a way that wakes us up. So what about the Martha/Mary/Jesus story in Luke? Could we wake it up together?

I invited the congregation (about 25 people spread out all over the big sanctuary, Anglican-like,)  re-read the brief clip of story I affectionately call the M& M story, then paused. So? What do you think? Silence. Was anyone awake? I waited and asked again: What wakes you up in this story? There’s no right or wrong here. What do you notice? I gestured. Then slowly, slowly the sermon began to happen.

The women busted out from their containment and found the "preacher" inside them. I didn’t dare imagine how they had held back for so long. Most of them were Marthas who had always held resentment about this story. One of them even received applause for her bold declamation of Jesus’ bad attitude. Men chimed in with their own feelings. One said he “got the spiritual idea.” The place was vibrating with energy. Faces lit up; eyes brightened. Nothing got out of hand. I was not tempted to explain, take back control or defend Jesus—or Luke.

Together we created the most magnificent thing—gave the Holy Spirit a workout and Her own wake-up call.

A man who is nearly deaf and rarely speaks, suddenly offered a prayer of thanksgiving aloud in just the right place, even though he couldn’t hear. “I knew something was going on here. I didn’t hear it but the women were talking. I don’t agree with any sermons but last night a man in my writing group for homeless people at the cathedral rummaged through his collection of street pick-ups, found a window fan and gave it to me. I slept so well last night. Thank you.”

The buzz kept on through coffee hour and outside as people left for their homes. The best news?  No one said, “Good sermon, Lyn.”

2016.01.10 Little Epiphanies

Dedicated to……..
   
            WORDS   
            and their
           beautiful
            hidden
              and
           beckoning
          uncertainties
   
          Dedication by David Whyte for Consolations, Meanings of Everyday Words,  2014, 
                an alphabet book of solace, nourishment and underlying meanings.

What Shepherds Do

Shepherds keep watch still.
Shepherds stood stock still
   agaze, agape, light-struck at night

We imagine them sore afraid
We are sure they made haste to follow

But no……………

They stood still to watch over their sheep.
What shepherds are made to do.

Stand still. God knows where you are.
                      Lyn Brakeman, 2016 

A Hymn and a Poem
 
I have enormous respect for the spirituality of Anglican hymnody, both its texts and its music. I love to sing and discover that voices age like everything else. I’d get depressed if I didn’t also put trust and hope in evolution: everything will change in order to grow. We don’t lose the old and familiar, though we add to it, amend it, and seek nourishment in resources and people outside our own tradition, to let more light in. Have you noticed that each time we let light in to grow we die a little too?  It must be so.

        To die and so to grow. If you have not experienced this
        you are only a dark guest on a lonely planet.
                             Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,“The Holy Longing”
 

Thus it may seem odd that my favorite hymn is quite outside the Anglican comfort zone. The music is classical yet the text is offered as a hymn in the Unitarian Universalist Hymnal. It is an anthem of peace, both for religions and nations: love what you love, and hold it dear enough to be able to love what others hold dear.

Finlandia   music by Jean Sibelius, lyrics of Finnish Anthem translated to English

This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace, for lands afar & mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Hear are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine

Holy Scripture  John 1:14 in the New Revised Standard Version.

Tiny words can make a big difference. This Advent I’ve been praying with some scriptural texts, all very familiar, but, by paying attention and by repetition, I have noticed them in new ways. One example popped up in St. John's Mystery of the Incarnation......of all places.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

So? The translators have chosen this wording over alternative translations that say: “as of the Father’s only son.” The use of the indefinite article “a” instead of the definite article “the” to modify father, in addition to the elimination of the capital F for father makes the phrase metaphoric, signifying a profound affectional bond. God is to Jesus as a father is to an only son. (Remember those Miller analogy tests?) Any father? Any parent? Any son or daughter? Divinity to humanity? The phrase is allowed to be symbolic rather literal. It can not easily be used to justify any claim to Christian superiority or exceptionalism.
                                         
Little things mean a lot.  So do little choices.

2014.12.14 Fear Not . . .But . . .

The phrase most frequently repeated in the New Testament is “Fear not,” or some version thereof. I find the phrase a comforting half-truth. Of course we have fear, and the wise writers of scripture acknowledge our fear, yet “fear not” is not a condemnation but a consolation.

Being able to feel fear is healthy. Like pain, fear tells us, that something is threatening, something is amiss.  Fear can be a motivator. It shoves us into action, often with great courage—not to erase fear, but to refuse to let it dominate our psyche and soul, to refuse to let it paralyze us. 

