2022.05.01 Easter Three. Theology Made Ordinary. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 5/1/22

Last week we zoomed in on parts of the Diocese of Massachusetts clergy conference. We heard talks from the Rev. Dr. Kate Sonderegger, Episcopal priest and Professor of Systematic Theology at Virginia Seminary. 

But what is theology? Can we actually dare to have a Doctrine of God? Sonderegger spoke to the intimate connection between academic explorations and prayer. “Theology is the intellect at prayer—alive and encountering us in all things.” I can relate to that, because I find myself talking to God, and sometimes Jesus, all the time—conversationally as well as asking for specific healing help. It’s simply a habit I’ve had since I was a very young child. At least God never talks back with advice, teaching, direction, or, God forbid, counseling. I guess God is like my mind’s eye, opening me to notice, or think, or feel, or imagine new things.

Sometimes an attention-arresting question pops into my mind, like the one God-in-Jesus popped to Peter, asking him the same question THREE times: Do you love me? Well, duh, now feed my sheep!  

God’s Love IS God’s will. Not hard to understand but easy to forget, especially when you’re busy blaming others, shaming yourself, spouting off like Job, or just plain feeling unloved, unloveable, too proud to ask others for help, or grumped out.  And when we fail, which is inevitable, then there is still Love enough to go round. So touch “restart.”   

Living into this faith of Jesus in a secular age is scandalous. Sonderegger said: “Simply being an ordinary person who is a person of faith, is an important testament to the goodness and glory of God.”  With a touch of humor, this academic theologian recognized that in the eyes of the secular world, a Christian—a person who puts their faith in a God who died and rose again, and shapes their life according to ancient laws—must be an idiot or a bigot or both. Nevertheless, to be the person who you are—to be an ordinary person, imperfect but loving, thoughtful, and decent—is itself an invitation to the people you know who love and respect you but who have no time for God, to wonder whether your faith and your goodness may in fact be related after all.

May we all have the courage to be visible symbols of God’s presence in our ordinary lives, and may our very ordinariness reveal to others the possibility of divine presence everywhere. Grace after all is the experience of being fully known AND fully loved at the same time. 

2021.08.22 Who Is My God?

The disciples of Jesus asked him more than once what to do, how to do it, whom to trust, and the like. Finally they cave and ask again: To whom should we go, you have the words of eternal truth? We’re still asking.

*  *  *  *  

Do you remember the delighting children’s book called Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman about a tiny hatchling bird who hops out of his nest while Mama is off looking for food? The baby can’t fly yet so he walks/hops all over in search of his mother, asking every imaginable critter and object he encounters, even an old car: Are you my mother?  The book of course has a happy (resolved) ending, because all good books do, but I will tell you that the little bird alters his question to resolve his quest.  

I bet lots of people search for God the way the tiny bird searches for his mother—endlessly inquiring in every direction: Are you my God? 

The Church says: No, but people have called me a mother.

The Bible says: Not me, I ask all the same questions

The priest says: Close but no dice, birdie. I’m a man!

The tree says: Not God but God made me, I think. Check my roots.

The Buddha says: Don’t bug me, bird, I’m Oming.

The river says: Not me. I drown people who ask silly things.

The seagull says: Are you kidding, midget? Fly off.

The mountain says: Climb every one of my kind, kid. 

The Christ says: Check with the Father. 

The teacher says: Read another book. 

The psychotherapist says: Think of a time when you felt completely loved as is.

The theologian says: God doesn’t leave you, birdie. Get another God, not Mama.

The agnostic says: I don’t know.

The atheist says: There is no God. Get a grip!

The Virgin Mary says: I’m a virgin, but some think I’m God—gender aside.  

St. Ignatius of Loyola:  Pray and Discern 

The little bird collapses into exhaustion, sobs, and falls into a heap—when suddenly he hears a quiet voice: Try your wings, kid.

  *  *  *  *  

There is much more to finding God than the search alone. After you seek, you ask more and more questions, you find many, many answers. Then you seek, ask, and find more and more answers until you are exhausted. Do all the good you can, go home, look in the mirror, grin—and trust. 

2021.07.11 I Know This, Said The Child

When Jesus of Nazareth chose his disciples, he didn’t look for them in expected places, such as his own temple, authority figures of his day. No, he chose working people, the poor, the mentally ill, and children—those who knew their need of God.
            
                            *  *  *  *

When the family of my youngest son made their first visit to see our new digs, seven-year-old Dylan whipped breezily through our apartment, commenting on nothing except how huge our bed was, and asking “When are we going to get pizza?” Nevertheless, when he came into my office and looked at the home altar where I kneel to pray, he stopped and took a longer-than-a glance look. I imagined he was thinking how weird his Grammy was, but then he pointed to the small wooden crucifix arrayed in seashells in the center.

I remembered when I'd decided to buy this little item. I snuck into a tiny gift shop located downstairs under a large shopping mall and run by some Carmelite sisters. It felt almost secretive, illegal, to be selling religious artifacts while above so many people were engaged in one of the most important worshipful activities in American life—shopping.  I was shopping too—underground, for a crucifix. But I’d been in spiritual direction with a Jesuit, and I knew I had to meet Jesus on the cross without a flinch or a moan—or at least with all my own flinches and moans.
 
Resisting my habitual impulse to explain, or invade the moment with resurrection talk, I shut up as I watched Dylan. Pointing at the crucifix, the little boy said: “Oh, I know this one. They shot lots of darts and spears into him and he died. It was very sad. But he was good.” Then he shot off, leaving me puzzled and amazed.

Dylan had been baptized Christian as an infant and privately by a willing Congregational minister on a Florida visit to his maternal grandpa. It was, in my opinion, one of those side-deals with little attempt to honor the sacrament of becoming a Christian in community. I confess I’d felt angry, hoping to have the honor of baptizing him as I had my other grandchildren. But who dares fuss about baptismal rights or rites?

This wise child has never been to church, but he has his own unique way of being in the world.

Where did his stunningly accurate and uncomplicated summation of Jesus’s crucifixion come from?
        A fantasy sport on his little game screen?
        Eager first grade classmate’s “evangelism”?
        The biblical prophet, Isaiah (11:6) in which little children shall lead the way to the kingdom?

