2024.11.24 CONFINING DIVINITY? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Most spiritual/religious groups have naming ceremonies for those newly born or for those later choosing to be a member of that group. Naming rituals are usually celebratory and happy. They vary according to the customs of each group. BUT ALL of them matter because we all need to know we belong and that we matter. 

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NOW comes trouble! How dare we presume to name, and worse, describe and define Divinity? 

In my younger growing years I assumed God was Catholic. Later, I assumed God was Father, then Son, then Holy Spirit, then Catholic!  Each tradition establishes its own vocabulary to define, describe, and yes, confine/ imprison Divinity.  

Even Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous concluded that everyone needs a Higher Power. Every evolving life-form on Earth, except the horseshoe crab which has never evolved. But I bet every beach-goer has praised that graceful glide.

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Consider this bison who, thought-to-be extinct, has, after 200 years, reappeared to roam the range in the European Carpathian mountains of Romania—to fertilize the habitat for other species. LIFE! 

In the 1980s I worked as a Chaplain in a treatment center for recovering addicts. I met a young man who puzzled over the concept of Higher Power. He had never heard of prayer either. I’d never met anyone who never even heard of God. We sat in silence. I debated various arguments, all dry and useless. I thought damn, then I silently swore, and then I thought help. Something came to me and I said to the young man: “Okay, have you ever sat alone in some open space like a field and loudly cried out HELP!”

“Oh yeah, lots of time,” he said.

“Well, who do you think you were calling out to?” I asked. 

The young man sat up straight. All he said was “Oh.”  And again, “Oh.” He grinned and then left my office.  He lives on in my heart-prayers.

 

2018.08.26 Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

You would be 107 today were you still alive. Happy Birthday wherever you are, Dad. I miss you. I’ve read that images of loved ones fade overtime, and that the face is the last to disappear from the mind's-eye memory. I still remember your face, Dad. I can see without a photo—lucky  because the scan of a very old photo didn't work. I also remember your personality and your influence on my life.

I wrote a lot about you in my memoir, especially the moments of spiritual understanding you gave me, times when you’d call me Lynda, the name you chose for me at birth. You chose the spelling, so you could call me Lyn, but then you and Mom called me Lynnie.

You called my Lynda when you were mad at me, like the night I tried, almost successfully, to sneak out to meet my teenage boyfriend, just to see if we could get away with it. We didn’t. You spotted my absence and hollered into the night from the front door of our suburban house: LYNDA!  It was louder than the blast of a train’s horn. I tore back home, feigning annoyance, but feeling secretly protected. Getting caught was less threatening than teenage sex in a car.

You called me Lynda when we had political fights, and then too when I told you I aspired to be ordained an Episcopal priest. I stammered to explain my sense of vocation. You stopped me and simply said: “I understand, Lynda.”  I was almost forty years old then, but I felt adult. I suppose a parent always feels like a parent even with a grown child and the reverse, but this time I felt truly dignified. Thanks, Dad.

Yes, I remember your  sarcasm. I’d been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. You said:  “There must be some mistake” then immediately said you were kidding, but it stung. I will say, however, that I didn’t give it much pain-time or credence, knowing that nasty humor was martini-generated. I also knew it was probably a critique you, the fifth child of a mother who abandoned her own aspirations to be an opera singer in order to have children, had heard about yourself. You and I, however were worthy of praise.

There was one time though when your silence, not your words, hurt me and shaped my self-image. I was five, a shy child, an introvert, like you. I wanted your praise and Mom was always in the way with excesses of adulation—compensatory for your silence, and mine I think. She complained to you about my refusal to greet the cheery doorman with cheer.“What’s wrong with that child?” she said.  You, Dad, said nothing.

You could be too quiet like me, but when you spoke you were honest. Do you remember the time you and Farmer Kurtie worked together with cattle prods to coax an angry bull onto a ramp and up into the truck that would take him home after the stud affair? You were a city guy. This was not your thing. I watched in horror, sure that ferocious bull would charge and kill you; instead he relented and ran onto the truck. I was so relieved and impressed. “Daddy,” I said, “”you were so brave! Were you scared?”  You said, “Scared as scared could be, Lynnie." I hugged you so hard, just for telling the truth.

