2024.07.07 Who DID Write the New Testament Anyway? Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

When I read biblical readings about politics, the politics of St. Paul stand out! Paul  frantically wrote to fulfill his calling to spread the good news preached by Jesus of Nazareth, or Galilee, or Ephesus, or Corinth, or in your heart. Paul was a convert, not programmed to endear many, and admitting he was wrong—sometimes.   

I remember the omnipresent and ever-irritating examination question in the final exam for the course in New Testament at Yale Divinity School. Students knew it was coming. We had been well prepared. We knew our stuff, yet everyone quivered.

WAS there a “right” answer? 

The question:  Who wrote the New Testament, Jesus or Paul? 

                                   *  *  * *  

I plunged fearlessly in with every intention of making my case for Jesus. I ended up with Paul. Why? In short, my personality is just like Paul’s. Thanks to the patriarchal culture of  his day (mine as well!) it took time. This Jesus was not selling yet another religion, or himself as THE Messiah, but rather a gospel full of parabolic stories about people who broke rules for the sake of justice. It got Jesus crucified of course, but Paul picked up the roots and the wings by which ALL Creation could connect and live peacefully. 

The Great Commandment: Do NOT do to others what you would not have them do to you. God, how boldly simple that is?  To call it LOVE is dramatically misleading. You simply have to treat all living things (land, plants, animals, yourself, all neighbors) with compassion and respect, just as their Creator does.  

                             *  *  *  * 

In the 1970s in the Episcopal Church, I jumped into my own simmering desire to stand behind an altar as a priest of the Eucharist, rather than kneel at a rail, my hands up, my tongue extended, begging to be fed. I know “they” called such a posture humility, but I experienced it as humiliating. 

The Episcopal Church had its own hoops through which an aspirant would jump.The screening committee told me I would be embarking on a “dual vocation.” I could not be a mother AND a priest. I thought of Paul rushing about nagging anyone who would listen, grabbing himself a travel companion, revising his manuscript as he went, and traversing a huge desert called “holy.” I followed. 

It took me well over the expected time it took anyone to get ordained. I did not get tossed into prison like Paul, but if I had I’d have tried to sing hymns, as Paul did. Like Paul, I found friends and allies along my way. Also, I wrote letters to God who from the beginning had listened to my ramblings, dwelled in my heart, and taken me seriously. 

*  *  *  *

My memoir, God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Becoming Woman. Becoming Priest, was published in 2016. Like Paul, I’ve continued to hammer and chisel away at the patriarchal armor through which the expansive love of God continues to shine, no matter what. Like Paul, I trusted divine omnipresence more than divine omnipotence. Paul’s first letter to the squabbling new churches in Corinth felt familiar. “The Spirit searches everything—even the depths of God. . .” (I Cor. 2)

Paul never gave up, broke every law on the books, fiercely and naively insisted that divinity was greater than all our imaginings. He did not found any single church! WE did. 

*  *  *  *

So who did write the New Testament? Paul of course! Jesus didn’t have time to write!

Now I’m 85 years old. I’m still talking and writing without ceasing about that steadfast God Paul trusted. Me too.

 

2024.03.17 Potentiation. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, 3/17/24, blog post

 

Above is my home altar, a great messy array of memories and images—all iconic to me.

Most everything you ever wanted to know about God is in Genesis, anyway. It’s the beginning of a very long story in a book called The Holy Bible—ancient and still a best seller. It’s not “holy” because it’s so old.  It’s not even holy because the Christian Jesus is in there, or the Jewish Moses, or even big bang theories. No, it is holy because your story is in there, too.

*  *  *  *

It was 1978, my first day as a student at Yale Divinity School. I sat in a huge lecture hall, loaded with tumultuous emotions—guilt, fear, joy, anxiety—great expectations!  I was supposed to be a traditional stay-at-home mother, not a forty-year-old woman in a huge lecture hall, wondering about having an affair, or who Jesus was, really, really, or who God might be, when suddenly a loud deep voice from the podium announced: “In the beginning (pregnant pause) God potentiated . . .” 

Potentiated?  

I wrote that word down. It was not the word the professor used; nor does it appear anywhere in Genesis or anywhere in the Bible. It was the word I heard. 

Where did this word come from? I didn’t know then, I don’t know now. Nor did I know just how potent it would become in my life, or just how painful it could be, or just how much personal truth it held for me. God or not God, potentiation exploded inside me. I sat up straight and listened.