Jesus in Mark 10, miming the prophet, teaching that we enter the kingdom of God as children?    

Theologians may continue, and will continue, to debate and fuss over the theology of the crucified one we call Lord, as in how could a good God allow such an unjust and cruel thing happen to a Christ, a Messiah—and worse, a Beloved Son?

So go, already, buy a crucifix you can hold and rejoice in what you can’t explain.

2021.01.31 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Fifteen. Immanence

The arrival of 2021 is freighted and illuminated with grand dreams, even some magical thinking—new executive leadership at the federal level, a vaccine that will immunize the entire global population against a lethal virus and end a death-dealing pandemic, a bipartisan effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth, bipartisan policy and legislation that will save democracy and end racial, class, gender, and economic inequities, and finally, multi-faith cooperation to end the crisis of inequality by promoting an image of Divinity that is both true to scholarship and frees Godde’s image and identity from limitations imposed by patriarchalism’s sexist language.

My hopes and dreams of all the years are at stake. What in my own history will help me weather such a deluge, help me not succumb to white supremacy? Am I too white?  

(To catch readers up in this “racism” series, I write about 1980; I’m in seminary, a commuter, hoping to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and learning some new theological words that assure me that the image of God is not, well, white.)  

                                                    *  *  *  *

Scene XLI. The Christian Testament, Called “New”

In my second year at Yale Divinity School, I sat in the same huge lecture hall, my pen poised, my mind open. I was ready for the New Testament—“our” testament, the one starring Jesus, the hero of Christianity. I wondered whether anything could top the Old Testament, also why this one was not called “young” instead of “new.”

I was a Christian; I did not know Jesus except through stained glass windows or sermons from mile-high pulpits. The sermons were either sentimental or divinely untouchable. It was obvious Jesus was divine, but not clear how he got that way. I felt guilty about my ignorance—a little.

Nevertheless, I was alert and bewitched just to be where I was.  


Scene XLII. Luke Timothy Johnson and Immanence Theology

This professor was spry, darn near jolly-old-elfish, and laughed a lot.

This man promised something new. We were to begin with the biblically obvious order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The syllabus, however,  indicated that we would begin with Mark whose gospel was chronologically first. Every Sunday School thing I’d ingested was about to be dashed on the rocks of scholarship.

The room fell silent. Into the solemn silence someone sneezed—loudly and explosively. Luke Johnson responded without missing a beat: “God bless you and all vegetative processes.” Everyone laughed—and breathed. Thus was launched the New Testament. Thus began my first inkling that Jesus was human like us, and like his predecessors in the Old Testament.   

I was to benefit from Luke Johnson’s scholarship as well as his style and his pastoral care. He was totally delighted doing what he was doing—lecturing about holy texts to unformed—or ill-formed—students, some even middle-aged! This professor’s spirituality was contagious. I made an appointment to talk with him about my fears and frets about the Episcopal Church and my having been turned down in the Connecticut ordination process. I knew Luke was Roman Catholic, had even been a monastic. He too had been hurt by his church when he tried to get laicized. I was trying to get un-laicized. He wanted out of the ranks and I wanted in.

“I loved the Bible and your course, of course,” I stammered when we met. Luke nodded. “I am trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and the resistance to women priests is, well, stiff.” Luke listened to my feelings with care. He was supportive with no answers. As we wrapped up I stood to leave just as another professor walked by Luke’s open office door. He was a learned professorial type—tall, erect, and fully uniformed in black with the traditional high-rise Anglican clerical collar. He was a nice man, kind and learned, specializing in Patristics (old guys—the Fathers—who articulated early church politics and theological justifications thereof). We students liked him, while also joking that we bet he slept in his collar.

Nodding in his direction, Luke said softly with a smile: “Lyn you don’t fit the model.” He added, “But God knows who you are, so trust God.” That could be good or not such good news.

For now I would dive into my latest God-word: Immanence. Luke used this word a lot and I thought he lived it pretty well. Immanence attracted me. It was close to imminence but with much more— ah!—profundity. Imm-AH-nence had not been on any of the lists of God-defining words I’d heard in Sunday School or from any pulpit.  Now I heard it from an academic podium and soon would read more in an essay about the Jesus of history written by a man named Marcus Borg.

One reason I found Immanence so alluring was that it described the God I’d met under the table as a child— intimate, reachable, and silently conversational. Immanent means “remaining within.” Pulpit Gods were mostly transcendent, almighty, unreachable, and remaining without. Jesus knew all about Immanence.


Scene XLIII. Bill Muehl and Immanent Preaching

As I was rejoicing over Immanence I was simultaneously more and more exposed to people in seminary whose skin was not white like mine. God, I figured, was immanent in them as well as in me and all living things. This I got from the Genesis Creation story, but Immanence was the classy theological word for it—a word that made racist imagery for God impossible.

Hearing black students preach properly and firmly confirmed for me the absurdity of racism. I heard them in the regular chapel worship and in the preaching class required of us all. Students prepared written sermons of course, but the moment of truth came when we had to deliver them—out loud from a pulpit in front of the class and the professor, William (Bill) Muehl. 

 

Meuhl had a sharp, wry wit, was a lawyer by training, and famous for his book All The Damned Angels (1972) deploring all sorts of rigid moralisms and gooey piety about the Cross and its bold dominance in Christian parlance. He once said that a miracle could be performed by accident, and in his book he landed square on the dirty business of Immanence, God’s life in the flesh: “I have had to be content with damned angels and the facts of life.”

I was already suspicious of too much unfleshly transcendence, and really did not adore the cross, although having to preach to Bill Muehl might feel a bit like that. I took courage from the black students who did not seem scared and let it rip with vigor, energy, and an intimacy I loved but knew I didn’t have in me. I was too white.

None of this helped me feel less fearful about Muehl’s critique. I’d heard of it but hadn’t yet experienced it. Good thing because it might have caused me to die before I ever got to the pulpit for my turn.