So, Dad, on your natal anniversary, I will remember you in these ways:
    I will sit in your huge red leather chair and pound the arm with my fist, as you used to when you wanted to make some point. I love your chair, and I love that I have it.
    I will say your favorite phrase: “What’s the point?” during the day and in my prayers. It was the last thing you said to me when you were dying. I will resist trying to answer that question and assume you know the answer, and that you were wise to ask it over and over.
    I will re-read my memoir chapter:”The Old Sweater” about how I wore your old torn golf sweater around for a couple of years after you died. The sweater’s sleeves hung down to my thighs when I let them. You loved that old sweater, Dad, and I loved you.

Today I discovered the answer to “What’s the point?” Celebrating my 80th birthday with my four adult children with me in the middle (Robert William III, Jill Barlow, Beverley Ann, John Thomas) was a perfect day—good weather, good food, good conversation, good company, good laughter, good sharing, good love and Love. That’s the point, isn’t it, Dad?

Love,
Lynnie

2013.06.16 Stuck With God? OK, But Not Godde's Pronouns

We may have thrown the baby out with the bath water. In this case the “baby” is God. The bath water I suppose is all the dirty sins—against God and humanity— of the many patriarchal religions.

Out, out damn sins, but save the "baby."  I’m stuck with God. I just can’t find a way around God. I’ve tried to use other names and  alternative spelling like Godde. I’ve experimented with various alternatives like Upholder, Source of Life, Creator, Shepherd, Holy One, Light, even Love— but these are all descriptives, not names.

I need a name! God is a name, not a gender.

There is something unrelinquishable about a name!—if you’re going to be calling on someone or addressing them as if they count. And God knows we call on God enough!—just in case if nothing else. Naming is an important tradition in families, in the Bible, and in religions. G-d names people.

The other issue for me is plain courtesy.  I was first introduced to divinity as God. I wouldn’t normally change the name I first knew anyone by, would I? Not. 

My one time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested I find a name for God that was a term of endearment, something like I'd use with my spouse—when I found him endearing. But hon just didn’t do it. 

I am a woman who fought passionately to get ordained a priest. As a woman, feminist, and priest I lobby for my conviction: God is not a boy's name.

Lots of Latino boys are named Jesus, Jewish boys named Moses, Muslim boys, Mohammed, but really! . . . Do you know anyone named God?  Can you imagine it?  “Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet the man I love and plan to marry. His name is God.”  It’s more traumatic than, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?”

When I was a child I thought of God as an old bearded man in the sky full of winks and wonders. and love for every ounce of creation. Then I was violated by an old man with a long white beard like God’s and after that I was pretty sure God was no man, even though the Church, all the prayers, the Bible, and everyone I knew called God He, Him, His, Himself.

I notice that traditional gendered language about God traps God in manhood and holy manhood at that—patriarchal images and theologies of omnipotence.  Language that deifies transcendent manhood is a constant thorn in the side of the freedom of God to be God. It’s God-abuse! 

It's also not good for us humans. We waste time and energy on gender-bound argumentation, all the while knowing that Divinity is not tied to a gender. It’s exhausting and personally it makes me furious and want to gnash my teeth. I do not feel loved and included in God who is only He. I'm a She. Divinity consistently clothed in such garb is NOT good for women, period.

So can keep God's name and get rid of the darn pronouns? It's possible.

At a retreat homily for seminarians I thought would be, well, liberal,  I suggested that, although Jesus the earthly man of Nazareth, was a man, Christ taken up into the godhead was a messianic title that no longer required masculinization. And further, the Incarnation was not restricted to Jesus’ flesh but was for all flesh, over half of it female.  N.B. The male seminarians freaked out; the women seminarians were moved and excited—but secretly.  One calling me a "trailblazer."

Why couldn’t we say in our liturgy, “By Christ and with Christ and in Christ” instead of him when we elevate the elements?   We have easily changed “It is right to give him thanks and praise” to  “It is right to give God (or our) thanks and praise.”  It’s not hard and it’s about Love.

Christians say God is unconditional love. Then why do we set conditions on that love by giving it a gender?

For Godde’s sake, literally, and before we know it some boy will be named God.  Poor kid.