2024.09.29 FOUNDATIONS, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

“Foundations” refers to many things, one of which is a woman’s undergarments. Below is how I see the “foundations” of this United States of America—with a place for ALL of us AND those who desire to join us legally, respectfully, and with pride.  My piece below was recently  published in online journal, Persimmon Tree. It publishes works of women OVER 60 only.     Love that foundational requirement!   

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This is the first United States presidential election in which I, a Democrat, will be voting intentionally against the Republican candidate!  I will also be voting for Kamala Harris, not simply because I’m a Democrat, but because I think her plans are closer to my values about socio-economic justice for all people, and especially for the reproductive rights of women, including, and specifically, making decisions about their own bodies.

 

States are biased by the politics of their geography. Some decisions require broader consideration. We need federal legislation to ensure women’s legal rights, specifically a woman’s right to choose abortion with medical assistance as appropriate for her health and her circumstances.  I appreciate Kamala Harris’s openness and honesty about her views—not simply because she is a woman herself, but because she respects and honors the pain of exclusion any human being of any gender, political party, geography, religion, race or ethnicity feels when robbed of personal freedom for any reason. Any reason.

 

I know all the pain of such decisions. I once sat with a young woman who took seriously her own right to life and freedom. We wept together, because this is a matter of personal wellbeing of mind, body, and soul. Either way one decides there is profound grief, and need for kind and compassionate guidance from an unbiased guide.

 

It is neither sin nor crime to choose one’s own good—as an individual or as a nation. 

NEITHER WAR NOR VIOLENCE solveS or resolveS OR evolveS   ANYTHING OR ANYONE.  

2021.02.21 COMPASSIONTIDE, Retreat with Martin Smith

It’s time!!  Go!

I’ve been restless, irritable, uneven of soul. It’s not the virus or hermetic ways, not even the bombardment online of a million glamorous offerings to deepen everything from your spirituality to your drain pipe flow. Something was missing. What?

RETREAT!  It’s been over two years since we’d been on retreat—out of town to a quiet place of contemplative solitude-in-community where you make friends with yourself and your God.

What is contemplative about Zoomed distance watching? Still, I need for my nerves a retreat, darling. So we sign up for a retreat, Compassiontide, at Holy Cross Monastery with Martin Smith, our favorite ex-monastic-now-married Episcopal monk-priest.

Retreat Silence  

An infuriating irony about retreat silence: the more you concentrate your focus outward on icons, images sculpture, artwork, natural scenery, a speaker, the more your inner focus sharpens.

Retreat prep 

I re-read Martin Smith’s Lenten classic A Season for the Spirit. I noticed the noble dedication by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie who commissioned a book for Lent, 1991. “It still comes as a surprise to many people that there are monks and nuns who belong to the churches of the Anglican Communion.  .  .  . This book is not a substitute for prayer itself. Instead it leads us into the experience of prayer.  .  .  .  Martin Smith has written a practical book.   .  .  .   I have much confidence that it will be found a rich quarry for Christians of varying traditions seeking to come closer to God in prayer, and also for those just beginning the journey of faith.”   

I have so many underlinings in this little book that it makes me laugh. I’ve internalized it and now imagine it to be my own clever theology. There really is nothing new under the sun. Good!

Typos 

I notice with a laugh that on pages 12 and 21 there are typos—the same word misspelled twice: INdentification.    
    In the chapter, “The Wind In The Wilderness,” Martin Smith describes the biblical story of Jesus being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit to discern his vocation. How could, or would, Jesus be human and divine at once? “If he is the Holy One of God, the Only-begotten, what becomes of his sense of INdentification with weak mortals?”
    In the chapter, “The Anaesthetic Begins To Wear Off,” Jesus wrestles with how to reconcile a broken world into the divine embrace of God. “The Spirit of Jesus moves us, as it moved him, to INdentify ourselves with a broken world AND to bring it within the reconciling embrace of God.”
    
I will  INdentify. Honestly, I slip-slide around, flop to one side or the other, and pray a lot to keep balance and be compassionate with my blundering. I’m a failure. But I’m awake. I go for more.  

Retreat Meditations In Small Bits    

God is an Overflowing Never-ending Immensity of Compassion—a Niagara. We can resonate with this flow, as a piece of paper lying on the strings inside a piano would when that note is twanged. The paper suddenly rises with the vibration. That’s how we RESONATE with divine Compassion—seeking more. The MORE is always available. I go with the flow.