I remember the text he assigned the day I was to be the preacher in class. It was one of St. Paul’s semicolon-loaded passages in Romans 5— all about justification by faith through grace via Christ, and then actually bragging about your sufferings. I was already suffering. But all would be well, St.Paul assured us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Why? Because God’s love had been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No problem. As far as I could tell, this passage was supposed to include the answer to all of life’s problems—just not mine right now.

Crucifixion suffering was overkill, and resurrection felt like avoidance of suffering altogeher. So, I focused on “poured” and imagined a huge pitcher full of Divinity, somehow liquified or magically de-solidified, pouring into me for the better. I’d never heard of water-boarding, thank heavens, so water seemed safer to me than Christ’s blood. This was a kind of suffering I figured, because I tried to convey the joyful horror of drowning in God. I passed the class.

Muehl would bemoan the fact that he never understood how students did well in his preaching classes and then got out there and preached “pap” in their parishes. Was I a future pap-preacher? I’d already developed a severe case of pulpit-paralysis in a small class.

Listening to the black students preach helped. These students had to be just as scared as I was, but when they got in that pulpit their words sang with Immanence,  jumped for joy.  It was so intimate that listeners talked back: Preach it sister! Say it! Amen! Yes. I felt exhilarated and daunted all at once.

But I was white.

White preaching was emotionally reserved, distant, bleached—transcendent. Was God even in it?  Was I? Muehl advised against imitation and told me to be myself. “You’ll get used to it,” he told me, adding something like, “but of course you’ll get flack about your female voice, so pitch low." I told him I was an alto.

Nevertheless I promised myself that I would experiment with preaching from the center aisle not the pulpit, maybe without a script, aka “cheat sheet.” Pulpit and written manuscript provided distance and a shield of protection from Immanence. 

My promise would prove impossible to honor—but not completely so.

2018.03.11 What Is Heroic?

What is Heroic, Really?

This Lent I fret once again over the Cross of Christ. Was Jesus a hero because he died in crushing agony? The symbol of the cross carries enormous sacred power. And every year I wonder why.

Theological explanations abound—atonement theory, martyrdom, God weeps and suffers with us, Jesus suffers in our stead, suffering is inherently sacred, one death puts an end to the need for sacrificial appeasements to get back right with God, and worst of all, unjust death is satisfactory “ransom” paid to redeem those kidnapped by sin for God’s sake. What?

A line in a movie we just saw leapt out at me: “So I’m a hero because I got my legs blown off?”

Would Jesus cry: “So I’m a hero because I was strapped to a cross and hoisted up to suffocate?”

The movie “Stronger” is about Jeff Bauman who at twenty-seven lost both of his legs to a the bomb explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon. He was a spectator rooting for his fiancée Erin.  The details of the horrific aftermath were graphic as was the background drama about Bauman’s family struggle with alcohol and his own, his failure to sustain love, his agonizing time in the hospital and rehab, his nightmarish memories of the bomb trauma replayed like torture, his fierce determination to walk again, and finally, his prosthetic legs—awkward but upright.

Bauman became an instant hero, pushed and prodded into public appearances before huge crowds at a Bruins game and throwing the ceremonial first pitch at a Red Sox game, not to mention television interviews and the like. The crowds cheered as did his proud family. The elegiac felt unreal to him— like adding further pain. Bauman resisted the pressure and in the end gave in. Did he believe the naive surety of fans who insisted that the Sox won the Series that year because Bauman threw the first pitch? I don’t know. All I know is that he summoned enough energy to throw that pitch, a gesture he’d practiced. He threw small and hunched from his wheelchair on that field.

He asked: “So I’m a hero because I got my legs blown off?”

To Bauman’s question my answer is NO. There is nothing at all heroic about survival itself. Nor is he a hero for his suffering—inevitable consequence of an unforeseeable unpreventable crime. 

What IS, or was, heroic?
    -Bauman chose life, day after painful day against almighty odds—physical, emotional, mental and relational.     
     -Bauman’s place of employment, Costco, consistently provided for his well-being with visits, good insurance, and held open his job at the deli counter until he returned to work.
    -Bauman, alert enough to spot the bomber, insisted on an interview with the FBI to help them pursue criminal justice. Then he put his energy into his recovery.
    -Bauman sought out and was befriended by Carlos Arredondo, the man with the cowboy hat, who had run straight into the fiery scene, beat out the fire in Bauman’s shirt, and stayed with him until help came.
    -Bauman and his fiancée Erin weathered the trauma together, including the birth of a daughter, even when their relationship was already irreparably broken and ended in divorce in 2014.
    -Bauman  disliked and resisted the force of public pressure but also complied with their need for hope.
    -Bauman told his story and chose the title for his memoir and for the film. Stronger doesn’t mean being strong; it means growing into strength—becoming stronger and holding onto hope. That’s heroic.

Hope without measure is heroic wherever it is found.

And Jesus? His death was humiliating, cruel, torturous, unjust, the politics of fear and crowd control, and ignominious in body, mind and soul. I can find nothing heroic or noble in it—nothing. When I reverence the empty wooden cross on Good Friday, I reverence the courage of Jesus’s lifelong convictions and the come-lately efforts of his followers, back then and now, to keep his vision alive.

What  IS, or was, heroic?
   
    -Jesus chose life, day after grueling day, just to heal and sometimes to confront fear.
    -Jesus  ennobled the poor with hope, telling them that God’s  kingdom was alive and potent within them already.
    -Jesus rebuked the political and religious authorities of his day who abused their power and privilege for their own gain.
    -Jesus never called himself divine, or the Christ, or the Son of God—or a hero.
    -Jesus prayed, seeking to deepen his trust of a power greater than himself alone—and to beg for enough courage and strength to stay the deadly course he chose.
    -Jesus rebuked grandiose fantasies in his followers—all of whom, like us, made him a hero for the wrong reasons.
    -Jesus pointed to hope in God—over his dead body. Like sports heroes, Jesus wasn’t a hero or a winner because he got wounded, but because he ran the race.That’s enough.
    -Jesus never said a word from the Cross, regardless of later Gospel embellishments, except maybe a loud raging wail, and Mama.
    -Jesus spawned infinite hope.  So does Bauman.

Hope without measure is heroic wherever it is found.

2017.12.31 Threats With Promises

Threats in world many. Each carries promise. Indulge year-end blogger rant in headlines. Bless you.

