2023.04.30 Know Any Sheep? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

When we traveled in the northern isles into Scotland and Wales, we saw sheep—lots of sheep. They stood around grazing and munching on the green hillside. We used to joke that the sheep were grazing and munching on the green hillsides at night when it got dark and we turned in for the night. In the morning when the sun loomed skyward enough that we could see in the morning light, the first sight we saw were those same sheep still grazing on those same green slopes chewing their cud in the side-to-side way such ruminating ungulates do. 

I always looked for shepherds and I never saw any on those hillsides. It led me to believe that sheep really didn’t need shepherds as much as we think, and possibly in the ways we assumed. In fact the locals would spat about the cantankerous, bellicose personalities of the Irish sheep, as opposed to the placid peaceful Scottish sheep. All of this was good humor, possibly to cover up for underlying hostilities between neighbors—the politics. 

*  *  *  *  

And then in Christian churches I heard a lot about Jesus as a—no THE—Good Shepherd, guiding, prodding, cajoling and scolding all the dumb sheep to make sure they followed him, and him alone. At this idea I bleated and balked, and refused to follow. 

Then I heard a sermon about the parable of the sheep and the goats presenting an image of Jesus, acting on God’s behalf, sitting on a throne separating sheep from goats. He cast aside the goats, designating them to perish in Hell, and adopted the sheep, designating them for salvation as God’s chosen ones. The Gospel was read. The people in the congregation settled into their pews—some ready to listen, other ready to critique, others settling in for a doze, imagining that no one could notice their drifting off. (A preacher in a pulpit or preaching from the crossing, can see all the dozers, believe me—just as we could see all the nonchalant sheep grazing inattentively day and night.)

This particular sermon began: “Some people think this Good Shepherd image for God is bogus.” 

Everyone quickly woke up from dozing or grazing and paid attention. This preacher went on to debunk the “bogus” image of God as Judge. This preacher I fell in love with. I knew he knew how to love everyone equally—goats and sheep—impartially, inclusively, gracefully. This God I loved as well, good goat that I was.   

Apparently, so did some members of a search committee, getting a preview of a priest who might be a candidate for their own parish. They were buried, anonymously, in that morning’s congregation. They too wanted a God who embraced both sheep and goats without prejudice. They elected him as their next rector. In time, I followed.  

2017.06.11 Graduating Into Godde

If I were giving a graduation speech or trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a bunch of eager, scared, impatient grads, I’d offer one idea to practice and a soul-poem that dared to mention God by name.

AT EVERY MOMENT, STOP TO WONDER AND ASK YOURSELF:WHAT MATTERS HERE? PAUSE. THEN ASK YOURSELF: WHAT REALLY  MATTERS HERE?

Do You Believe in Godde?
     by Lyn G. Brakeman
 
I say I believe in God
when I see a seventeen-year-old girl-child
catapult down
center aisle
–late–
 shot from a cannon.

Wait! she shouts;
her bright blue graduation
robe flaps open
to reveal bare knees ending in fuchsia sneakers.

She races— winged— up the steps
to the stage
then stops,
straightens her square hat
until it settles over her curls, then walks with slow steady steps
towards the school principal
—who waits.

I say I believe in God
when I see this girl
walk with no swagger.

The principal waits still.

When she arrives he hands her a diploma
He says her name
—all of it, out loud—
even the middle name she hates: Victoriana.

At the sound of her name she leaps into his arms.
He holds her tightly,
the diploma still in his hand.
It has her back.

I say I believe in God
when I hear murmurs of shock
ripple through the crowd of praise-addicts.

I say I believe in God when
—one-by one—they rise to applaud.

Two people in the very back row
keep on clapping
after the girl flings her tassled
hat into the crowd
and runs off the stage.
No one is there to snap her photo,
except the invisible Godde*
with the invisible camera that images all Earth.

I say I believe in God
when I witness such jubilation,
and keep on believing
long after the applause has died down.

I say I believe in Godde when years later
I see this girl
hard at work packing groceries
with neat precision into bags.
She grins at every customer
so broadly that the whole world can look down her throat.


*Godde is the Middle English spelling of God. It is used quite frequently in modern times, because it nuances femininity in the divine name and softens the hard "d" ending. 

2016.07.10 Pray, Pray, Pray, and So?

All over the internet, on social media, and in all our email boxes there are calls for prayer. Our Episcopal Presiding Bishop has issued a particularly elegant call and prayer for our common humanity from the Book of Common Prayer. It is beautiful. Every person and all prayers are earnest and honest in their spiritual desiring. How they get winnowed is not my business.

So why do I feel uninspired? I feel frankly impotent, though I do pray for peace and an end to the escalation of violence. I even feel a little ashamed because I’m not on board somehow or I’m privileged not to be afraid. I’m not beseeching, not weeping, not agonizing. Am I cold-hearted? Is God dead? What does God do? Anything?  

