2023.07.02 NO! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

A child, about six or seven, once asked me after church, after hearing the grim story in Genesis 22 of Abraham preparing to make a burnt offering of his only beloved son, Isaac.

“Did this really happen?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then why do we read it in church?”

“The biblical readings are meant to teach us something about God.”

“I learned that God was a really bad Dad.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t you listen? God told Abraham to burn up his own son.

“But Abraham didn’t do it, did he?”

“No, but it was close.”

“Why didn’t Abraham do it?” I asked this delightfully inquisitive child. 

I waited and wondered what the child would say next. There was a long, long pause. I stayed quiet. The child was waiting for me to solve this problem for him. I waited. Maybe five minutes passed before the child said anything. He looked up at me before he finally said.

“Because God finally said NO Way?

I nodded.

“Still it took God waaaay too long, right?”

“Yes,” I said.  

*  *  *  *

Back in the late 1980s, it took me a long time to say NO to significant pressure I thought was from God but which really was from the diocesan bishop’s expectation that, after ordination, I would go into full-time parish ministry to help with the shortage of parish clergy. I tried. The parishes I served were authentically appreciative of my ministry with them. I wasn’t bad at the task of managing a small business on volunteer giving the Church calls “stewardship.” I felt as if every sermon secretly functioned like a report card. Whether that was true or not, I knew parish ministry was not for me. I only wanted to be a priest of Word and Sacrament, not a rector. So I said NO. When I left that parish and parish ministry, they presented me with a white stole, hand sewn and delicately embroidered with dates and gratitude for my ministry with them and blessings for my future. 

*  *  *  *

When you go against traditional expectations as Charles Darwin did, you take huge risks. Darwin published his 1859 book On The Origin of Species, saying NO to scientific and religious declarations about his sanity, and NO to the theology of his day that insisted on the omnipotence of God, Creation being the evidence of the same. Darwin went as an unpaid companion on an expedition with Robert Fitzroy, Captain of the HMS Beagle. On the journey to South America, they landed in Rio and stayed till June, 1832. Darwin became ill in sweltering 103-degree temperatures in the tropics but was cured by “cinnamon and port wine.”  This remedy still works I’m told!

On the trip he sampled all kinds of animals, even iguanas, armadillos and agouti rodents, proving that his species could survive and evolve, alongside all kinds of others evolving by natural selection. Darwin’s theory has been misconstrued to mean the survival of the fittest, but he wrote about naturally evolved ingenuity, the development of new traits, and the willingness of the human species to ask questions, take chances, observe closely, and realize that the ONE God created and blessed ALL of it to co-exist. (I confess to swatting mosquitoes, trapping mice, and squishing some wee crawling bugs. I notice they all seem to increase and multiply anyway.)   

When Darwin came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar, to be eaten alive by the grubs after hatching, the event alone challenged his belief in God. He wrote:  “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” 

So Darwin said NO to this omnipotent Divinity and YES to the God who chooses Love over Control. Darwin risked prison time when his theory was published. Was it denying God as THE Creator? NO, it advocated the growth of ALL creation. I, centuries later as a 21st century woman, believe that the one God delights in the evolving of all Life including its risks and uncertainties.  

Apparently, so did the Buddha. Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877, took a trip in 1911 to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published. He wrote: "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.”  I said YES.

As a parent I learned this lesson early. If I prevented every fall a toddler took while she or he was learning to walk, he or she would never have learned to walk or how to fall and then get up. I also learned how hard it is to love and let go, hard to say NO. I made many mistakes trying to balance the two. I often erred on the side of permissiveness. In time, I said NO to over-mothering, did plenty of under-mothering and exercised my own God-given freedom to evolve.

*  *  *  *

P.S. No God in His Almighty right mind OR heart, would ever authorize the kind of stupid parenting Abraham tried to exercise by sacrificing Isaac. 

God said NO! 

 

2017.07.09 Can You Still Love? Two Healing Stories.

My seminary learning experience at Yale Divinity School took place in a religiously diverse environment—one reason the school continues to thrive and is economically viable. But it isn’t just the sensible economics, or even the obvious ecumenicity, that gives this school, or any school, a soul of its own. It takes real people and real stories.

Nellie was a student with multiple challenges. She’d been in a car accident on her way to begin her college education. Her mother was driving. It was an accident—an accident that left Nellie with severe brain damage, unable to walk or talk except in very halting and barely intelligible ways. I was scared of Nellie. I didn’t know what to do or how to be with her, or what to do with my shame. I admit I avoided Nellie and feared for myself as well—hardly exemplary of a woman who wanted to serve God in ministry or take a shot at christlikeness.

I wondered how Nellie had forgiven her mother. I wondered why Nellie wanted to go to seminary and get ordained in spite of her severe limitations. One professor, an Episcopal priest, worked with Nellie as a tutor. He typed out her words for papers, and made sure she was accompanied safely to and from her classes. It all felt like a full-blown miracle to me—too difficult to digest.