I’m tech-savvy now so I “Googled” this word. It has to do with the potency of Being itself, whether it is found in material or spiritual beings. Courtesy of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle of course.  

I’m aging. I talk to God all the time as I always have. I don’t expect “answers.” I just watch for potentiation—tiny or huge bursts of Being itself. It just happens. It’s an experience, not to be evangelized from any single point of view.

*  *  *  *

I live in a retirement community. A young woman, CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) specializes in shower assistance as needed. Nothing fancy, but when you can’t get about without a walker, and when the shower seat is “miles” away from the water source, and when you’re stark naked and shivering, well, you need expert help. 

My shower was refreshing and lovely. I memorized the process and taught my live-in help/spouse. 

The after-shower conversation I had with my CNA, however, brought mutual potentiation.  After the shower I “walkered” into my office to my comfortable swivel chair.  She followed and sat on a small rocker from which we removed two stuffed owls and a stuffed pink “valentine cupcake” of sorts. She wrote her official notes and I swiveled round in my computer chair.  We sat facing my home altar at which I hope to kneel again sometime. It was designed and hand-carved, a gift from one of my daughters and her husband, a professional wood-worker. It is carved from good maple wood, about the measurements of a door lying flat, and it is polished to a sheen. On it rests my entire prayer life. Underneath it is written a date, and an inscription of love from my daughter and the artist, Pete. 

“What are these?” my shower aide asked, pointing to two small multi-colored striped triangle-shaped pins. They symbolize support for the Pride movement, celebrating the many different expressions of human sexuality GLBTQI.  

“Oh. We don’t allow that where I come from.”  

I chuckled. My altar array represents my family, my church, my culture, my favorite images of God, a crucifix, and most of my sins. All holy. I then  asked her if she thought the great and loving Creator of all of us cared equally for all of us, even with our differences?  She pondered a bit then shook her head Yes. YES!

In that small moment we potentiated the image of God.    

Such Visions, Quests and Questions? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

She’s six feet tall

striding the mall

Thin as a rail

leaving a trail

Shoppers awake

each one agape

Is her skin white—

hardly, though light

What does she want?

What doesn’t she want?

Why is she here?

What is her gig?

What’s her m.o.?

Is she a robot?

No . . . but

are you?

I must have glimpsed the above image somewhere among the array of online images that fly past my eyes as I skim quickly down the line of internet posts. Was this from an ad? I have no idea, but I woke up with this image dancing before my mind’s eye this morning, and these words followed, so I jotted them down. What? The thought that I may be going daft, or demented, or any number of strange ailments, crossed my mind, because I could not make sense of this image, or analyze its meaning.  

*  *  *  *

Another image came to mind without warning. It was an analogy articulated by a patristics (studying the early theological writings of the old boys) professor, the late Rowan Greer of Yale Divinity School, back in the early 1980s.  He told us students, emphasizing the intellectual futility of any analogy of course for how Creator God interacts with Creation, that the relationship between divine grace and human free will or agency was like sailing. 

Grace is like the wind, available at all times for better or worse, and free will was like the sailor (or crew). The tighter you pull the sails in, the less play you give to the wind, and the more likely you are to capsize the sailboat, and possibly drown. Conversely, if you let the sails flap wildly in the wind, you and your boat will flounder aimlessly about, getting nowhere. The wind is always there, to one degree or another. Your job is to cooperate with the wind, to allow its omnipresence to work with you and for you.

Your job is to manage the sails/your life artfully. It won’t happen well if you’re too uptight, or too loosey goosey, about your choices and your destinations. Ya gotta know what you’re doing and be careful doing it. Freedom is a precious and extremely difficult gift to manage—and you’re not alone. Ever. 

This as many of you know had been my experience from early childhood, and believe me I’ve been pretty awkward at times managing those “sails.” But I managed them through storms and painful losses and trauma—sometimes very close to capsizing altogether, giving up my own desires and passions to traditional roles. On occasion I have felt  becalmed, abandoned by God and everyone else, even myself—too helpless to go on.

Still, I always picked up the ropes of those life-sails again, and managed to go on. 

* *  *  * 

I may never fully understand the flash image that came to me this morning, but I am pretty sure the tall woman is not a robot, nor am I.  And I’m pretty sure she has life to live, and that she will live it with grace—no matter what. 