When fear dominates we can not hear the Word of God inside us, nor can we listen well to our own good sense or the counsel, or even love, of others.  When the disciples felt afraid they either went into high-gear military mode (let’s fight to kill) or they fell asleep (let’s refuse to acknowledge that there is danger, let’s take care of it tomorrow.)

Ironically, Jesus Christ presented a real trauma (something over which you have no control happens to you that scares and scars you, almost to death) to the world in which he lived, and taught, and healed, and died, and was resurrected. He scared the living hell out of them with his gospel. Jesus advertised a God who could reverse the worst of human conditions by the power of Love.

Jesus trusted the God he proclaimed, yet he was not free of fear; in fact, according to the accounts of the New Testament gospel writers, he sweated it out in the garden of Gethsemane where he prayed fervently just scant days before he would be arrested and executed. What made Jesus different, and therefore irresistible—followable—was that he did not succumb to terror’s paralysis. He was neither free of fear, nor naive to its effects, both internally and externally. Terror was all around. He just did not let it cause a mental, emotional or spiritual blackout!
  
Fear not is a prayer.

Jessica Stern, in her 2010 memoir,  Denial. A Memoir of Terror, relates her own experience of  the terror and trauma of rape. She writes about the disturbing side effects of trauma: “Denying one’s fear makes it possible to survive a life-threatening event but also impairs the capacity to feel fear and worse still, impairs the ability to love.”

I think this is why Jesus Christ spoke of love and fear in almost the same breath. It’s so easy for Christians to deny and push away the fear in our story. In Advent we want to jump into Christmas jollity. In Lent we want to leap into Easter joy. My God, you can hear Christmas jingles blasting in gas stations as you pump your gas. Ick! This is why Advent is important. It reminds us of the dark side of our world. The only way we can feel the love, is if we also can feel fear.

In Easter images that depict Christ resurrected, the wounds from his cricifixion are always pictured. Without them it wouldn't be a true image. The wounds of Christ survive biological death!

Do Christ's wounds also survive biological birth? Are the wounds present from the beginning? I've never seen an artistic rendering of the manger scene with wounds on the infant Christ, have you?   That would be too much, no? Symbolic crucifixion marks on a newborn, the wounds of human mortality on divinity from the beginning? Way too frightening! Or not.......... 

2014.04.27 Serious Daring

Eudora Welty, b. 1909, offered this wisdom to all writers: “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

This is absolutely delicious to the ears of a seriously daring introvert who grew up under the tutelage of a seriously extroverted mother. 

Welty’s wisdom is gospel for any writer, and it may be so for any woman striving to be heard in patriarchal societies, churches, and cultures.  Emily Dickinson gave birth to some of the best poetry in the world—from within her rooms and from within her own soul. She wrote of love: “That love is all there is, is all we know of love.”  Few could top that for serious daring from within!

Now, speaking of topping anything, I am currently wondering if I am an utter fool to keep on believing in my writing gifts and feminist slants. I’m riding on god knows what wave of feminist spirituality, probably fourth wave, which is more spiritually inclined.

Religious women are getting sick of feeling excluded from conversations in a secularist culture. Not long ago I attended a reading by Gail Collins from her fine book, When Everything Changed. The Story of American Women from the Sixties to The Present. Collins’ book is revelatory of the ongoing subordinate status of women in a patriarchal culture. It’s very thorough, often humorous, and also makes you wince. At the Q and A time I asked: “I don’t know if this omission was purposeful or not, but I noticed that there is nothing at all (I’d checked carefully) in your fine book about what was, and is, going on for women in religion during this time period—and there’s a lot.”  A hush fell over the small group of maybe 40 people, during which I thought to myself: Either I hit a nerve or I’m about to be run out of town.  (But I saw a few heads nod.)

Collins finally spoke, “You’re right and I’m sorry.” Then she explained all the instructions she had given to her researchers and how they used only secular journalistic sources, blah blah. Then she said, “I should have interviewed you for my book.”  I thought: You should have, and said, “Thank you. Maybe another book.” Maybe mine? People laughed and the tension was over. Collins was honest and gracious, yet it saddened me how isolated religion is from our culture, and how we women all have the same concerns about being treated with equality and dignity.

I won’t write a book like Collins’s. I don’t have the time or the energy, but what I do write does matter, so I persevere anyway, after a recuperative break to breathe, finishing my memoir and researching publishers—small ones.

I’ve questioned my desire to get published by a publishing house. I don’t aspire to any of the big houses. Well, I once did. Growing up and into one's gifts is a steady process of right-sizing for humility. But do I seriously dare to think I have something to say? Well, yes, in fact.