The mystical password to enter the Gospel Mystery is ADORATION, not obedience. Adoration is loving God with the brakes off. A brain-damaged child would butt his head on the TV screen. He was aroused and gestured that he wanted MORE. He wanted IN, into the action. How adore-able. Me too!

Christianity is the only religion that puts passion back into compassion. Our God suffers. The hands that hold us in existence are pierced with unimaginable nails. The Cross, therefore, is a judgment, not because it is violent, but because it brings human cruelty into the light. I see!  One of Jesus’s hand on my home altar crucifix is missing. I cover its absence with a tiny white shell.  I shiver.

Martin has a small lamb tattooed on the inside of his arm. “The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world; the sins of the world do not take away the Lamb.”  I see that silly lamb with new eyes—no longer ridiculing but with gently tenderness.

Compassion for others is an unstable idea. What? Justice is very popular for good reason today, but it is not the Gospel of Christ. What?  Justice offers equality, giving all of us just what we all, by rights, deserve. Mercy, however, is not just. It gives us all what we do not deserve, have not earned. Say again? Consider the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Some worked hard all day, and some worked an hour only. They all got the same pay. Equal pay for equal work? Nope, not the way of God.

When you are helpless establish a sheltering heart in prayer. I pray with a young man of 25 whose acquaintance I have only recently made through his grandmother. He had a normal accident for a teenager who at 17 climbed a tree, lost balance, and fell to the hard ground—flat on his back. He is now 25 and quadriplegic. His grandmother left the church long ago, in disgust about rules that hurt people. I’d told her I was going on a retreat—virtually. We laughed. She knew what a retreat was, and the next day asked me if I’d pray for her grandson on my retreat.  I do. I am. No brakes on.
 

Practice promiscuous empathy. OK, I’ve tried promiscuity in other ways, but this is much harder. Screech go my brakes. They still work—in case.

The Holy Spirit invites compassionate experimentation: Try this. See this. Ask this. Wonder this. Pray this. The Spirit tugs gently at your heart and gives it clues. For example, imagine that the person whose behavior you deplore may have an unhealed wound hiding behind mean behavior. In prayer, recall your own wounds, and Compassion will soften your heart. That’s God—madly soft-hearted.

Last Laughs

I asked my usual question about the lumbering pace of the Church in eliminating gendered language to find a more expansive and compassionate vocabulary for God. Martin grinned and said he knew who had asked that question. I’m that much of a pest, yes. He said he was not adept in this area, offered “Loving Parent,” and admitted that, although Church rhetoric is hard-edged to change, it is still locked into a masculine distanced God. (He didn’t add white. I forgave him immediately.)  After all, most of the quotes and images he used were from women.

Hilarious irony: the theological language question about which I am the most passionate, I have never prayed about, never directly consulted God in prayer about. Have I assumed that God already agreed with me?  Oh God, forgive me and help the Church loosen up and change traditional theological imagery. Thanks.
 

2015.12.06 Where Is Compassion?

On one cloudy cold morning I awakened feeling grumpily ungrateful. It would be easy to blame the equally gloomy weather for my mood, of course, but my agitation went beyond the personal.

Thanks to the Internet, my mindset is getting global—such brain strain. Now my heart is, too. Creeping mental global awareness hurts, and spiritual globalization nearly kills the soul. There’s bad news everywhere. And it’s Advent, the lost season, sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Advent warns : BE AWAKE, ALERT, WATCH. Good Godde, I feel like Chicken Little—so in need of heart-sheltering.

When we celebrate again the birth of Christ, will it make a difference? Will that seasonal spirit we call Christmas bring compassion into the world? Can it save?

Where is compassion? It seems almost a perverse virtue in the face of the world’s travail: shaken by apocalyptic terrors, violence, little children mutilated, daily/hourly murder of innocents, institutional abuse, parents capsized with grief, opioid deaths mounting. Good god, there is even a program of cathartic boxing for women —not for sport, but to vent their rage and grief. The tenor and energy of violence spread with the news, as if the strategy of terrorist groups had become our own, posing as mere retaliation of course.

Compassion. Is it dead? Is there such a thing as radical compassion, and had I felt a snatch of that—a compassion seizure, the kind that can grip your gut and wrench it free of sweet sentiments, recited prayers, empathic sighs, rote prayers, the kind that can make you feel a little sick. I suddenly thought: I bet compassion can spread like violence, maybe faster. Can it?

 Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

Yes!  This Greek word, limply translated “moved with pity” in the New Testament. I learned it in a course called Compassion with a capital C, taught by Henri Nouwen. We flocked to it. Okay it hadn’t much of a reading list, and Nouwen was a guru, but in truth all hundred or more of us seminarians were tired of hearing about compassion. We wanted it. We salivated for it. We wanted to be  Compassion. Oh, we knew only God had flesh-rending Compassion— but oh, we wanted it, too!

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

The guttural sound repeated over and over. Splawch! Ach!  The word is the strongest possible word the New Testament could use to describe what Jesus felt when confronted with the overwhelming needs of his world. “Listen,” Nouwen said the word over and over, jumping up and down, near-hysterical himself. “It’s the same root as the word for womb, your bowels!”

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

I was getting aroused, my belly tightened. I couldn’t take notes to calm myself. I couldn’t spell it!  Instead I distracted myself to recall the feel of a baby doing what felt like calisthenics in my womb. Was that the kick of divine compassion trying to get out?  But Jesus was a man. Never mind. Nouwen was near-apoplectic, and we all were right there with him, giving birth. He shouted. “You are pregnant with Christ. Can you hear all the loudly begging people? Let your gut be wrenched like Jesus’s.”   (Godde, it’s awful to be asked to be like Jesus, really!)

Splawch-NID-zo-mai.

I wanted this scphlank-word. I also wanted this lecture to be over. It wasn’t soothing. I wanted compassion like this to go away. Others must have felt the same, because after the lecture  we sought relief in gallows humor, one way to cope with a power too great to manage: “Bowels of mercy gently pressing.” “Jesus shit.” 

My own compassion seizure, if that’s what it was, passed—and will recur. Compassion has rage and roar in it. It is not sugar-coated. It is a potent life-force. Compassion created the cosmos—splawch like that. Compassion evokes Magnificats, grand biblical hymns in the mouths of women whose wombs had been instruments of compassion. Compassion leaps alive in every willing—and unwilling—heart.

Beggars in the city are polite and ingratiating. They even bless my meager offerings. Sometimes I stop to chat. Susan’s husband had a work-related accident. They have two young children.  It’s not about drugs and alcohol, like everyone thinks. The family applied for housing, which will be effective this month. In the meantime, Susan sits on the sidewalk with her cup, wrapped in a warm blanket, to beg. Marcus is older and out in the rain with his handwritten cardboard sign. I know what it says without reading it: out of work. I ask, like a mother, if he wants my umbrella. All I have on me is a dollar. I apologize, then silently wonder if these folks should get the little machines that swipe credit cards. Marcus tells me there’s a laundromat down the street where he can dry his jacket. He’s taking care of me! So I give money and get a blessing.

“My son died, and I don’t know why,” sobbed a father. I read it on Nov. 28, 2015 in the Boston Globe. (The son was a bystander shot dead outside a bar in Boston.) His son died. He didn’t know why.  Don’t bury me under politically correct theology, please. A son of God died, and God didn’t know why either.

There’s not enough compassion in the world, or the gospel, to go around for these people—or is there? I’ve come to believe that what I periodically feel is a compassion that is buried in human flesh, planted there in the beginning. We might call it the image of God. Thomas Merton, monk theologian, called it “hidden wholeness.” Everyone has it; in fact, it is what humanity has in common—seldom tapped and never trapped, yet available when we dig deep to our inner core: salvific Compassion.

There is no original sin. There is original compassion.

2014.05.18 The Spirituality of Curiosity

Curiosity is a very pleasant place to dwell. Relaxing even.
And most certainly fruitful.

The above quote is from a prose poem, “Experiments,”  by Margaret Wheatley. I love this delicious idea. Of course I do. It's true of me. I used to drive my parents crazy with questions and more questions. All kids do that as they grow but I never grew out of it. My curiosity is insatiable really. I wish my brain could keep up with what I want to find out.

Since my curious bent knows no limits it has quite naturally turned to theology. I mean if you’re going to question everything, then eventually, or even first off, you must question the most mysterious thing we can name. Still, as long as I question it means that I’m faithful, which means not stuck on certainty.

Here is more from the Wheatley excerpt: 

Curiosity it a very compelling space—open, rich friendly. We’re willing to be surprised rather than having to get it right. We’re interested in others’ perspectives, intrigued by differences, stimulated by new thoughts. 

Curiosity is a very pleasant to dwell. Relaxing even.
And most certainly fruitful.

All it requires is letting go of certainty and admitting we
don’t know what we’re doing.

Let the experiments begin.

I doubt if curiosity ever killed any cats. They’re too smart. But I often get into trouble with my questions. To some people they can feel rude and invasive. Others love it and see my curiosity as a sign of caring, which it is.