*  *  *  *

The last morning image that ran into my mind’s eye this morning was another remembered  image of children at play. These kids were in a Palestinian refugee camp in Israel. Unlike the well groomed, privileged children in Cambridge, these refugee children were unkempt, often scantily clad, living with anxious parents, unfree, and scared.  And still they played with vigor and passion enough, I pray, to, set “sail” even in the face of political and economic upheaval, not of their doing. 

*  *  *  *

Many are fond of bemoaning God’s absence, less fond of praising that presence when things go wrong. They ask: Where was God?  Others are fond of using most all their energy, individual and collective, to praise God’s presence, less fond of expending much of their own energy on the task at hand, be it recovery from trauma or grieving one’s losses with grace. God asks them: Where were you?  

I dare to believe that all these images came to me this morning to spark hope for this world. It’s irrational, I know, but I also know that God does not solve problems. We do, with the help of God whose grace lives within us—in our flesh, as well as beyond us. BOTH/AND.  

What if there is no either/or, but only both/and? 

Still, I do know that God's Spirit does send sparks of energy my way— doses of trust in that windy presence I call God.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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.

My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal History. Part Thirteen. Choices.

My very first choice was at three when I left my parents to their own cocktail hour and went off on my own to meet God with my reckless imagination. Whether that choice could be considered free I can’t say, except that it felt free to me. Looking back, I’d like to say I had good emotional intelligence, yet honestly it was more likely impulsive, childish creativity writ large—accidental grace. Is there any other kind of grace?

My first morality-laden choice had been choosing my own pleasure against loyalty to my black friend Carol Lee. The burning memory of it still stings. Whether I called it racist or not didn’t matter. My conscience did. Carol Lee and I were different—not just because of our skin color but because of my choice—my choice.

My early experience set me up for knowing that choice was an intimate part of life and that it would always be impure.

Scene XXXIV. Why?

I was nearing forty. I’d made made choices about marriage and children. These might not have been perfectly timed, but I had no regrets as I watched the children I adored and admired grow and thrive. They were my greatest pleasure. But something was missing. I didn’t know what exactly. I sat in my kitchen conjuring up fake images of myself as a domestic wonder-mother when an interruptive question—the kind only God-from-within could inflict—broke into my reverie.  

Why are you doing this?  

I sat down at the kitchen table, rested my bowed head on my crossed arms and sobbed—sobbed.
Why was I doing this?  Truly, madly, deeply why?

Scene XXXV. Leap

As I sat in my tears I made a choice to answer the question—truthfully. What was missing from the lovely picture was me. Yes, me. I leapt first into a part-time job as a local weekly newspaper reporter.
I faithfully reported on the most boring of town meetings. I was a stringer, paid by the column inch, so I made my articles as long as I dared. Soon I leapt into writing features, then editing.  

I listened carefully to the instructions from the hang-gliding teacher. He strapped me into my glider wings. I took a deep breath, swallowed my fear, and leapt off a mountain top, well, really a ridge. Lifted and held by puffs of wind, I was airborne—a soundless plane. The thrill was—forgive me—godlike. I looked down and saw the world, my world. I wanted it all. All. I wrote it all.

Choice by choice, I devoured my freedom—moving, leap by leap, away from traditional and expected roles. I could blame the 70s or Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, but that would be cheap grace. I took it anyway. I would deal with the sin of my profound selfishness in time and through tears. My four children were too young for this loss, for my leaps, for my evenings meetings, for too much maternal abandonment—paternal too.

I got involved with the local church and took on leadership roles. I eyed the altar territory with something akin to lust. I wanted to stand up front. I wanted to be a woman-in-the-flesh up front and not a statue draped with sorrowful looks and roses. I also leapt from the Republican party to the Democratic—away from my parensts'  party to one of my own, one I thought more in line with the  kind of values and choices I thought Jesus would make.  I was sure Jesus would ordain me if he were a bishop—or still enfleshed, or not Jewish.  
 
In 1977,  just after the Episcopal Church had voted—not by a landslide—that women could be ordained priests, I made application to get into the ordination process in Connecticut. The Bishop of Connecticut had voted against the ordination of women priests—unbeknownst to yours truly who had an outsized idea that the Church was the Body of Christ, therefore apolitical. My application was rejected, mostly because I had “2.24-too-many children”, and I couldn’t be a mother and a priest. “Dual vocation” they said. No mention of men and fathers, of course.

