2025.03.30 A Famous Story—Now and Forever. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Last night I dreamed about the parable called The Prodigal Son. When I woke up I had this sentence at the front of my mind:  Let go of your prideful ego and discover your famished soul. 

My first feeling was annoyance, and then I began to wonder if the sentence itself was prodigal, that is wasteful or extravagant especially with pride?  My mother was amazingly prodigal with my father’s hard-earned salary. Once I saw Dad cry about money, and once he cried prodigal tears over the dog he loved who obviously failed to look both ways before he raced across the road and was killed by a prodigal car that never even stopped! My little sister could easily have done the same thing, and it would have mysteriously been my fault for not watching her, because I was engrossed in my favorite book—prodigally!

You see what I mean about the many and varied complications this very prodigal parable invites. This is why so many preachers glibly blame Divinity itself, because of course Jesus had just told them about it all. Puffed up with pride, the disciples went forth, forgetting Jesus’s own favorite words: FEAR NOT.

*  *  *  * 

As I age I feel proud of myself even though I cannot mobilize like I once did. After all, I have survived. I remember my name. I still can lobby for all kinds of good things. My husband and I still love each other……. prodigally. I can laugh even at myself tottering along at 86. I pray that my adult children forgive me some of my own prodigality as they enjoy their own. 

*  *  *  * 

I’m not really starving, and yet when I die, God, please fill my famished soul. I suppose there’s one of those paradoxes often found in biblical story: the less you strive for pride the more you discover you have.  In fact I can read the entire Holy Communion/Eucharist as a paradox: we pray hard for the salvation we also acknowledge that we already have!   

I’m not really starving, yet when I die, God, please feed my famished soul anyway.  Thanks! 

2024.04.07 Wondering/Wandering/Weeping. The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

This compelling image by Italian freelance illustrator, Andrea Ucini, appeared back in July, 2023 in the New York Times Book Review. It was the illustration for a piece on global warming by Zoe Schlanger, novelist and staff reporter at The Atlantic.  

I cut it out and saved it. Why did it make me cry? Why right now?

Of course I’m concerned about the issue of global warming, labeled “an inconvenient truth.” by former President Bill Clinton’s, Vice President, Al Gore, Democratic Senator from Tennessee. Gore was a Rhodes scholar and a 1973 graduate of Yale Law School. He ran for President unsuccessfully in 1988 and 2000. In 2000, Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes, but lost to Republican George W. Bush, because the Supreme Court intervened in Florida. The result was Bush’s win via the Electoral College outcome rather than by the popular vote. I bet Gore cried, but he didn’t give up. 

Gore made his documentary, film “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, four years before I retired from active professional ministry myself, and just after I was diagnosed with emphysema. I had been tested by a Boston pulmonologist who glanced at my test results and said, “Well, I don’t see emphysema.” Feeling free and rejoicing, I went out to lunch with a good friend to celebrate. As we dined my phone rang with a call from the Boston doctor to tell me that I did, in fact, have emphysema. I heard nothing more than that. My tears flowed as I hung up, saying “thank you” of all things. 

When I saw Gore’s movie I cried. Suddenly, I saw that our Earth breathed —inhaling Oxygen and exhaling Carbon Dioxide. When the exhale of CO2 exceeds the inhale of O2, the planet has trouble breathing. It has emphysema. We earthly residents are only now beginning to understand and to weep, even as we rejoice at the Easter message. 

Below is the perfect icon—a crucifix without a body—to capture the Easter paradox. 

The more we Christians grieve the death of the earthly Jesus, the more we experience the Risen Christ alive in our midst, in our own fleshly hearts. It is surely an inconvenient truth. 

    

2013.03.29 Listening

It’s Good Friday, a paradoxical day when Christians remember Jesus’ hideous death on a cross and all the injustice and pain in the world, and at the same time see in it hope for transformation—brought forth by divine/human collaboration. Kinda crazy really, but hope against hope is like that.

One can only pray and write poetry. Here’s one that captures the whole hope-driven journey.

LISTENING
    by David Ignatow (American poet, born in Brooklyn, NY, 1914)

You wept in your mother’s arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
Listening to your sobs,

I was resolved against my will
to do well by us
and so I said, without thinking,
in great panic, To do wrong
in one’s own judgment,
though others thrive by it,
is the right road to blessedness.
Not to submit to error
is in itself wrong
and pride.

Standing beside you,
I took an oath
to make your life simpler
by complicating mine
and what I always thought
would happen did:
I was lifted up in joy.