2023.09.24 Mercy Me! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I’ve been a Mercy Associate for over thirty years now. I’m not mercy-full enough. Still, I’m venerable and vulnerable enough to have mercy on God for not living up to our righteous/wrongful expectations.

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Before I get too tangled up in Chronos—ancient personification of time/chronology/sequence on clock, calendar, or map  let me heed Kairos—ancient Greek for just the right time, opportune timING, often identified as Godde’s time. Chronos is quantitative. Kairos is qualitative.  

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When I was a young elementary school age child I was short. I hated to have to be the first in a line-up for walking into some all-school assembly. On the other hand, I hated as well to be last in line.  I also— secretly—hated God for making me short! Why couldn’t I be statuesque like Lucy Lofty, or at least curvaceous like Mimi Malarkey?  

Now, by Chronos, I am eighty-five years old, and guess what? I’m growing shorter, day by bloomin’ day. Of course I know there’s a genetic and scientific explanation for my height. I know my height isn’t a diagnosable condition. I know my bones are worried about support and my skin is shriveling, my memory pillowing—my Chronos is almost up. 

*  *  *  *

Today, I read the biblical parable ( Mt. 20:1-16, also told in Mark, Luke), told by Jesus about the laborers in the vineyard. This small story, considered by Jesus scholars to be authentic to Jesus’ words and teachings, has created more argumentation, more ire from fair-minded business practitioners and even more spiritual chaos than most any other story Jesus told.  Equal pay for equal work is a quantitative Chronos-based practice. 

The refrain “the last will be first and the first last” is attached, although scholars doubt its placement here. Jesus doesn’t mock those who hold onto that practice, however, he does offer a Kairos way to understand why the vineyard keeper, the boss, often thought to be God/Creator, would pay ALL workers the same day’s wage, even though some arrived late and worked less time than those who labored all day. 

I don’t know exactly what Jesus might have been up to in his day. I do know that he  consistently spoke hope and blessing to the “poor”—those in deep need. 

I do know that every single worker was EQUAL in need, EQUAL in willingness to labor, and EQUAL in gratitude. And I do know that the vineyard owner freely chose to use his money in this UNEQUAL way.  UNFAIR shout the Chronos-bound people. 

THANKS BE TO GODDE, shout the Kairos-aware people. This is a Kairos parable.

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P.S. Consider the metaphoric parable of a tug-of-war. Two groups pull to WIN. One group finally loses strength and will and drops the rope—LOSERS.  The other group all fall down on their butts and declare themselves the WINNERS.    Now laugh! 

2022.04.17 Little Easters Everywhere. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/17/22

O God of Love

    so high above

       so deep beneath

           you never sleep

                you always keep

                    your heat in beat

Your love of LIfe’s

alive in strife

You love, therefore I am.

I love, therefore You are. 

                   Lyn G. Brakeman

Bovine Salvation

Sturdy Ms Methane

staunch in her pose

She’s not vain

Just full of Methane

See how she stares

Her soft eyes engage

She’s gassing the planet

In peril it stands—yet

We’re changing her repast

De-scenting her gasses

She’s still very well fed

And we’ve nothing to dread

For the gasses she passes 

are now Methane-free. 

Lyn G. Brakeman

  

Does anyone imagine that God does not have emotions? I bet it is hard to imagine God’s own feelings, especially fear or anger, if you’re not in touch with your own. Still, we have for so long worshiped a Divinity so dominantly transcendent, so consistently almighty, and so exclusively masculine, that we really don’t know God at all. 

The Creator God of the Bible creates natural wonders of Life itself with excessive prodigality and excitement. This God has creative power and shares it radically with all Creation—natural world and human. God wants it all to thrive, and adorns it all with the freedom to do just that. 