I leaped into God-school anyway. Anyone could get a theological education, the bishop had said. I applied for a student loan—something I thought carried great authority. Paying it back I’d worry about later. The second I came onto the campus of Yale Divinity School for my interview, I gazed at the very Protestant chapel keeping watch over the quadrangle of buildings, went to sit in its emptiness, and filled it with my prayers. My heart soared. I leaped into seminary education in the autumn of 1978.

In March, 1979, my youngest sister died unexpectedly at 34 after surgery for congenital aneurysms in her brain, leaving her husband and three young children. Her death precipitated severe asthma in me. There is nothing like not breathing well to make one feel like death. I never thought this was divine judgment or punishment. I did feel a terror I hadn’t known before—and again the pain of  betrayal. On medical advice, I found a new home for my second daughter Jill’s two cats. Fear-based choices never work well.

There was probably no better place for me to be than studying the Old Testament, not a single word of which was free of anguish, pain, grief, sin, and relational turmoil—all of which God created, absorbed, healed, frowned at, and and wept for. Sin and mayhem were as omnipresent as divine love no matter what. I chose it all.

Scene XXXVI.  Free?

All my choices, my leaps, shaped me, hurt me, hurt others, helped me grow, helped others grow, required amends—and forgiveness.

I was dimly—gradually, painfully— learning that most of my personal big choices could be followed, because I was white, privileged, and moneyed.

My freedom was not bound by poverty, class, or the color of my skin, although I knew the pain of being restricted because of my gender. White freedom of choice looked free, but it was racist. It was embedded in a context of racial injustice. Others, chiefly blacks, couldn’t make the choices I could. There wasn’t room for their freedom in American society. Black people and others did not have the same access to the famous and, to my mind questionable, “American dream” as whites did—even though such freedom was preached. A racist set-up if ever there ever was one.

My choices were made in a racist context and therefore indirectly partook of racism. My racism was getting clear enough not to surround it with quotation marks.  All it needed was to be fleshed out.

 

Psalm 23, Beloved Prayer Song Re-potentiated

A word is dead when it is said
Some say
I say it just begins to live
That day
        Emily Dickinson, 1924

Hear an old favorite psalm with just a few fresh words that change its complexion. 

Psalm 23 translation, Pamela Greenberg The Complete Psalms

God is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You lay me down in lush meadows.

You guide me toward tranquil waters,
reviving my soul.

You lead me down paths of righteousness,
for that is your way.

And when I walk through the valley, overshadowed by death,
I will fear no harm, for you are with me

Your rod and your staff—they comfort me,
You spread a table before me
in face of my greatest fears.

You drench my head with oil;
my cup overflows the brim.

Surely goodness and kindness
will accompany me all the days of my life

and I will dwell in the house of the Holy
for the length of my days.


The psalms are prayers—startlingly honest emotionally. No feelings are absent from these prayers, even violent ones, the ones that let us know where and how we are hurt and want to hurt back. Yet psalms are also poetry and we chant them. Pamela Greenberg has translated the psalms in creative new ways without allowing them to lose their poetic power and spirituality.

I love familiar words that lull me; I love fresh words to awaken me even more. These latter force me to pay attention, to tune in. That’s how I grow. Even in discomfort, there is soul. Besides, who says scripture must always comfort or edify?  Poetic words soothe and disturb in equal proportion, and psalms are poetry.
                                         *  *  * *

The Rev. Dr. Judith Fentress Williams, Old Testament professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, spoke to the Massachusetts clergy recently about the Old Testament—its value and its power, its connectedness with the fullness of earthly expression and experience. “Don’t be afraid of it. Preach from it,” she said.

I’ve always loved Old Testament. It was required in seminary, and the very first course I took at Yale Divinity School. The instructor began in solemn tones; “In the beginning, God potentiated……….. 

I wrote that down and tried to still my heart. Potentiated felt more powerful than created. It signaled the spiritual power behind/within everything that lives breathes and has being. It spoke to me of God’s agenda: ongoing potentiation. Whenever you are potentiated, by anything at all, you awaken. You feel suddenly lifted….in a word, resurrected. It’s a scary and a wonderful feeling.

The Spirit of God potentiates Life in the beginning, at the end, and in every second in between.
                                               *  * *  *


What do you notice in Greenberg’s translation of Psalm 23 that is different from what your ears are used to hearing? Say it aloud.