I learned prayer as a child when I talked endlessly to God, instructing God that many things should change for the betterment of my little world, and specifically that God should end the dominance of the martini glass in our house. God did nothing, didn't change a damn thing outside me. I prayed anyway. It made me feel better inside, more able to seize life as it was and  never stop praying anyway—just to know my heart’s desires and to feel God’s listening. That formed my image of God: omnipresent but certainly not omnipotent.

I wonder if God is who we think God is—eternal almighty-ness?  Or is this a stereotype to whom we too often bow?

I am inspired by this prayer, written in the diaries of Etty Hillesum. She died at Auschwitz at 29.

Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing, God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little You, God in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last.   (Etty Hillesum, Essential Writings Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2009 p. 59)

To this kind of prayer I say Amen, and to this God I pray without ceasing.

2012.05.02 Blogoir: Gift, Miracle, Table

Miraculousness, my status at birth according to my mother,  made me too precious for Mom to hug much but not too precious to fuss over.  She defined miracle as something God does for you without you. I’d seen the picture of me inside of her and obviously she was a partner in the making of this miracle. I became suspicious. Either God or Mom was lying but what little child can choose between these two deities?

Being “a gift from God” had more promise for me as an identity than miracle. I preferred being a gift because a gift required intention and thoughtfulness, even love, while a miracle seemed like a flash-in-the-pan quick fix.  Also, no one in their right mind, even my theologically addled mother, would turn down a present as adorable as she said I was.

Preferences aside however, both spiritual ideas imparted to my young and curious mind a fascination with God. Who was this divine guy and how did He choose me for His gift?

At first I confused the whole masculine divinity idea with my father because Mom always called him  “my divine guy.”  It seemed she confused us both with God. It was easy to tell Dad wasn’t that heavenly. Someone as big as God who created the whole world and all that was therein (words I heard from a book)  probably didn’t drink martinis and nightly neglect the daughter who was a gift from God to him also. Wasn’t she?

My father held the magic glass. He twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. My mother had a different glass, tall with ice and dark fizzy liquid in it. Still, Daddy’s glass drew worship from both of them. What was wrong with my mother?  She had told me this was supposed to be the “children’s hour” like the poem said. Their elitist nightly ritual disgusted me.  It hurt, too.

I stomped away from the sanctuary of the parental Cocktail Hour leaving my parents to gaze at the long-stemmed triangle-shaped glass filled with clear liquid and three enormous green cross-eyed olives. Too big to float they nestled near the stem, their red eyes staring out at me in a menacing way—the evil olive eye.

I found refuge under our large dining room table with the cloth to the floor. I took off my slippers and left them outside the tablecloth—token good girlism.  Then I crawled in under the table,  sat cross-legged on the worn maroon carpet, and hiked my yellow nightie with the tiny flowers all over it up over my knees.

For company I took my three imaginary friends; for food I took some Ritz crackers I’d snitched from the cocktail tray. I lined the crackers up on one of the cross beams  and started my “sermon”— a lively one-way conversation with God who joined the group and, unlike my distracted friends,  was the only one who listened attentively and unflinchingly—and listened and listened at a time when no one else did. 

After I’d turned myself inside out chattering I was hungry and it was time for our meal. I ate my Ritz cracker and left the other four lined up on the cross beam. I felt sure my communicants would come for them after I went off to bed, but of course my mother would have retrieved them, knowing that my faith in my three imaginary friends depended on it. She never asked about the fourth. 

That was how I got my image of God, how I first knew for sure that I mattered no matter what, and how I invented a eucharist.  I felt this experience could be the greatest story ever told.

Some days I still wonder.

The Shack - a Review

Today is the anniversary of my late father’s birth day. If he were alive today he would be ninety-eight; instead esophageal cancer left him with too many bags, drains and tubes and no way to eat, so he went to bed the day after Christmas, 1982 and died. I loved him, alcohol, cigarettes, despair and all. My grief was long and hard. He died too soon for the length of my love.

I never thought God had a thing to do with his premature departure, causally at least. I don’t know what Dad thought. He didn’t talk. He’d say on and off throughout his life, What’s the point? and those were his last words to me as he lay dying. I had no answer but I don’t think he expected an answer, at least from me.

Dad had a reverence for the holy even in the midst of feeling defeated by life. He had a respect for religion and the transcendent. I could tell by the way he sang the Christmas carols in full bass voice, almost happy. I’d look up at him when I was a kid and think he knew something but couldn’t quite grasp it or let it take hold of him.

Traditional portraits of God— judge, monarch, Big Daddy watching from on high, subduer of deepest desires and passions—may have made it hard for my father to love and feel loved by God. He grew up in a family of six boys and two girls, number five flanked by two sisters who used to dress him up and play house. His father was passive, sweet and inebriated while Ma was a stern rising tower of authority. “Ma’s boys” could do no wrong. Dad was successful but I’d wonder if the occasional yearning I spotted in his eyes longed for, craved, a missing peace.