We, according to ancient story, chose to do the one thing God knows will make trouble for us for the whole rest of our existence: we exercised our freedom to know both good and evil, and to choose either way. We exposed ourselves to evil as well as good, to moral as well as immoral. And thus this little mythic story explains why we have been at odds with ourselves, each other, and God forever and ever, amen. It takes courage to make choices, and more courage to undo or reset those choices that turn out not to be so good. It takes courage to suffer choices we do not make. 

It takes prayer and serenity and wisdom and love to realize that the binary God seemed to set up is much more subtle, much more demanding and much more rewarding, precisely because it is NOT a true binary. There is no such thing as a purely good choice OR a purely evil one. This, I believe, is why God Creator warned the Edenic couple to leave the fruit of that tree alone—and why they could not leave it alone. 

This little story never happened. This little story always happen. Outside the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem there is this giant sculpture. 

 

The wind was fresh, the earth was young,

the scent of life was everywhere

the garden lay a fruitful dream

and God enjoyed the evening air

Where are my loved? the Maker wooed.

The clay I shape and call by name?

The questions spread through stem and leaf,

but as God waited no one came. 

God’s loves were hiding, faces turned,

beyond the reach of breeze and Voice,

aware that sometime in the day

they’d made a dark, far-reaching choice.

The question lingers in the leaf

in barren branch and shrinking pond—

Where are my loves? The Maker calls,

still trusting clay may yet respond. 

Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle

* * *  *  

A wise old owl says: Now, my dears. Do hoot and cheer and never fear, I’m always here.  

Another wise owl stays far aloft. I look out for danger and for prey. I’m always here.

Both the guardian and the nurturer seek little easters everywhere. Both equally incarnate the Spirit of Love that simply never burns out. 

*  *  * *

EIN SOF

The first time I heard these words was on our 2012 trip to Israel—a two-week pilgrimage I shall never forget. It’s in my bones. It was sponsored by St. George’s College in East Jerusalem, led by tour guides who knew the land and the language in way that made it come alive. The course was called “The Palestine of Jesus” I shall never forget my experience there. I felt as if I’d walked right into the Bible. Ein sof is one of the phrases I learned there. It’s Hebrew to describe a mystical divinity I can’t possible explain, so I call it God before God—the infinite unknowable known or finite infinitude. You see, it makes no sense and yet we know it s presence. It come in Kairos time. God’s time or timing. 

No wonder sweet mortals went speechless when they experienced kairos. It does not submit to any containment or control. No wonder that before long we humans, failing to control Kairos, invented calendars and clock, for chronos, our own time and timing.

We watch a medical television sitcom, set in the busy ED in a big city hospital. Whenever a patient, despite heroic medical efforts dies, the doctors and nurses who have been working so hard suddenly get it. They all stop at once. One doctor calls it. God calls it simultaneously. 

“Time of death 13:30” says chronos. 

“Time of Life: 13:30” says kairos.  

Ein sof. 

 

2021.01.24 'Dom Ring

Today, the third Sunday of Epiphany for Christians, the New Testament Gospel tells the story of Jesus’s choosing his disciples, those he would train for a renewed way of being with God, self and neighbors. It was a Kairos time for his ministry on earth. It is now a Kairos time for us earthlings as we choose new leaders and plot new courses.
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The Greek language give us two words for time: chronos for clock-measurable time and Kairos for time that, for a variety of reasons, many unforeseeable, is simply opportune or favorable. Kairos time is neither measurable nor predictable, yet it is discernible— a time made special by a sense of one’s presence to oneself, all creation, and to the creator. Kairos is God’s time. It knows no bounds, has no measure, and is available to all Creation.

Most days are run by chronos. We are chased by, or chasing, time’s passage, racing against its inevitability as if it were in our control. Some of us run too fast and some too slowly. To accurately asses time and make room to notice Kairos occasions, we have to let go of the dominance of chronos, get conscious of what our own insides and our senses reveal.

What time is it now?
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When I was a child I begged my mother with annoying persistence: “Sing ‘Dom Ring’. Sing it again, Mommy.”  My mother, not particularly gifted with a singing voice, took a while to figure our what ‘Dom Ring’ meant, and not much longer to say: “Ask Daddy.”