This translation is familiar —and brand new. The first thing I notice is: “God is my shepherd”— not the Lord. God is a name not a noun. God is free of royal role and all its accoutrements.

Then I notice is “there is nothing I lack.” It sounds different from: “I shall not want” or “I shall not be in want.”  “Nothing I lack” means I have everything I need. Do I? Even as I age and feel lacking in many joints, every sag of skin, every short-term memory lapse: what did I have for breakfast today? But with God I lack nothing.

This 23rd psalm hums along, and all of a sudden your mind is jarred. You expect: “You lead me in green pastures” And you hear: “You lead me in lush meadows.” The words mean the same and yet have different tonality, sensuality. Lush!

“You spread a table before me in the face of my (fill in the blank)—enemies, we all say. But we hear: “my greatest fears.”  What is potentiated by these new words? Are your fears like enemies? Do they not make you skulk, cringe, cower and hide? Are they at war with your aspirations? Do they help you sin against goodness? Is this translation as accurate as the idea of having real enfleshed enemies out to get you?

And “I will dwell in the house of (fill in the blank)…the Lord, we shout?  We hear instead: “the Holy.” Lord implies ruler; Holy suggests a quality of Being, a Presence within and without. This Holy Presence  “drenches” our heads with the oil of healing. “Drench” is more literal and stronger than “anoints.”

What do these new words potentiate in you? Maybe contempt or distaste? For me, it’s the knowledge that great words I love do not die when they are altered, but they do acquire a different flavor; they inspire me to think—again and again. As the poet says, these newly spoken and heard words live.

What am I saying? What am I thinking? What am I meaning? What words do I use?

Lastly, the image of the shepherd is softened by these new words. Real shepherds are rough and tumble, not so gentle with sheep. The divine shepherd accompanies yet neither drives not coddles. This shepherd is just be a little more, well, divine.

2017.07.09 Can You Still Love? Two Healing Stories.

My seminary learning experience at Yale Divinity School took place in a religiously diverse environment—one reason the school continues to thrive and is economically viable. But it isn’t just the sensible economics, or even the obvious ecumenicity, that gives this school, or any school, a soul of its own. It takes real people and real stories.

Nellie was a student with multiple challenges. She’d been in a car accident on her way to begin her college education. Her mother was driving. It was an accident—an accident that left Nellie with severe brain damage, unable to walk or talk except in very halting and barely intelligible ways. I was scared of Nellie. I didn’t know what to do or how to be with her, or what to do with my shame. I admit I avoided Nellie and feared for myself as well—hardly exemplary of a woman who wanted to serve God in ministry or take a shot at christlikeness.

I wondered how Nellie had forgiven her mother. I wondered why Nellie wanted to go to seminary and get ordained in spite of her severe limitations. One professor, an Episcopal priest, worked with Nellie as a tutor. He typed out her words for papers, and made sure she was accompanied safely to and from her classes. It all felt like a full-blown miracle to me—too difficult to digest.

Yet Nellie was a vibrant presence among us stressed-out, worried bunch of first-year seminarians, most of us not knowing a damn thing about this God we were there to study, if not master. Nellie stood out for her smile. Some days I thought she herself was a prayer. How could she seek God after all that had happened to her?  Some students reported that when she had a beer or two her speech suddenly became intelligible. Nellie’s being there among us must have had something to do with the impossible love of God—the love that scared me and made me run the other way. 

Now I wonder if Nellie's passion for God was not for the God the church traditionally presents, the Omnipotent one with all the power, but rather for the God she found in her own broken heart—the same one I’d found in mine as a young child.

I’ve thought a lot about Nellie over the 35 years since I graduated. What ever happened to her?

Google-god!!—the great connective search engine—helped me out.

Nellie did graduate from Hampshire which took her seven years. In that time she felt called to serve God. “Serving God became her salvation,” wrote Michael Vitez, journalist and Director of Narrative Medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Vitez has written Nellie’s story for his book on the healing power of story. 

Nellie went on to graduate from seminary and was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1993. She served in Chestnut Hill United Church (formerly United Methodist) until 2014 when she retired. It would take Nellie as much as five weeks with blurry vision and one palsied finger to type out 2000 words for a sermon. She then selected different parishioners to read her words to the congregation. Oh Godde, what a privilege! Nellie attended the Episcopal General Convention in Denver in 2000, where a special ramp for the entire altar procession was constructed so Nellie could read the Gospel using her voice box. 