Is the case that my story illustrates relevant?— the need to establish full dignity and inclusion of women in all areas of ministry AND the need to liberate divinity from oppression by masculine pronouns? Yes, I believe so. Christian feminists continue to insist that words matter and language shapes how we feel about ourselves as well as how our relations are structured. Many people think that God is just as God is described in the Bible. Really? Every description? Count ’em. What we think is God is a portrait of God—not the same, Dorian! Scripture is full of portraits of God. Our work is to discern with integrity and not to make any one an idol. Perhaps the Church has sold its soul to market just one portrait: He-Man deity inflated with transcendence? It still sells.

It’s hard on our spirituality to live in a consumerist and market-driven culture. Nowadays for example, an author needs a sizable platform, a dazzling provocative brand, a perfect pitch, and an irresistibly alluring hook just to get in over the transom. Good Gawd, what an insane world. Anne Lamotte was right when she labeled America “the U.S. of advertising.”  Even my beloved late dad, the 1940s “mad man,”would agree.

I think we writers ought to rebel completely and make our own markets. Most of us, after all, have had some assertiveness training along the way! Between market demands and economics, our part feels almost negligible. Look how fast celebrities turn out memoirs! Really, I think it’s baloney-on-the-run—celebrity writing for either fame or fortune, or both.

Writers, it is time for some serious daring. Write your very best; make every word accountable; don’t sell your soul, or your words, to the market; let your soul speak. Publish yourself. It’s one way to protest and be prophetic—a prophet being one who sees the world for what it is and acts accordingly.

Thank you, Ms. Welty.

2013.04.21 Interfaith Faith

Yes, I watched the interfaith service at Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston last  Thursday. And yes, I was moved to tears of both grief and joy. And yes, I was struck again about the energetic resurgence of religious vocabulary in our secularized culture at times of national catastrophe, in this case the holocaust of Marathon Monday in Boston, 2013.

Words like God, prayer, sacrament, blessing and many citations from scriptures abounded, led and modeled, in this situation and others, by our President Barack Obama—and he’s had more than his share of such occasions. Of course it was a religious service, therefore such language was natural, but it was also a civic commemoration, a collective funeral. Our civil “religion”emerged as strong and healthy as our spiritual religion. Is there a difference really?

A few things I loved.........
    President Obama should have been a preacher. He took to the podium as if it were a pulpit, which it was.  He cited verses from II Timothy 1:7 which are worth repeating here. Paul the apostle was encouraging his student and disciple for his mission to teach and proclaim the gospel of grace: “For God did not given us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” These are inner gifts available to us all.
  
    Is there a call to turn to our faith traditions for solace, strength, and national invigoration?  Could it be that God, whom many think of as omnipotent in the way the world understands power, is begging us to consider a new/old theological perception: Godde as love within?

    The visual diversity was an astounding image. Many “minorities” in leadership.
 
     Cardinal Sean O’Malley spoke with calm eloquence and offered a biblical insight: Crowd and community are often present but are not the same phenomenon. A crowd is a bunch of individuals grouped together, loosely or tightly, each individual invested in her/his own desires and interests. A community is also a bunch of individuals but these individuals derive their identity, meaning, purpose, and quality of life from being part of a community with a unifying vision.  Marathoners and fans have formed community over the years—and a vision, without which the people perish. (Scripture again.)

    The cello, played by the inimitably passionate Yoyo Ma, is the one singular instrument able to convey the pathos of such a time—mournful, melancholic, yet as deep and rich as soil and soul ready to receive new seeds of life. In the final phrase the melody grew faint, trailed reluctantly off, leaving and not leaving.

    Nasser Wadeddy, Islamic interfaith activist for democracy and an American citizen by only one week, remembered his own terrifying experience with a bomb explosion on a road in Damascus, Syria.  (Some will recall St. Paul’s encounter with Christ on a road in Damascus, a time when he began his turn away from violent persecutory ways. )

    Closing Hymn: “American the Beautiful” based in beauty and grandeur of landscape, not military victory as was our national anthem.

And didn’t love.............
    Extremism in any form, including a bit too much American positivism and can-do pride
    The phrase: “This doesn’t happen in Boston!”
    That there were many many more men than women up front—still, still
    I heard no prayers uttered for the young male criminals
    That people who "don't believe in organized religion" flock to God and the offerings of organized religion when something catastrophic and inexplicable happens yet never mention the sacred in other venues or give religion a voice in public conversations. Do people flock to cathedrals for political reasons, or for spiritual reasons?

This week Boston and the nation have traveled the arc from vibrant life through death and despair, into hope and hints of healing, and now the journey arcs forward into a climate of uncertainty, unsteadiness and wondering.

Yes, we will go on.  Yes, nothing will be quite the same. The best way I know to assimilate the “new normal”  is to find a community that is not a crowd.