Daddy did have a good voice. I knew this, because I saw pictures of him in lines of singing men dressed in fancy suits called tuxedos. They were called a glee club and named after a famous musician, Mendelssohn. Daddy was famous.   

There were no women in the group, but I was used to such displays of male importance, and besides my Daddy was the handsomest, even though he was mostly too tired to sing ‘Dom Ring’—to me.  ‘Dom Ring came from the British national anthem sung for their Queen, but America stole it, and I made it my personal favorite. Here is the first stanza.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freeDOM RING!

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Not given to paroxysms of patriotic zeal, episodes of urgent flag-waving or flag-burning, or seizures of praise-cheering in church, I have suddenly just now been twice overtaken by surges of patriotic fervor with echoes of “'Dom ring" flooding my heart. Both brought me to tears.

On the day of Epiphany, January 6, 2021, collective ignorance met collective rage. What appeared in full view was America against itself. The well-planned, presidentially-incited, white supremacist attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. was violent and horrifying. Many of us were asleep to this possibility, entirely unprepared for such an insurrection, operating on chronos time only. There hadn’t been time or will to organize such violence, many thought. Not in America, many said. We’re safe and secure here, politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainline Christians said. Our president wouldn’t allow such a thing, many said. This was unprecedented—and indeed it was. Nevertheless, we did have warning signs—misread, little heeded, and imagined to be isolated. I trembled and wept.

Then on January 20th, the United States inaugurated a new President—not chosen by dissent or the will of a dictator, but by the votes of record turnouts of voters. Many labored together, outside of political preferences, to make sure there was no voter fraud and that all vote counts were accurate. This was a Kairos-driven process—unexpected but crucial. The losing candidate finally left, declaring himself the “real” winner of a “stolen” election. He was deprived of nothing except the dignity of truth with humility. I worried and wept.

Would this inauguration come off free of violence, safely, without foreign or domestic interference, and within the structures of tradition?  For 13 days I’d held my breath and prayed like hell. I still held my breath as I watched Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Kamala Devi Harris, first black and Asian American woman to serve in executive office, swear on huge bibles, using God’s name, promising to uphold the principles of the Constitution as they held its highest office. This was indeed a Kairos within chronos event. This was a ‘Dom Ring moment. I exhaled and wept for joy.
                 
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On that same day things came together in Kairos time for me personally:     

    1) My country chose Democracy over politics, Constitution over party, and leaders with integrity and a chronos-time commitment to American diversity truly represented in our government. 
    

    2) My husband and I received our first vaccine shots against a deadly virus.
    

    3)  One of my nephews, a long-time heroin addict, for whom I’d prayed incessantly, finally got clean and was willingly admitted to a local Suboxone clinic for treatment.
    

    4) President Biden proclaimed and embodied empathy and mutual respect for the dignity of all humankind and the whole created order, promises central to the baptismal covenant of The Episcopal Church in which I am a priest. America would UNITE NOT FIGHT! Biden’s “whole soul” was/is in this effort. Mine too.

    5) Amanda Gorman, age 22 and the youngest national youth poet laureate ever in this country, recited her brilliant inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”. (Not a grueling self-defeating hill like Sisyphus’s, nor a hill like Jack & Jill’s, down which Jill came tumbling after Jack, of course.) Besides her natural beauty and verve, Amanda Gorman, like Biden, has had to overcome a stutter. Now she preached a gospel of “right not fight”—irresistibly.  
    
    If we merge mercy with might, and might with right,
    then love becomes our legacy in change, our children’s birthright.

    With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
    we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

Maybe this nation, long enthralled with its own freedom, progress and self-love, is ready to turn itself inside out for the freedom, progress and self-love of others. Is that enough unity? Will freedom ring for us all?  We shall make it so—kairologically and chronologically—as we plot together the daily wonders of Epiphany.  

‘Dom Ring.
 


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