Here is a photo of Nellie on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You see she is still smiling that smile I remember so well, the soul-smile that made Nellie shine.

Nellie died in August, 2016, at age 64. 



Only recently have I fully understood and wept deeply for Nelly and for me. The painful beauty Nellie gave me, stirred up as I read about Ed Bennett (1959-2017) in my Yale Alumni Magazine. Ed became a quadriplegic after a diving accident just before he entered his sophomore year at Yale University.

Here is Ed at a wedding in 1990, surrounded by his Yalie friends who called him “Edder”.

“Can I piece a life together?” Ed had asked a rehab psychologist, Lester Butt, when he was facing life with minimal movement in one arm only.

“Can you still love?" Butt replied.

The rest of Ed’s wheelchair-bound life was spent living the answer to that awakening question in the affirmative. He was the first quadriplegic to graduate from Yale College and went on to attend Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School but did not complete those degrees. He didn’t think his temperament was suited to pastoral work, although friends remember Ed as one with an “uncanny ability to bring people together.” Note that smile! The church could have used him. I wish he and Nellie had met. Obviously, they both could still love.

Ed wrote this in an essay for YDS in 1995:

“I have thought a great deal over the past few years about what is important to me. Perhaps my paralysis, maybe my acute experience of mortality  . . .  something has forced into my intimate, quiet moments the sense that God matters. My friends matter. The suffering of other people matters. And when I look at my profoundest satisfactions—friends, ideas, helping others, family—I do not see political or intellectual connections among them. Instead, I see a world of subtlety and wonder that lives in the spiritual world.”

Can you still love? 

I’m trying, Ed and Nellie. Thanks to you, I’m trying. And thanks be to God whose Hope incarnate forgives me—over and over—in my own clumsy efforts to love. And thanks to the Spirit who gives me eye and heart to spot healing stories, call them gospel, write them down, and send them forth—seeds for healing.  

2017.06.18 When Your God-School Dies

What would it be like to have a school from which you graduated close its doors—for good? And what if it was a seminary, your God-school?  I can’t imagine. Maybe it would be like losing a beloved father/dad—too soon, which would be any time really.

My dad died at 71— too soon for the length of our love. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I’m so glad you were there when I graduated from my seminary at Yale, your undergraduate college.

Now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the  Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) just closed.

A seminary is a particular kind of graduate school. It’s about learning to be who you are through studying who God is. How strange that sounds as I write it. How true it turned out to be… And how sad that many denominational seminaries are closing. Some, like EDS, are moving to affiliate with other thriving schools of theological education where they will maintain a presence, a dean, and some faculty.

The viability of independent denominational seminaries is obviously uncertain, but I wonder what the Spirit might be asking us to consider, besides just how to merge and survive as a kind of half-breed? I wonder if God might be calling us to examine the viability of denominationalism itself as a way of re-presenting Divinity to the world? 

I went to Yale Divinity because I could commute, and loved it, ironically, because it was not  denominational. I got courage there to sacrifice my fear of pushing for new ideas about sacred traditions and sacred language. Godde is bigger than all traditions. I will grieve if it ever closes. That said, I live now in Cambridge and will sorely miss having an Episcopal seminary right in my neighborhood—a presence.

I will sorely miss EDS, but not as much as its graduates, like the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates, Bishop of Massachusetts who wrote with candor about his own grief, memories and blessing.   

 “As a member of the EDS Class of 1987, I was marking my 30th reunion year.  My memories of EDS in the mid-1980s are not without complication.  It was a time of some considerable conflict and challenging community dynamics at the school.  Chapel life in particular was fraught.  And yet it was simultaneously a place of manifold grace and genuine formation for ministry in church and world, a blessing for which I have always been deeply grateful. At last week’s final Alumni Eucharist I found myself offering prayers of deep gratitude for that blessing.

What I had not anticipated was the level of deep grief that I experienced in that moment.  St. John’s Memorial Chapel and its surrounding campus was a place where I had been taught well by so many devoted faculty members; a place where I formed lifelong friendships; a place where our elder son was baptized; a place of altogether singular influence on my identity as a priest.