There is a lovely woman in our neighborhood who drives a motorized wheelchair all over town, moving along the city streets, potholed and hazardous enough for cars, bikes and pedestrians, but for a wheelchair?  She goes some distance to get over to Mass. Ave. and the Dunkin’ Donut shop. One day I met her. She was toodling along in the rain holding an umbrella in one hand and steadying a sizable bag in her lap. She called to me for help. “May I borrow your cell phone? I forgot mine and also my keys.”

I gave her my old-fashioned flip-top phone, then helped her dial. Her husband didn’t pick up so we dialed her son. “Hi, it’s mom. I’m out here on someone else’s cell and I forgot my keys so will you go unlock the door? OK. Thanks.”

She thanked me profusely and we chatted a bit as neighbors do. We exchanged names and I then went on my way, reassured that she would go on home and be able to get in. I thought to myself: what an attractive friendly woman; I and wonder why she lives in a wheelchair. Did I mention that she has flaming red hair coiffed in a neat pageboy?

I expected she’d go right home. I went over to the square to do my errands and while walking back, still in the rain, I spotted her sitting near the window of the Dunkin’ Donuts shop drinking her special coffee. I tapped on the window and waved. She waved back and we grinned.

The next time I saw her she was on another street, this time traversing snowy, icy surfaces and griping about this winter like everyone else was. She is either intrepid or insane. 

“I just have to get out into the world,” she said. “Every day is a curiosity.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I had swallowed my curiosity and kept myself from asking what kept her in a wheelchair. I’ve met her several times now, and I call her by name and say hello. One day I asked her, “What keeps you in a wheelchair, Theresa?”

“I have MS,” she said with a smile.

“I’m so sorry,” I said smiling back. Should I have been more gushy, boo hoo-ish? Or apologize for my question?  No, I decided, remembering that she was as curious about each day as I was, and listening to my heart, which beat with compassion and admiration for this woman’s spunk.

It’s my mind that generates the curiosity. When accompanied by a compassionate heart, curiosity is more loving than invasive—”a very pleasant place to dwell indeed.”

I thought of the first disciples. If they hadn’t been curious they’d never have discerned resurrection.  Jesus often asked bold questions. Imagine asking a hopelessly crippled paralytic man if he wanted to be made well? Obvious, but Jesus was curious to know what the man wanted before he whipped out a miracle healing. The man’s own heart’s desire was as important to Jesus as Godde’s was for healing. 

(I promise I won’t ask Theresa if she wants to be healed next time we meet. I’m not that curious—and besides, I couldn’t deliver.)

Prayer will be enough—an act of honest care, of faith, not certainty. 

2012.11.14 Eat Lou or Die?

Well, you won’t really die if you eat Lou, that is, your biological life will continue full of protein and new strength, but your spiritual life may suffer a bit.

The late Lou and his surviving team mate Bill were working farm oxen at Green Mountain Junior College in Vermont. The college has a sustainability vision which of course requires that some things die that other may live. The college made the same mistake that the biblical God made in Eden: made the forbidden fruit too attractive and told Eve and Adam in paradise a lie (they would die if they ate)— to protect them from knowing how to do evil as well as good.   

Green Mountain's farming program encouraged the students to love and befriend the farm animals —including Lou and Bill with whom the students worked to plow fields and haul heavy loads. The strong oxen duo served well for ten years. Now they were scheduled to be slaughtered for meat for the college meal program.

BUT these oxen had acquired names and become like pets to the students who protested wildly when it came time for the violence of the slaughter house for Lou. They knew Bill would follow. They knew too much.  They cared too much. They had the knowledge of good AND evil.

When you engage the human heart you invite love and compassion and then you put stops on violence, because how can anyone of sound mind and heart slaughter or harm a creature they also know and love?

Recently Lou was euthanized despite local offers of retirement care until natural death— a post-controversy compromise I assume between the high value of sustainability and the equally high but less predictable value of love. 

Is this a lesson in sustainability and its natural consequences? Or is it a call to become vegetarian? Or is it a challenge to expand the breadth of compassion and its mercies? 

Would I never again enjoy a hamburger or a juicy steak if I thought it might be Lou or Bill?  I don’t know to be candid.

But I do remember the late Benedictine monk and liturgics scholar/professor at Yale Divinity School Aidan Kavanagh’s fierce clarity when years ago he taught students that: “the holy things of the liturgy did not ‘drop from Heaven in a Glad Bag’ ” and  to remember that, “the Eucharist began in the slaughterhouse.”