GOOD RECIPE? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 9/10/23

I’m sure you’re thinking I will offer you the next greatest recipe for the next greatest whatever. NOT SO. I’m not a foody or a cook. Nor am I fussy about food prep. I do rejoice in eating, however. And writing, but not formatting.

What I care most about is the “recipe” that is written in the Bible, the Christian testament to be exact. It’s the advice of a very wise Jew named Jesus (Yeshua) who gives his followers a spiritual recipe by which they can settle complaints and disputes and grievances in five easy steps. (Well, they aren’t “easy” to act on, even if they are easy to understand.) Here they are: Matthew 18:15-20, The Inclusive Bible.

IF YOUR SISTER OR YOUR BROTHER SHOULD COMMIT SOME WRONG AGAINST YOU, GO AND POINT OUT THE ERROR BUT KEEP IT BETWEEN THE TWO OF YOU. 

Are you kidding? What if she or he doesn’t agree? What if a gun is involved? What if my own fear allows me to downplay the offense, deny it?  What if my own anger allows me to overplay the offense?  What if he or she denies it altogether? What if I exaggerate? 

IF SHE OR HE LISTENS TO YOU, YOU HAVE WON A LOVED ONE BACK. IF NOT, TRY AGAIN BUT TAKE ONE OR TWO    OTHERS WITH YOU SO THAT EVERY CASE MAY STAND ON THE WORD OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES. 

Great!  But was the process worth it? I could have just swallowed my pride—minimized the whole thing. Besides, who would I pick for my witnesses? Best friends? People who think as I do? Kin? 

IF YOUR SISTER OR BROTHER REFUSES TO LISTEN TO YOU REFER THE MATTER TO THE CHURCH. 

Even worse! The Synagogue? Any denomination or religion?  My own parish?  Whose rules and regs? Which authority? 

IF SHE OR HE IGNORES EVEN THE CHURCH THEN TREAT THAT SISTER OR BROTHER AS YOU WOULD A GENTILE OR A TAX COLLECTOR. 

And how would that be? In Jesus’s day Gentiles and Tax collectors weren’t exactly buddies with Jewish Temple authorities.  Is this about making sure everyone obeys the same rules, listens to the same centralized authority?

THE TRUTH IS, WHATEVER YOU DECLARE BOUND ON EARTH WILL BE BOUND IN HEAVEN, AND WHATEVER YOU        DECLARE LOOSED ON EARTH WILL BE LOOSED IN HEAVEN.  

Whoa! That sounds as if heaven and earth are one. How can that be?  Still, we’ve used all the ingredients and followed the process to a tee. And that’s it? 

AGAIN, I TELL YOU IF TWO ON EARTH JOIN IN AGREEMENT TO PRAY FOR ANYTHING WHATSOEVER IT WILL BE        GRANTED TO YOU BY MY ABBA GOD IN HEAVEN.  

Oh, there is one new word now. What?  PRAY. Consciously include God: We cannot make all this happen alone. Apparently, neither does God.  

WHERE TWO OR THREE ARE GATHERED IN MY NAME, I AM THERE IN THEIR MIDST. 

Oh, we must ground our differences IN God. This means we trust the Immanence of God’s Presence, close with and within us as we settle differences. Yes, it is about forgiveness. It is also about deep emotional honesty— telling the truth to ourselves, God, and our neighbors. 

*  *  *  * 

But all this is ancient. It’s in the Bible. Not relevant now. Really? Consider the amazing process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired in 1996 by South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  

Can a country that has long lived under the tyranny of apartheid—systemic racial discrimination at all levels— reconcile itself to itself once the warring is over? Tutu used the biblical recipe above as the model for the commission’s process, called restorative justice. They pursued forgiveness over retribution. 

Was it forgiving enough? YES. Was it free of error and resentment? NO. Did it work perfectly? NO. Did they pray enough?  YES. Was God present? YES.

The recipe works and worked—and never stops working. That’s called HOPE, not perfection. 

2023.04.09 What's New? Old? Here? Gone? Near? Far? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Today is Easter Sunday. Everything’s new!  Last evening we celebrated the Holy Eucharist around the dining table with two lovely friends. We had no organ, only our reedy aging voices. Is this a newly minted “church” perhaps?  A sacrament without a proper sanctuary? 

Easter felt intimate. God’s presence felt near, in our words, smiles, shared prayers, the flesh of our hands held. And yet, we worshiped a risen God. Far? Close? Near? Far?

I needed a new word for my two-faced spiritual experience. A new word popped into my head as I wondered. Did we experience divine transcendence immanently—or maybe divine immanence transcendently? Or both? 

TransImmanent. 

TRANS? In contemporary lingo, “trans” is short for transexual or transgender, someone whose sexual identity does not correspond with their birth sex. Deep inner truth prevailed. Is that just for individual human beings?  Trans is from a Latin root, meaning across. I envision God crossing, even dancing, back and forth, over and around two traditional theological definitions for the image of God: Divinity is transcendent—above and beyond physical human experience. Divinity is Immanent—remaining within, inherent.  