1. Drugs: far more abundant with cheap choices and more omnipresently aggressive in their demands for attention. It’s hard to say no.
     YET many do, and many heal from addictive disease through medication and therapy, and from love, faith and hope—three unconditional spiritual values. Yes, unconditional.

2. Venomous American political conversation: escalates to violence, government paralyzed, guns more available to more people than ever—and considered indispensable to some. To inject sanity and, godde forbid, love for all, into this environment risky as hell.
    YET good people, political and priestly, keep praying and working for good gun control legislation and an end to violence in speech and action. They are the blood donors, the organs our culture needs.

3. Sex, as in practice thereof and orientation therein: acceptance, no, expectation, that sexual behavior, yes, intercourse, is the normative even for teens, common—and competitive. When did you have your first lay—or get laid? When did you lose your virginity first? When did you have your first smoke, beer, snort—gun? Kiss feared old-fashioned. It may have lost its supremacy as a sign of young, tenderly-cautious, physical attraction-towards-love.
    YET older teens and twenties are engaging in less sex than past generations. No one knows why. Possibly choosing to explore getting-to-know-you love first? Psychological data: females depend on mutually supportive relationships for their well-being. So do men, GLBQIS. Dating around, sleeping around, hooking up, one-nighters can’t satisfy the deep longing for relationship; nor can erections and orgasms.

4. Marriage: uncertain and faraway goal for many. In olden days girls pushed and shoved into it by the fear, no terror, of getting pregnant. Currently, more choice. Birth control seen as  protective, except for STDs, but the safety it provides can hinder long-term relationship security aka marriage.
    YET emotional commitment, whatever one’s orientation, is, yes, still nourishes mind, heart, body, and soul—if nothing else to practice the sanctity of marriage should one choose it in the future.   

5. Technology: broad range of options, bordering on omniscience (Google) and omnipresence (i-phones actually text you to let you know your parents are tracking your whereabouts—true), and omnipotence (Amazon Prime.) These attributes used to belong to God (by whatever name) aka divine Mystery. They still do. Technology unable to provide flesh-and-blood love, unconditional beneficence, or shared audible visible embodied rich laughter. Easy to hide behind emojis.
    YET social media technology does give people a community of understanding, support, advice, accompaniment, and safety.

6. Religion: weak in the northeast; humanism, atheism, secularism viable options; religions fail at apologetics. What does this or that religion mean? Who or what really is God? Christ? Moses? Is there spirituality beyond morality and rules of conduct? Is it enough to be a good person?       
Researcher at Harvard Divinity School, Angie Thurston, calls millennial generation “religiously homeless” in opinion piece by Zachary Davis:“Has Secularism Gone Too Far?”  (Boston Globe, Ideas, 12/24/17) Response letters (12/31/17) unanimously—tellingly— defensive, angry.
    YET secularism thought too rational, pessimistic. Davis identified a mismatch between the job religion is supposed to do and society’s floundering search for that job to be done. The job? Not the preaching of morality, but the steady inspiration of hope, not just in afterlife but now: “. . . a hope that goes beyond reason—to give us the strength to pursue a world beyond reasonable expectations.”  Religion stretches the possible.  Granddaughter asks, with an edge: “Grammy, why do you pray?” “I pray because I love. And because my love is not enough.”

7. Public education: public schools forbidden to teach religion as a cultural phenomenon, as the spawn of great works of philosophy and literature, even some biblical literature and moral principles. Something missing. Separation of church and state necessary good. Still, young seekers in public settings unable to study every blooming thing they wonder about. “Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates.  But not in our public schools. Religion not even an elective. Religion condemned as proselytizing to fill its coffers. Good teaching never proselytizes.
    YET  . . . slowly religion and wonderments sneak in and silently infect and inform many curious hearts. The same granddaughter searches on line, not in school. Tries pantheism, atheism, agnostic theism, and many things. Trust God will find her and she will find the Love therein that she seeks.

8. Theology/God: how we think and speak about divinity, factor in sociological analysis. Religions consistently allow one image to dominate, a theological stereotype, a superpower deity who is almighty, transcendent, masculine, and interventionist. Image idolatrous. Limits divinity; limits human spirituality.
    YET traditional theology has always proclaimed God as equally immanent. God lives and moves deep within flesh, strengthening, encouraging and empowering love us to love—no matter what. In this God I trust. In this God possible to love, live, move and have being. For this Christians, this is God Jesus died for—to die and so to live.

8. Spirituality: name for what all humanity deeply craves and often does not find in society or church.
    YET Love discovered available in ditches and trenches, in pews and sewers, on streets and in mansions, in life and in death, and in one’s own lonely unlovely flesh. A woman, struggling for years to create/enhance her own self-esteem, suddenly hugs a friend and sobs:“I’ve just discovered that there is a little piece of God in all of us, and in me, too”
    YET God is Mystery—beyond our words—and small enough to adore them.

9. Personal: beloved husband and wife born on same day three years apart. Wife has seniority. Today both alive and well, bloated with gratitude—also fret, spat and grieve changes and terrors that seem to take away church and country. 
     YET  . . . they can still laugh and hug
    YET . . .  one day both will die and leave this beautiful place and all the people they love.
    YET . . .  there is something more Godde has in mind, they hope. Creation never stops.

2017.06.25 A Retreat To Consider

Words Matter: A Conversation About Theological Language and its Impact

Tuesday September 12- Friday September 15
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Led by Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman and Rev. Richard J. Simeone

A young rabbinical student raised her hand, and the Rabbi gave her a nod. “Rabbi, does G-d have a gender?” Students laughed. The Rabbi answered respectfully: “No.” The student had more to ask: “Well then, if G-d has no gender why do we use only one gender when we talk about G-d?” To this the Rabbi had no answer. It’s not easy to stump a Rabbi. He could have said that the Hebrew noun for god was masculine, but that, he knew, was inadequate. The student had awakened the teacher. The Rabbi who told this story some years ago still ponders that question.