As we sang and prayed all of this was viscerally real to me, and I could not help but weep.  Momentarily present there in that chapel were all the remarkable, committed and quirky professors from whom I had learned, in both classroom and refectory.  Present with me were classmates and friends with whom I had exegeted Scripture; conjugated Greek verbs; wrestled with process theology; practiced chanting the collects; dreaded the GOEs; and contemplated resolving the campus housing shortage by turning the quad into a KOA campground.  Present also were support staff personalities who oversaw with an eagle eye my operation of the refectory’s Hobart dishwasher, and insisted (unfairly!) that I must have put coffee grounds down the kitchen sink at Kirkland Street housing.

All of those saints and more, living and dead, joined with alumni, faculty and friends as we celebrated the final moments of this final Eucharist of the final school year at EDS in Cambridge.  They were all there!

In coming days we will pray earnestly for the fruitful vocation of EDS at UTS.  On this day we pray with the deepest gratitude for the manifold gifts offered and received at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.  Thanks be to God.

Here is the final blessing which I offered at that closing Eucharist.

Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
May the God of faith grant you the courage born of the assurance of things not seen;
May the God of hope renew your confidence and preserve you from despair when that arc of the moral universe seems to have bent in the wrong direction;
May the God of love empower you as an agent of that love, having been strengthened in this place to strive relentlessly for the justice which incarnates love;
And the blessing, mercy, and grace of God Almighty, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit, be upon you and those you love and serve, this day and always.  Amen.”
 

2017.05.07 Winged Words and Image

The Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School will host a conference, “Love Bade Me Welcome” on May 12-14, 2017.

It sounds by its title as if this conference is about social justice and supreme hospitality. So it is, of course, but its stated mission is to provide inspiration and practical guidance in the many uses of poetry for worship, liturgy, meditation, and education. “Our aim is to equip church leaders with the ‘winged words’ of poets as we seek to shape the minds and hearts of contemporary congregations.”

Here are the “winged words” of seventeenth century poet, George Herbert.

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.

The conference planners recognize that “poetic sensibilities are always present within the Christian faith. From the remarkable poetry of the Psalms, Prophets, and Wisdom literature, to the splendid verse of Dante, Herbert, Milton, Dickinson, Hopkins, Levertov, and many others up to our contemporaries, poetry has brought life and light to the Church through the ages.  How, afresh, can poetry revitalize our worshiping communities today.”

Herbert’s poem is religious, yet its “winged words” take it far beyond religion. It thrills me to see such an effort undertaken on the campus of the school where I spent four of the most formative years of my life.

To Herbert, “Love” is God, welcoming him and noticing, with a “quick-eyed Love,” how much the guest doth protest all his sins and unworthiness. Love invites, welcomes without condition, then feeds the guest actual food while also bathing him with the grace of healing his fascination with his shame—now toxic. Are you secretly preoccupied with your inadequacy?

Jesus the Christ lived and taught that Love absorbed all such feelings. He was crucified for his efforts. It’s ironic that humankind has little tolerance for Love, especially the kind that does not demand excessive displays of repentance, the kind that’s Eternal, the kind that just plain bypasses the sin we allow to cling to our souls—so tightly, so tight. 

Like the rejection of a heart transplant, humankind rejects Love. We are simply not comfortable unless we have a way to atone. Atoning sacrifices give us a way to feel powerful, a way to take control over our salvation. Oh, for God’s sake let God do it!

Love, writes this poet, bids us welcome without atonement. There is no such phenomenon as Eternal disdain. Love is winged—too big to demand repayment for the sake of being bade welcome.

The music of Herbert’s words brought to my mind the Greek muse Polyhymnia, muse of sacred song—a winged art form if there ever was one. Polyhymnia has no wings, she is simply winged.

Artist Susan Sohl created this image of Polyhymnia, copyright, 2017.  In giving me permission to share her image, Susan told me a bit of her own story.  She wrote: “I look forward to reading this blog and seeing my "muse". I did the entire series of 9, and none of the originals remain in my possession. They found a variety of homes, and now I am ready to start on other icons from the ancient world.

‘By the way, I am a survivor of lymphomic cancer, lupus (chemo forced it into remission), open-heart surgery, and two spinal surgeries. Painting and creating gave me the strength and will to never give up.  Now I teach and continue to paint, sharing my sense of color and love of movement with others. Thank you for wanting to offer one of my pieces to your readers, Susan.”

 Below is the artist with the winged soul.

Thank you Susan for your generosity. Obviously, Love bade you welcome and gave you strength to love back through your art and your spirit of persistence. Love inspires that kind of thing.