2023.02.26 Ashen Days/Dusty Path, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

The repeated refrain on Ash Wednesday echoes in my mind. Is it just this one day called Ash, or is it all of Lent, or is there something more universally true about this dusty theme? Is the spiritual life one long unpaved path—straight, curved, twisted, hilly, full of distractions, temptations—tedious and irresistible? What keeps us on this path and why? 

People stream forward up the aisle and stand or kneel before a priest whose thumb, dampened with blessed healing oils presses into a small bowl of black ashes that stick. Over and over the priest smears the black ashes onto each upturned forehead, making the sign of the cross and saying: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. 

This ritual kicks off the season of Lent, and shapes the whole season, one of reflection self-examination, grace and grit all the way to its climactic tragedy of Good Friday. Gloomy to say the least.    

Why is this ritual so popular?  You’d think it would fearful, depressing, overwhelming. Who wants to be reminded of their mortality? Many apparently do. 

When I worked as a chaplain in hospitals, staff would seek me out to get their ashes. Just the one phrase with the smearing and they hurried off to finish their day. Patients as well often requested ashes. I knew there were some who weren’t even Christian, including former Roman Catholics and young agnostics who had left the institutional church long ago, constrained by its rules and its gloom, not to mention their resistance to “organized” religion. Name me something that isn’t organized? Yoga, the spirit-calming practice, is very organized!  

Once the ashes I smeared floated down onto a recipient’s nose. She laughed. So did I. No point in being overly solemn or pious, as if we actually knew exactly what we were doing.  While working as chaplain in an alcohol/drug rehabilitation hospital I added a phrase to the traditional line: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. And God by grace will restore you to fullness of life. It was cheap grace, arrogant idolatry, and playing at God, I know, but some of these people were so beaten down by disease. And I had difficulty leaving them in ashes.

I left my own ashes on all day long—profoundly convinced that Ash Wednesday is the most true and honest day of the Christian year. 

-There is not a single soul who doesn’t mess up, clean up, mess up again, and clean up again. 

-No one does anything without two motives, one truly altruistic and generous, the other secretly self-serving. 

-God does not lead anyone into temptation. We do! Then we pray for help from God and others to get back on track, to save us from ourselves. God is far more generous than we are.  

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Do you know that our bodies can actually be composted, turned into rich, fertile soil, in which new green life grows? Tis true. Far less costly to the environment than cremation. Now there’s a new beginning!    

2014.06.01 Words Matter, Spoken and Unspoken

Ludwig Wittgenstein (below) was born Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge, UK, in 1951. He was was a philosopher interested in language. He wrote: "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."  I wonder.

What if you have no words?

I’m no philosopher, though I think a lot—too darn much in fact. But I do love languages, even Latin. (I had a great Latin accent.)  Curiosity, wonder, and yearning make us humans reach for heaven—sometimes even touch, like Adam and Creator-God in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. Both reach. Both touch. No words.

When I was a hospital chaplain at Hartford Hospital I worked on the spinal cord team. It was a terrifying ministry—quadriplegics and paraplegics all. I saw young teens who had dived off piers and cliffs and broken their necks; I saw young people who had flown through car windshields to land on open road; I saw middle-aged people who’d fallen off ladders. I saw everything—lives snapped off at the neck, literally. I cried myself to sleep often.

Some could still talk, but others were without speech, without words, although, cruelly it seemed, their minds could still function. Most could still hear. We invented ways to communicate, a bit.  What got me through was the poetry I read to people, smiles, prayer, and staying in the tension of my desire to know what it was like and my desire to flee.

Also nurses.

Nurses are the most bold and creative people I know. They are not afraid of bodies—sick, disabled, paralyzed bodies. They flip them and turn them and shove them around the bedclothes, and rarely speak down to them.

I visited a quadriplegic nurse in the hospital and in a rehab center. She finally made a decision to die—or not to live in a paralyzed body. She could talk very little and think, but not move. She set all her affairs in order, had her priest anoint her, and somehow willed herself to die. I prayed helplessly by and never tried to “talk” her out of it. I will never forget her courage and felt sure, for no reason, that Godde was present throughout. Suicide is not a sin!

What I learned in my time on the spinal cord team was that there was a language of the soul, a language without words. I wrote about it. I had no skill in this silent language, being such a cognitive wordy freak, but I could sometimes feel eyes speaking, read twitching mouths, and hear sound in the silence. And touch was visible even when it could not be felt. 

Wittgenstein, the word man, offers a metaphor that helps me define soul-speech: "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

It’s possible that the imagination has a life that travels far beyond the body and the mind. And that it has its own keyboard and its own music. The Church calls this the Holy Spirit and uses the image of a dove flying about and landing inside human hearts with a wordless word.

Perhaps, all those years ago, the feeble words I uttered mattered anyway. Maybe they struck the imagination of some of my patients and we made a chord. I have no idea. I just made my rounds, used all kinds of words, was glad to be rotated off the spinal cord team.

Godde, you are sometimes imaged as the Word, a word of grace and wisdom. Be the Word in our words, and help us to be more conscious about how very much words matter, how very much they can enhance or impede the flow of your divine love.  Amen.

Amen, in soul-speak, is three blinks.

2012.11.18 Religiophobic??

“Don’t mention religion or God to them. You’ll be blasted out of the room...they’ve been hurt and are pissed,” said my brand new employer.

 I’d just been hired by as a chaplain in a new alcohol/drug rehabilitation center. I was a religious professional on the way to being ordained an Episcopal priest— and already there was a gag rule.

During my first week on the job I went to the detox area in fear and trembling to visit my very first patient, thinking the warning might be exaggerated, and reminding myself confidently that they had advertised for a chaplain. It was a title they wanted to change to pastoral counselor but I had lobbied  for Chaplain, a title with religious implications—and won.

“Get the f... out of here, you goddam religious freak!”  Noelle screeched before I even introduced myself.  I backed out of her room slowly and mumbled fleeting impotent words of comfort like it will be all right—for my own benefit. Then I went to find my supervisor to ask for a change of assignment.  She said no.

“Take it slow and easy,” she said.  “Detox is monstrous. She’ll be more reasonable when she is alcohol free. Just don’t mention religion or God.”

But I hadn’t.

When Noelle came to my office for her first post-detox meeting I was tense awaiting another assault. Instead she was cautiously friendly. It turned out that her reaction had been to a cross I’d worn. It was a gift from my husband and I loved it. I hadn't mentioned religion when we met; I hadn't needed to, I was wearing it around my neck. Noelle told me that her mother had beaten her up at night and preached religion at her all day. It wasn’t hard to listen to her painful story and to feel compassion.

“Why is the place where Jesus is supposed to hang empty on your cross?” she asked.

“Because he’s not there any more,”  I said.

“It’s kinda pretty,” she said.

I  took the cross off and let her hold it. She declined the offer to let her try it on, saying it was mine.  When Noelle left the treatment center after four weeks she looked well and happy.  I'd never suggested she go to church, and I don’t know if she held onto her sobriety. I pray so. She healed my fears and helped me be an authentic goddamn religious freak.

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Over time in my chaplaincy there I mentioned religion a lot in my work with addicts. Few were hostile; in fact many longed for the basic ideas and sacramental practices they’d known as kids. Every time someone came to see me it was a confession of sorts. Listening was absolving.  I used Bible stories like the prodigal son or daughter coming home to Love; spoke of prayer as a common denominator; offered ashes on Ash Wednesday,  and was bold enough to convert my office into a Meditation Room always open for prayer and quiet. No one came but it was there.

All these courageous alkies helped me become a goddamn religious freak of a woman priest.