How does theological language and imagery shape the divine image? How does it shape our souls? What about all that familiar and beloved liturgical formulae? What about pronouns? What would you change? Why or why not? Is this simply a women’s issue? Is it an issue of spiritual formation of human souls? Is it just politics? Or is it a theological issue? What would Jesus do?

Cost: $ 350; deposit: $80

To Register, call the Guesthouse Office: 845.384.6660, ext 3002


Holy Cross Monastery is the mother house of the Episcopal order of brothers (yes, monks) The Order of Holy Cross. The Monastery, in West Park, New York, sits atop a sloping hill, often dotted with deer, overlooking the majestic Hudson River.

The house is comfortable (nice new bathrooms), the landscape alluring, the food near-divine. The regular worship in the monastery chapel led by the brothers gives rhythm and structure to the soul and peace of the mind. You can follow from the Book of Common Prayer easily, or you can sit and let the chanting of psalms and canticles flow over you.

The retreat will include meditations by the leaders with ample opportunity for conversation, questions, humor, experiential learning together.  There will also be plenty of time for quiet reflection and prayer on one’s own. It’s a chance to have fun together and relish a few days away from the pace of the world in silence, solitude and community.  The monastery website is:  www.holycrossmonastery.com

2016.12.25 Love Is The Gravity Of The Soul

"Love is the gravity of the soul."

This is wisdom from St. Bonaventure, Italian medieval Franciscan friar who died in 1221. To me it is perfectly attuned theology for a God who is ever-nearer and ever-greater at the same time and always.

If love is the gravity of the soul, then hope is its wings, and faith is its practice.

David Wilcox, 58, is a contemporary American folk singer and song writer captures this spirit. These lyrics are from his song “Show The Way.”

Show The Way

It is love who mixed the mortar


And its love who stacked these stones


And its love that made the stage here


Though it looks like we’re alone.


In this scene set in shadows


Like the night is here to stay


There is evil cast around us


But it’s love that wrote the play. 


In this darkness


Love can show the way.

As the psalmist prays, so we sing:  Shiru  l’Adonai, shir chadash.  Sing to the Lord a new song. It is time to sing many new songs, fresh songs, new words and new connections.

Merry Christmas to everyone. We hallow a tiny babe in a humble manger and call this God. What could more insane? What could more true? What could be more Eternal? What more holy?

May the Love of Christmas bless and keep you now and always.

2016.04.10 Dear Atheist

Dear Atheist,

Some years ago I gave a talk to some Episcopalians about God, or some such mysterious topic. I announced I was an atheist. I explained that I was an a-theist, not because I did not believe in a Divinity named God, but because I did not believe in God’s linguistic wardrobe we proclaim in Christian churches as if it were divinity itself. 

After the gasps settled down, I went on to speak of the God I did believe in, though I’m pretty sure many ears were slammed shut to whatever wisdom I thought I was going to impart. I was young and foolish then, you see. BUT now I am old and foolish, and I still do not subscribe to the traditional, and still dominant, imagery and language attached to Divinity: Father, Son, He/His/Him/Himself, King, Almighty, Lord, Prince—masculine images transferred like decals onto Jesus, the post-Easter resurrected one whom we call Christ, the One who has, so far as I know, transcended any gender.

So if you tell me you do not relate, intellectually or emotionally, to a deity that sounds so domineering, patriarchal, and male-gendered, I’m with you.

It’s not as if I want to castrate divinity. I never recall feeling penis envy myself; in fact, it seemed like it could be rather an anatomical nuisance, albeit quite necessary for procreation and pleasure. 
 
For me the telling biblical wisdom about the nature of God is in Genesis in which the Creator-God of the cosmos (not just our own earth, sun, moon and stars but multiple universes) made  life happen in many forms—suns, moons, stars, seas and all lands, vegetation, nature and human nature (male and female, and every combination thereof.) 

Do  you think divine creativity stopped with our galaxy? Do you think God meant to create rigid rank-ordering of biological life? Or did God, simply and deeply, potentiate evolution? Later, Darwin, a faithful man himself, would verify this process and prove that the test for survival was not fitness but adaptability. We are now adapting to an enormously wider and deeper view of BIO-LIFE and of GODDE.  Have we forgotten to look at the stars?
                 

In 2016, Americans elect a new president who will put his or her hand on the Holy Bible and swear in God’s name. To what? The American dream or God’s dream?

Republican presidential contender, Donald Trump, waves his Bible around – though he is apparently unable to name a single verse from it when asked – and talks a lot about making America great again and the threat from Islam. The other Republican front runner, Ted Cruz,  knows his Bible well—well enough to apply it rigidly to reinforce his conservative social agenda. And that speaks volumes about what sort of faith it is that most Republican believers actually believe in. Little wonder, as Professor of Ethics, Stanley Hauerwas, commented, that America doesn’t produce interesting atheists: they don’t have a God interesting enough to deny.

America would never nominate or elect a president with no religious faith, preferably Protestant. America itself has long been its own civil religion. Often I wonder if we worship America first, God second, or not at all.

Giles Fraser, writing in The Guardian (3/30/16) wrote: “When the Pilgrim Fathers got in their little boats and sailed to the new world, they took with them a narrative that had begun to build in England, that the protestant English were actually the chosen people. America, then, was to be the new Israel. The pilgrims had landed safe on Canaan’s side, the promised land.

“In other words, America became its own church and eventually its own god. Which is why the only real atheism in America is to call into question the American dream – a dream often indistinguishable from capitalism and the celebration of winners.”

I am, by this definition, an a-theist again, this time of the American dream deified. I do think America has become its own church, its own god. Maybe that’s why fewer people attend traditional church—even when the American flag hangs in most Christian churches. Is that patriotism or blasphemy? Do we worship the God of ultimate unconditional compassion we see in Jesus the Christ? Do we worship the God-made-masculine-only? Or do we worship the God of our own national idolatry? Some selfie addicts, I imagine, worship their own divinity. There are many brands of atheism.

Which deity is worthy of your atheism?

It doesn’t matter to me what you choose, really, because I know that you have lived and loved well; you have kept faith in yourself through many shattered expectations and crushing disappointments. Some atheists wonder how Jesus, a mere human being, could be so divine, so worthy of deification. Maybe Jesus is not the only christ?  Here’s a poem written into someone’s soul. It reminds me of you, dear atheist friend.