TransImmanent? 

The God I first met under the large table when I was a toddler chatting away about whatever popped into my small inquisitive mind, was a loving/listening presence, yes, on a cloud with a long white beard. That cloudy image faded, but the experience of God being intimate never did. Over many years I’ve studied and prayed and done all sorts of academic, sacramental, and spiritual calisthenics, trying to contain, or explain, or even shake off this inner God, thinking it was my own illusion. 

I can hear the echo of my wonderful late Spiritual Director the Rev. Pierre Wolff’s voice   in my ear: Doucement cherie. Yes, but . . .

Through all my wordiness and wonderment over years, I’m struck with a sudden heart-thumping elation—a new idea I can’t suppress, a new emotion, even though it is attached to, yes, a word and my childhood experience! Without warning, a very old traditional childhood hymn popped into my mind:  

For the beauty of the earth, 

for the glory of the skies, 

for the love which from our birth, 

over and around us lies. 

Lord of all to Thee we raise 

This our hymn of grateful praise. 

TransImmanence.  Over and around us. . .  

HAPPY EASTER. 

  

2023.01.22 Transcendence? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

For a long time, I’ve wondered about divine transcendence, or at least its defining dominance over the image of God. 

My wondering started when, as a toddler, I sat cross-legged under a large dining room table and shared all my intimate chatter with a God who, according to my favorite book, listened to all “weeny” sounds, including mine. Thus I learned that I mattered. I followed my listening God looking in all the traditional places—Sunday School, church, seminary, retreats, Bible study, getting ordained priest to be closer to the Christ. Everywhere I looked God was always portrayed as transcendent, far off, high, almighty. There was the idea of divine immanence—the God who existed and operated from within, of whom I’d heard, and about whom I write. It gets published, yes, and I do not hear or see much about this close-up God for whose presence I’ve so longed. Was there something wrong with me? Or was there something wrong with traditional teachings, imagery and language?  I had swallowed transcendence, yet never really digested it.  

I’m old enough now to make up a new word: transimmanence.  God should be both transcendent and immanent in public prayer. Is it time to bring the God I met under the table out from under in transimmanent language and song?

*  *  *  *

We recently watched a Netflix documentary, “Pope Francis, a Man of His Word”.  It is a well done movie about, let’s say, the travels of Pope France around the world. Details of his travels are  interspersed with some of his own words of wisdom. He knows and speaks many languages, but he speaks mostly in his own first language, Spanish. Subtitle captions are provided. As I watched mesmerized, I chuckled thinking, “Is the Pope Catholic?”—a phrase that describes something we think to be unquestionably obvious. After I watched this magnificent film, I found myself in awe at the catholicity of this man’s actions and message, and at the same time I thought: “This isn’t even that Catholic!”  What I meant was that this amazing leader, by direct word and action, knocked the stuffy, stiff, preachy, rule-bound rigor right out of the tradition-bound institutional Church’s backbone—in an intimate, kind, and wise way. He simply did this with his own presence. He was never not the Pope, that is, not trying to pretend he was not who he is, holding the high office he does. He was authentic, that’s all. I remembered Vatican II and Pope John, 23rd in 1970, saying something like: ”I want to throw open the windows of the church so that we can see out and the people can see in.” 

Perhaps Pope Francis dares to embody this transimmanence? 

I recall the early Church “Fathers” struggled to define orthodox Christianity. They had similar ideas about the nature of Christ. 

Wanting more, however, I shall continue to beleaguer my listening God with my battering ram mind, the same at 84 as it was at 4. 

Some people call this nagging. I call it faith.  

2021.10.17 Divine Immanence

Leaves fall down and die, and so do souls. Not to be moribund about divinity here, but I am thinking about theology. How important it is to stay aware—and pray aware—like the biblical Job did, of life’s shadowy sides, and God's role in the life of a faithful servant. God didn’t attack Job. Job discovered, or uncovered, God in the hollows of his own pain— the context of near-death dying when he could see nothing but darkness. God offered no explanation but only the divine Presence—up close and personal. It was enough for Job.   

Bumper sticker wisdom informs us: “Shit happens”.  Another bumper sticker carries another wisdom: “Grace happens.” But you never see this latter one, do you? The point is that both of these are true, and God is in both the bright and the shady, both the gloomy and the happy—and everything in between, the liminal area where most of us live most of the time. 

I get seduced easily by the happy joy-bomb, the happily-ever-after parade. People want to follow such pied pipers out of town, taking the rats with them. That’s what they thought they were doing I suspect when the early Jews followed Jesus. He tried to warn them, saying wet blanket things, such as: I’ve come to serve not to be served. OR I’ve come to die, not to live happily ever after. Yet they keep on following and asking. So do I.

A rewrite of an old Methodist hymn text popped into my mind recently, in part because I have been praying with someone who is going blind and who thinks VERY little of God. “Why did He make all this great world and then let it be so ugly and full of bad people?” she asks. I make all the obvious arguments for freedom’ed love, but I too wonder. Then these words came:  

Lead me, Lord, lead me in thy righteousness

Make thy way plain, within my heart.