It’s not God but our misconstrued images of God that wound and kill us. The patriarchal God who points fingers and plays favorites has scared too many people for too long. That God, He, is the projection of a frightened church. That God, He, is still alive and well in too many shivering, cautious hearts. That God, He, has been the image of choice (for there are many images in the bible) in the church for too many centuries now.

Many clergy preach other, but mental imprints and hierarchical domination language are still used in worship and still hold power over souls.

I wish my dad could have met the portrait of God in The Shack.

When I read The Shack this summer I felt affectionately connected to God— in myself, in creation, in other people, and on high. Not new feelings but renewed feelings.

I’d resisted reading it in part because it was all the rage and I’m cynical about the tastes of the masses, and in part because I’d heard it was evangelical propaganda full of biblical literalism and not for sophisticated progressives who take the bible seriously but not literally, like my image of myself.

The Shack is a parable, a wisdom tale designed to startle and reveal something new. The story is about a father’s spiritual trip, and I say trip, because it is not a steadfast faith journey that evolves and matures over time with trust and prayer. It’s a crisis trip, an internal psychological/spiritual conversion of soul and mood: from a life of grim plodding, possessed by grief, laden with a habit of gloom larger than Eeyore’s to a life full of joy grounded in wisdom not rapture.

The plot isn’t complicated. It’s a reiteration of the story of the biblical Job, the good guy who is struck by more personal tragedy than anyone should have to bear and asks, Why? Job is far more dramatic in his impatient refusal to let go of the besetting question about why bad things happen to good people than is Mackenzie Alan Phillips in The Shack who has sunken into a faith of empty duty and spiritual deadness—until he gets an odd invitation in the mail.

The ideas in this book aren’t new: God in three persons, God who meets us and loves us at the center of our pain, Jesus in living color. It’s evangelical Christian propaganda as I’d feared.

What is new is that the theological ideas are wrapped, often not too tightly, in personal narrative, someone’s experience filled with characters you can fall in love with, identify with, care about. You keep reading even though you think you can guess what might happen, and to Christians the story is the one we hear in Church every Sunday and then some—with a twist. One of the novel’s characters is God-relating-to-God. Hey, don’t you have inner dialogues? But are yours all filled with mutual respect and love—and good boundaries, for godssake?

The gift of his book is that it gives readers a new image of God, not an abstraction or doctrine but as characters in a novel, drawn with sympathy and color, characters that sustain the narrative, characters you want to know. That’s new and it is charming.

What makes The Shack not really a good novel is that its plot is weak, the writing not very creative, the dramatic action not suspenseful but forced into the service of an agenda, the solutions contrived, the wisdom un-nuanced. The plot quickly takes second place to the agenda of the author and collaborators with just enough change of scene to keep you going. What starts as a story turns into a sermon, embarrassingly preachy in spots. especially near the end when a clear Christian refrain shows up uninvited. I cringed. My Jewish blood also curdled in a couple of places that were unnecessarily anti-semitic and insulting to the Hebrew scriptures. The story doesn’t carry its own weight throughout.

As I’d feared it is also biblical literalism thinly disguised. Why am I not in a rant? Disgusted? I don’t know. I just got into the scene, the relationships, corny but alluring, often followed up with a tidbit of irresistible wisdom like the Eden myth question: “Rumors of glory are often hidden inside what many consider myths and tales.” Or the human soul as a living fractal—wild, messy always in process, patterns emerging, alive, growing and needing constant tending.

Jesus takes Mack on a walk across the water. I giggled with them as they stepped off the dock, carrying their socks and shoes and rolling up their pants just in case. This and other biblical scenarios are simply portrayed without fanfare. They’re just acted out in character. Who cares if they actually happened? It is not fact that inspires faith but warmth.

This book is vulnerable, open to all kinds of scholarly nitpicking, literary scorn, religious defensiveness, much of it justified. But does it work anyway? I think it does for one reason only: the characters are lovable, charming, their voices convincing. You want more. You fall in love. You want this kind of love, this kind of God. I wonder if that is why this book is so popular. It allows us to fall in love, to be as a child, to let go of proofs, to enjoy a story that touches our humanity at its most vulnerable and presents an ancient Christian insight in new garb.

In addition, this book may serve as a bridge between the foolishly warring left and right religious camps. It's a string bridge to be sure, but one that both side may be able to execute with caution.

If The Shack does nothing else it give us fresh dynamic language and imagery for divinity and goes a long way to balance transcendent and immanent, love and freedom, revelation and psychology.

This is evangelical Christianity in its loveliest form. Happy Birthday Dad. Is this “the point” you always asked about?