I don’t tell you how much it matters to me that you are my friend.
I’ll never tell you, bluntly and face to face. I can’t summon words
That way. They only come to my fingers occasionally if I’m silent
And just quit thinking. Our fingers are a lot smarter than we know.
Like today when my fingers want to say something like: your gifts
To me have been ears and humor. We speak some strange language
That few other people speak. I don’t know why that’s so. It’s surely
An accident. It’s not like we set out to find each other in the tumult
Of this sweet wilderness. But we did somehow. You can put names
On the finding if you want. The names all mean the same thing. An
Old name is Providence, which is another way to say God, which is
A way to say We Have No Idea How, But We Are Aware of Grace.
There are more names for God than we’ll ever know, and one is you.
                   Brian Doyle, A Shimmer of Something, published with permission

2015.01.25 Tribute to Marcus Borg—and Mom

Happy 102nd birthday, Mom. Thank you for having always encouraged me to try new things, to speak out for what I believed, even if they were all your ideas. To let you know, though, I have found my own convictions, many of them in favor of women having pride of place in all ways and in all places. That one was your idea, and I agreed. I bet heaven is full of women who now enjoy full inclusion in the wide embrace of Godde—you too!

So about Marcus Borg......  I think my mother would have liked his almost casual approach to big fat unmanageable theological concepts and his humble stance about his considerable scholarship and the mystery of God and Christ he wrote and spoke about— and admitted he didn't "know." Once he was asked by a listener, “How do you know that what you say is true?” After a pause, he said, “I don’t.”

When I first read Borg’s, Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time, I was thrilled that the Jesus I’d come to know through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, was acknowledged by a Jesus scholar of history and culture. I’d fallen in love with this feisty Jew of Nazareth, with dirt under his fingernails and dust on his feet, who spoke pithy, provocative wisdom in one-liners. Thanks to Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong, I knew Christ wasn’t just a figment of my own fertile,  idiosyncratic, prayerful imagination. And I fell in love again.

Borg was a Distinguished  Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University and the Canon Theologian of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. He was not ordained, except maybe by the Holy Spirit of Godde. Ordination is not a requirement for a canon. According to Borg’s wife, an Episcopal priest, to be a canon you only have to be a “big shot.” Boom, boom!

He died on January 21, 2015, at the age of 72, two days after the day we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. Both men were prophets of transformation, King for racism’s evils, and Borg, I would say, for the liberation of the Christian religion from “barbaric” ideas that denigrate the very heart of what Christian’s call God’s Love. What is loving about a God some call Father, who demands payment for sin through the death of a beloved son as a condition for reconciliation and forgiveness?  At a talk in March, 2013 at All Saints, Pasadena, Borg called this understanding of Jesus’ death “a destructive corrosive notion.” I call it devastating theology—unjust to God and humanity, just like racism, et. al.

Even as a child I thought this notion was “really dumb” and bet my own father would never even think of such a thing. I’d also had a very different foundational experience of a God I knew wasn't like this. This helped me discount just about everything I heard in church. But as a kid I was too busy memorizing and reciting all those elaborate Presbyterian definitions, for which I earned awards—little pins I still have. This I did for myself, not for God, although maybe God appreciated my earnest efforts, as any loving God would.

The payment-for-sin idea came in through Anselm of Canterbury in 1098, whose theology prevailed as doctrine, against the objections of his opponent Abelard. Abelard thought better of God and humanity. No wonder the late Madeleine L’Engle, author and faithful Christian, named her dog Abelard! Animals and people are God's gifts for us to love and be loved by— not to kill for God's sake.

The earliest Christians realized that animal sacrifice in the Temple was an offering, a gift, not a payment or ransom. Today, if we're generous, we sacrifice (the word means to make holy) money.  We carry it forward to the altar on plates at the Offertory, and it gets blessed, just like the bread and wine. Money serves grace, not the reverse.

When I celebrate Eucharist and say the words of atonement, I no longer wince, as I first did. (There are revised prayers now, but entrenched doctrine dies hard.) In my mind I change “for our sins” to “because of our sins.”  According to Borg, the word can translate “for” or “because.” And by God, Jesus surely died because of human sin. How often do we crucify Love? Daily I suspect.

I first read Borg in seminary, a little article on Jesus. This man has something, I thought, and watched for more Borg. His work enlivened my Christianity and refined my understanding of the God of grace I first trusted. Well, once I cheated and betrayed my own theology. I answered a canonical examination question about atonement theology, defending the traditional doctrine. I’d had enough trouble with the Church and wanted to get ordained. I wrote something icky I knew the examiners would love: Wouldn’t it make sense for a guest to wear the proper attire for admission to God’s banquet? (The proper attire would be Jesus Christ, lamb of God, sacrificed to save us— the ticket to get in.) I don’t know if any end justifies specious means, but I was so happy and proud to get ordained that I presumed on divine forgiveness. 

Experientially, and according to personality and circumstances, there are Christians of the First Person of the Trinity who directly experience the sacred in the Creator, and Christians of the second (Christ/Son) and third (Holy Spirit) persons. This capacious articulation protects me from being judgmental, or spiritually competitive. Borg identifies himself as a First Person Christian, having never had a direct experience of Jesus.

So, dear Mom, do you remember that once I asked you if you believed in Jesus Christ? It was at the peak of my Jesus zeal, and worried you might not even be a Christian, because all you ever spoke of was God. “Of course, darling,” you said, and that was that. Well, now you’re in the heavenly rest place of all our yearnings, and you might meet a man named Marcus Borg. If so, he is a First Person Christian, just like you.

Thank you, Marcus Borg.

P.S. I've read most all of Borg's work, also what he and Dom Crossan created together to illuminate for us the path of Christ lived by Jesus, the remarkable man of God. I plan to read Borg's latest and last book, Convictions.  Borg recently said that he gets suspicious if he meets someone of 40 who has several firm convictions, but if, by 60, one has no convictions, it might be time to worry. When I was 4, I had a conviction or two, connected with what mattered to me. By the time I was 40, I had no clear convictions, except one: to find a conviction, or two, and go for it. 