Yet Nellie was a vibrant presence among us stressed-out, worried bunch of first-year seminarians, most of us not knowing a damn thing about this God we were there to study, if not master. Nellie stood out for her smile. Some days I thought she herself was a prayer. How could she seek God after all that had happened to her?  Some students reported that when she had a beer or two her speech suddenly became intelligible. Nellie’s being there among us must have had something to do with the impossible love of God—the love that scared me and made me run the other way. 

Now I wonder if Nellie's passion for God was not for the God the church traditionally presents, the Omnipotent one with all the power, but rather for the God she found in her own broken heart—the same one I’d found in mine as a young child.

I’ve thought a lot about Nellie over the 35 years since I graduated. What ever happened to her?

Google-god!!—the great connective search engine—helped me out.

Nellie did graduate from Hampshire which took her seven years. In that time she felt called to serve God. “Serving God became her salvation,” wrote Michael Vitez, journalist and Director of Narrative Medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Vitez has written Nellie’s story for his book on the healing power of story. 

Nellie went on to graduate from seminary and was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1993. She served in Chestnut Hill United Church (formerly United Methodist) until 2014 when she retired. It would take Nellie as much as five weeks with blurry vision and one palsied finger to type out 2000 words for a sermon. She then selected different parishioners to read her words to the congregation. Oh Godde, what a privilege! Nellie attended the Episcopal General Convention in Denver in 2000, where a special ramp for the entire altar procession was constructed so Nellie could read the Gospel using her voice box. 

Here is a photo of Nellie on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You see she is still smiling that smile I remember so well, the soul-smile that made Nellie shine.

Nellie died in August, 2016, at age 64. 



Only recently have I fully understood and wept deeply for Nelly and for me. The painful beauty Nellie gave me, stirred up as I read about Ed Bennett (1959-2017) in my Yale Alumni Magazine. Ed became a quadriplegic after a diving accident just before he entered his sophomore year at Yale University.

Here is Ed at a wedding in 1990, surrounded by his Yalie friends who called him “Edder”.

“Can I piece a life together?” Ed had asked a rehab psychologist, Lester Butt, when he was facing life with minimal movement in one arm only.

“Can you still love?" Butt replied.

The rest of Ed’s wheelchair-bound life was spent living the answer to that awakening question in the affirmative. He was the first quadriplegic to graduate from Yale College and went on to attend Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School but did not complete those degrees. He didn’t think his temperament was suited to pastoral work, although friends remember Ed as one with an “uncanny ability to bring people together.” Note that smile! The church could have used him. I wish he and Nellie had met. Obviously, they both could still love.

Ed wrote this in an essay for YDS in 1995:

“I have thought a great deal over the past few years about what is important to me. Perhaps my paralysis, maybe my acute experience of mortality  . . .  something has forced into my intimate, quiet moments the sense that God matters. My friends matter. The suffering of other people matters. And when I look at my profoundest satisfactions—friends, ideas, helping others, family—I do not see political or intellectual connections among them. Instead, I see a world of subtlety and wonder that lives in the spiritual world.”

Can you still love? 

I’m trying, Ed and Nellie. Thanks to you, I’m trying. And thanks be to God whose Hope incarnate forgives me—over and over—in my own clumsy efforts to love. And thanks to the Spirit who gives me eye and heart to spot healing stories, call them gospel, write them down, and send them forth—seeds for healing.  

2013.02.16 Leaving God?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air."

Emerson was born in Boston (1803). His father, who died when he was eight, was a Unitarian minister, as were many of Emerson's family members before him. He was a quiet and well-behaved young man, not an exceptional student. He graduated in the middle of his class, studied at Harvard Divinity School, and got a job as a ministerial assistant at Boston's Second Church. Not long after his ordination, he was married. He was happy at home and in his work, and soon he was promoted to senior pastor.

All was well.

Two years after Emerson was married, his wife, Ellen, died of tuberculosis, at the age of 19. He was devastated. He began to have doubts about the Church. A year after Ellen's death, he wrote in his journal: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." He took a leave of absence and went on vacation in the mountains of New Hampshire. By the time he returned, he had decided to resign from his position as minister.

I don’t know whether Emerson left professional ministry, or whether he left some ideas that should be left.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

In this 21st century, there is much doubt and query about God, religion, ministry, church, et. al.  It’s not new. Myself, I have no plans to divorce God, if you mean the One whose love is immortal and available to everyone. Or the Church I love to hate—it still offers me Jesus, some grounding prayers, sacraments, and a community that will bring me casseroles—and pray. 

If you doubt and fear and are uncertain, so?  Speak your words honestly in prayer and in conversation. Many gods and god-ideas live and die, and pass us by. And ministries evolve.

A word from Goethe in a portion of his poem “Holy Longing.”
    “And as long as you have not experienced this,
     To die and so to grow,
     You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.”