Love me, Lord, love me in my weariness.

Love all my fears. Take me within your heart. 

Tune, 1861:Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley.

Text: The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021

Within these words, I retrieved and, dare I say, resurrected, the early theological doctrine defining the divine nature as Immanent—oh so close. We, both church and culture, in America, are dancing and dashing after the Transcendent God who we assume makes everything better by a sleight of divine magic, simple as kissing a “boo boo” all better. We have betrayed the doctrine of Immanence. We have created God in our own image.

The father of poet E.E Cummings, Edward Cummings, a cleric of vigor and punch, preached from the pulpit of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. He scared his listeners half to death, saying: 

“The kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden, it’s inside you!” 

The poet and son, Edward Estlin, was devastated when his father died in a car accident in the 1930s. He paid homage to his father in the poem, entitled, “my father moved through dooms of love.” 

Dooms of love.

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2021  

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.

Religious Feminism

We just entered Advent, a new church year and “the year of the priest” according to hierarchical decree in the Roman Catholic Church.

I am a priest of the Anglo-Catholic variety, Episcopal, and a Christian feminist who suspects, with a dash of surety, that this year of the priest is a campaign slogan designed to recruit men, young ones, for the all-male priesthood, currently suffering from short supply. Women need not apply or consider themselves in any way included in this effort unless they want to be sideline cheerleaders.

However, it seems that the Spirit is calling women anyway. World-wide there are over 100 Roman Catholic (RC) women ordained under the auspices of RCWP (Roman Catholic Women Priests) and more in the process.

They are forming communities; they are ordained from both canonical and non-canonical communities; their bishops are pastoral not administrative; they utilize a consensus model of decision-making and democratic processes. "Our goal is a new model of ordained ministry in a renewing Roman Catholic Church," according to Bridget Mary Meehan, Bishop of Southern Region, RCWP, former Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister.

These women priest communities, yes, like parishes, rent space and the ordained women do what priests do. They’re growing. Adversity and opposition from on high gets press and helps them grow.

Who said feminism was dead? I am the cheerleader, sending prayers, money and all my heart their way.

Some women in American culture wonder about feminism and about young women feminists. They are out there. My daughter is one of them although she falls now into the mid-life category. These women are concerned with justice, with equality and equivalence for women in all our institutions. They have made changes in their homes and their workplaces. It’s still uphill.

Our government and international organizations have recognized the plight of women the world over. Awareness of oppression, torture, stonings, violence of the most horrific kind and unjust laws that sancitify violence against women has increased.

In this country domestic violence is rampant and increasing. Sexism may have an even stronger hold on American patriarchal culture and church than any other -ism.

I am a Christian feminist. That means that because of my religious faith..............
I serve on coalitions that work on prevention of violence against women and educate my parish on that and similar liberation issues.
I harass my congregation about inclusive language, especially for Godde who I believe has no gender. The congregation is loving and listening and some I imagine converted, including some men.
I spell the divine name Godde, softer and open-ended. I don't change it because I don't usually change names by which I am introduced to someone. A woman parishioner just asked me why we don't spell it that way in the church bulletin and prayers. I told her we haven't gone that far—yet.
I preach and teach and write books about Jesus’ feminist politics.
I understand the bible as sacred literature, more devoted to story than history, giving us universal stories and characters who continue to give meaning and shape to our own relations and self-understandings;
I direct a group of women who present a dramatic rendering of the biblical women who came to the burial tomb of Jesus on Easter morn. The women play themselves; they share their personal stories of new life and resurrection. People cry.
I understand Godde as a spirit of goodness embedded in all creation, all flesh—male, female and combinations thereof.
I celebrate the Holy Eucharist every Sunday. I am a woman’s body at the altar.

Roman Catholic women who feel called to serve Godde as priests think that their church’s stance goes beyond simple injustice. Jamie Manson writes in the National Catholic Reporter (www.ncronline.org) “But what is, for me, most exasperating about this searing opposition to women’s ordination, is that it is a rejection of faith in the power of God to work in our world. By banning women from serving as priests, the church is saying that God simply cannot work sacramentally in the body of a woman.” This is not only against traditional church teaching but places limits on divine activity. Many admire Rome for its consistency but isn’t that the “hobgoblin of little minds”? (Walt Whitman)

It’s always about sex. My goodness, Rome has invited Anglicans who are discontent about full sacramental inclusion of practicing homosexuals (male ones) to join them. They offer to ordain even Henry Eighth breakaways as long as they have male anatomy. Anyone but a woman with breasts.

For this feminist the soul of the Christian religion is body—embodiment.

Today I hear myself whisper thanks to Godde for mucous. Odd. But for someone like me with lung disease mucous excretion means an end to incessant, exhausting and futile coughing. Why thank Godde for a natural human bodily process? Because it’s a process in which the Godde who connects heaven and earth, human and divine is present—intimately so.

And if this my faith is not so? Then I will grieve deeply, for Godde will become distant, clothed in male anatomy only, and no longer a divine feminist.