2014.12.28 The Soul Feels Its Worth

O holy night
the stars are brightly shining
it is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
long lay the world in sin and error pining
till he [Christ] appeared and the soul felt its worth.    

I love this hymn, in part because it is quiet and offers a counterpart to the loud confidence of the world, and yes, sometimes the church, thinking itself triumphant. Christians do joy very well at Christmas. We shout out, Hail! and Go tell it! and Gloria in Excelsis!— and much more. These are our favorite songs and stories. I love them, too. The mood soars. My mood soars, too.

Yet . . . do we know what we are saying?  What is Christmas, deep down and really? Is it Easter?

There is nothing more powerful than the vulnerability of a newborn or the suffering of human flesh. Both summon exquisite compassion, divine and human—compassion that can change the world.  

 Oh Holy Night, indeed! 

 

The other reason I love this hymn is that my father loved it and used to sing it in his deep bass voice with dignity and reverence. In fact, he sang it, softly and to his nurse, just a week before he died in 1983 after a short devastating bout with esophageal cancer which left him unable to eat and drink, except by artificial means. When he sang this hymn, something happened. I don’t know what, yet as a child, I thought he was God. I wasn’t that far off.

This year I have been haunted, sometimes annoyed, by one line of this hymn hammering in my brain: Christ appeared and the soul felt its worth. (I replace "he" with "Christ" because, well, "he" is too masculine, too constrictive for the enormity of divine hospitality herein proclaimed.) Over and over, I heard this phrase. Consider it: Christ appeared and the soul felt its worth—felt it, not thought it up. Christmas is a soul feeling its worth, immediate and ultimate, because God takes up residence in mortality. You are divinely human, and all humanity with you. Oh, if only we could ingest and digest this truth.....by God, we'd never harm ourselves or others. 

[NOTE: the original text in French, written by Placide Cappeau in 1843, is a carol about Christ's birth, entitled Minuit, Chrétiens. Literally translated it reads: Midnight, Christians, is the solemn hour/When God as man descended unto us/To erase the stain of original sin/And to end the wrath of His Father/The entire world thrills with hope/On this night that gives it a Saviour.]

The line that has caused my heart to have a meltdown comes, not from this French translation but from an 1855 translation by Unitarian minister, John Sullivan Dwight. I prefer the simplicity of Dwight's translation. The essential meaning is intact: rejoice because your flesh is worthy of God's indwelling. My soul does not feel much worth from the 1843 version about God's wrath and original sin-stains.

What is soul-worth? It doesn't mean feeling happy, nor the thrill of a spiritual selfie, nor a blast of confidence or bravura, nor a burst of extraordinary courage or aplomb. Soul-worth is profound; it come from an inner well which nothing can destroy, eradicate, or desiccate—even death itself. 

Mystics tell us of direct, unmediated spiritual experience. They do not proclaim a God of wrath or an author of sin so indelible that it requires human sacrifice, even if lovingly offered, to erase it. Julian of Norwich writes: "There is no wrath in God." I wonder why we cling to this notion with such tenacity? Or should I say vengeance?  We love sin, especially the sin of others! 

*  *  *  *

On December 14, 2014, I read in the Boston Globe a good opinion piece by Jennifer Graham, headlined: “Holiday nitpickers deserve coal in their stockings.” She made a good point that Christmas, of all times, was not the time to obsess about facts or clear history, but rather to listen and take in the story, like a work of great art. Swallow it whole. 

From Graham’s article I learned, to my amazement, that “O Holy Night” had been banned in France when it was discovered that the composer, Adolphe Adam, was Jewish—just like the babe in the manger, but who would let that secret out in the 19th century? The stated reason for the banning was the song’s “total absence of the spirit of religion.”

The author of the French text was a professed atheist and anticlerical, the composer, Jewish, and the English translator, Unitarian—not exactly star-studded Christians, yet these people understood and communicated the mystery of Christmas within— and beyond —its religious particularity. It seems a supreme irony. Perhaps it is good that Christmas is now a secular holiday, as well as a religious one. Christmas goes beyond Christianity.

It has also been noted that all that “pining in sin and error” was a comment on French politics. Perhaps so, but could the same be said of 21st-century American politics?

In the middle of her editorial, Graham commented that the proper time in the ecclesiastical calendar to obsess about facts would be Easter, not Christmas. “For Christians, everything hangs on the cross, and the Resurrection; nothing hangs on the manger.” My hackles flew up as I raced to my computer to type a letter to the editor, courteous yet firm.

I wrote: “I enjoyed Jennifer Graham's wry humor and her insight about Christmas not being an occasion to obsess about facts ("Holiday nitpickers deserve coal in their stockings," December 14, Ideas.) Graham writes: "For Christians, everything hangs on the cross and Resurrection; nothing hangs on the manger." I would counter that everything, for Christians, hangs on the cross and lies in the manger. It's not by fact but on faith that Divinity dwells in human flesh, even a humble manger.”

There is nothing more powerful than the vulnerability of a newborn or the suffering of human flesh. Both summon exquisite compassion, divine and human—compassion that can change the world.  

They didn’t publish my letter, and one could shoot a million theological/historical holes in my abrupt statement, however, the message of both manger and cross hang (great word) on a theological truth that Godde always appears as life abundant—on birthing bed or deathbed. Christmas and Easter live together. Both assure the soul's worth.

 When God appears in whatever form, souls feel their worth.
 

2014.10.19 Flor y Canto—Assisted Dying

Recently a dear friend, with whom I have shared both affection and a medical bond, died. We would call each other “lung buddies,” because we both had lung disease. We did everything we were told to do, took our meds, and ran ourselves to panting on the treadmills, because exercise strengthens any organ. Her condition finally took her life. Just before she died she told me, in a passionate and lucid way, that she wanted to die and was ready. She wasn’t a lingering person in life, so in death she didn’t want to linger and drag along. Me either!

It got me thinking........ (OK, fuzzy thinking image, because this classic Thinker image is not really me:)

In our present culture and church we celebrate life, life, life—life abundant, the divine imperative to choose life (Deut 30), God’s gift of life in creation. And we worship a God who brings life out of death. Life seems the only option that accords with divine desire. (OK. St. Paul wanted to die to be closer to Christ, but that was a little whacko. And the blood of persecuted Christian martyrs is out of fashion, thank heavens.)

What if someone feels called, moved, motivated to choose death? What then? Some religious folks think God is against this, that it's a sin, called suicide. This idea gives people little choice but to blame God for their circumstances: Why doesn’t God take me?  That would be the thing a compassionate God would do, right?

Maybe God doesn’t take anyone, like a body snatcher. Maybe God doesn’t take as much control as we’d like. Maybe God defines life by its quality not its quantity, though "length of days" is a good in scripture. And too, what if death is God’s idea? What if the freedom many believe to be granted by a Creator God really is free? Didn’t Jesus choose death?

Freedom is the hardest darn gift ever given. Damn! Still, it is amazingly respectful; it makes me love this Godde more and more. 

Personally, I’d like to take advantage of this great gift. I’d like the chance to choose death without guilt or shame, and with hope, while I’m still in state of mind, heart and soul which is sane, healthy, alert, that is, not distorted by physical pain, mental illness, or being under the influence of addictive substance.

But it’s illegal.

We have assisted living. Why not assisted dying? I mean for real, and legal. Statistics show that in Oregon, where assisted death is legal, the option is not exercised frequently. The feared rash of “suicides” just didn’t happen. Hospice care assists death, but is it enough?

I know this is complex, but if we don’t have serious conversations about it in families, in our churches, and at the level of public discourse, death remains enemy. I know when I bring this up with my children they shrink. I understand, yet I wish I’d had the chance for such a conversation with my parents.

IN THE MEANTIME.............  Here is a lovely way to celebrate life even in death, and while still being realistic about the pains and limitations in our celebrated freedom of life: flor y canto, flower and song.

The Amerindian ancients looked to BEAUTY as a reflection of the divine. Their intuition survived in the Spanish phrase flor y canto and in the tradition of fiesta. Beauty signified the blessing of the divine and also was used to communicate back with the Sacred. They arrived at divine truth, not through linear abstractions, but in an aesthetic praxis. They trusted in the hidden power emanating from flor y canto. Social justice and ethical conduct proceeded from the practice. First things first.

The Eucharistic banquet is our flor y canto—a little stiff and pale in comparison, but we're anglos.

This is what we can learn from the U.S. Hispanic community. A people whose lives have often been marred by great suffering, currently in the immigration crisis, find God in a party—first. They don’t sit down to deliberate doctrine and form a plan, or write wordy blogs full of questions (see above); they form the Beautiful and live life in the subjunctive mode—as if.  It’s their spirituality, their theology. Mi casa, tu casa first—telling stories at table and getting to know each other comes first.

Maybe we have things backwards? Maybe we should throw a celebrative coffee hour before we hit the pews, right in the narthex?

Yet, maybe too, each people and culture has its own mystical ways to celebrate God EVERYWHERE EVERYONE ANYWAY.  But I wouldn’t mind a little flor y canto as I die.

2014.07.13 What Would One Say?

When my oldest daughter was in junior high, she did what most kids do during their growing edge years, she giggled and talked in class. She is an adult now and likely remembers this incident.

 

 The English teacher, a particularly stern, and I would say prissy person, did what many teachers would do: called attention to the offense and asked for a return of attention to the lesson of the day.

This should have been enough, but wasn’t. The teacher further addressed my daughter after class and said, “Beverley, isn’t your mother studying for the ministry?” My daughter nodded. The teacher’s wasn’t quite through. She added: “Indeed. What would one say?”

What would one say? The little phrase was meant as a thinly disguised moral scold. (Think Maggie Smith at her prunish best.) In our family it became cause for sibling hilarity—a perfect reprimand tossed off for the tiniest infractions, followed by gales of laughter.  Occasionally, I’d remind them that Jesus wouldn’t say such a thing. So what would he say? They’d egg me on. “Get thee behind me, Satan.” (Matthew 16:23) By then we all were laughing. “Mom quotes Jesus now.”  Ha, ha.

I felt proud to quote the gospel Jesus, happy to offer them a good example of a clear-hearted and clean response for any kind of angry confrontation—a curse really. Peter had not been paying attention in class, or if he had, he’d rejected the teaching of Jesus’ reality gospel and even rebuked Jesus for his wisdom. Peter still thought that God would eliminate the suffering part of the suffering-with-redemption equation, make an exception for someone as good as Jesus. Jesus said, NOT.

What would one say? Do you think, in spite of Jesus’ cross and all the preaching about suffering in most religions, we still just can’t bear it to be part of God’s desire and design? OR is it that we can’t forego dualistic thinking? OR maybe it’s the redemption part we can’t tolerate: Okay for Jesus, and other spiritual celebrities, but not for mass humanity? 

Here is a paraphrase of a quote from The Rt. Rev. Samir Kaffity, Retired Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem...............


 Christianity began as a vibrant faith of the victory of redemption and joy in Jerusalem.
It then traveled around and up the coast of the Holy Land.

It crossed the Mediterranean Sea, to the Aegean and landed in Greece,
where it became a philosophy.

It left there and crossed the Adriatic Sea and on to Rome,
where it became an institution.

It continued westward across Europe, and crossed the North Sea to Great Britain,
where it became a culture.

And finally this great religion crossed the Great Atlantic Ocean,
and lapped upon the North American shore,
where it has become an enterprise.

What would one say?  Is Christianity an enterprise, a business, a product to be perfected for consumption, to be twisted into the latest desirable shape? I wonder if the oomph has gone out of Christianity, the gutsy vibrancy of Jesus and other founders, the capacity to be direct without superiority? 

Are churches today embarrassed to offer the profligacy (so, so close to licentiousness) of divine grace, cheek by jowl with profligate violence—and call both truth?

It doesn’t make a bit of sense to do so, you know. I want to holler NO—Godde is Love.  Just how inclusive can Godde’s Love be? I wonder. 

If the junior high school teacher’s attitude seeped into the literary material she was trying to get the kids impassioned about, it would be dry, and they would be rightfully bored, no matter how much attention they paid, nor how hard they studied, nor how enterprising they were. 

What would one say?