2024.08.04 CORRUPTION? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I became so corrupted by constant discussions and varying definitions, not to mention accusations, of corruption charges tossed about, I had to look up the word in the most faithful source of accurate information I know: The New Oxford American Dictionary (laboriously edited and regularly updated by word freaks and accuracy demons like myself.)  

I don’t know if I’m right but it’s a good bet that this dictionary, over time, has as many revisions, additions, and updates as the Bible itself. Both of these resources most people trust and hold quite sacred. They evolve as we do. 

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It's worth considering the original roots of the verb CORRUPT (to break altogether altogether) It means to cause to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain, to cause to become depraved for money, that is, not simply to make unintentional errors by true and correctable mistake, but rather to  CAUSE ERROR/ERRORS TO APPEAR ON A BROAD DATABASE—WITH INTENTION.  

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Can the Arts save us from corruption?  During the Black Power movement in the 1960s, I wondered what made power, or music, or poetry black. Poet Robert Hayden wrote about the experience of black people, just as I wrote about the experience of myself as a white woman lobbying for the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church, and about the spiritual necessity of liberating Divinity from being corrupted by the exclusive use of masculine pronouns. 

Poet Robert Hayden, born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit (1913) wrote about the experience in such poems as "John Brown's Body" and "Middle Passage," about the slave trade. He said:  “There’s no such thing as black literature. There's good literature and there's bad. And that's all!”  

When Louis Armstrong, a trumpet player of jazz, was asked what black jazz was, he replied, “Good Lord, man, if you have to ask that you don’t even know what jazz is!”

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There’s no such thing as black or white, male or female preaching. There are just good, lively sermons and flat boring ones. Good Lord, people, Jesus wasn’t a Jew who converted, corrupted his own religion, or started a new religion. He was simply a wise itinerant Jew exposing an already present Loving Divinity. We are to act accordingly. 

 

2017.05.28 Goodbye and Thank You Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle, a writer who made music with his words, just died yesterday.

I don’t write obituaries as news. I write today because I feel deep sorrow at the loss of a writer so supremely deft with words that I am left wonderstruck. (The formal obituary is below.) I did not know Brian Doyle personally. I grieve his writing, much of which I’ve read.

I would call Brian Doyle a Master of Words. He would, in his prose, pile words up—verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—in heaps, and he never heeded the scorn of those who advise writers to use fewer adjectives and never an adverb. He wrote about everyday things and made them all shimmer with soul. He shunned no word that said what he meant and felt. Brian gave me courage to use as many words as I needed to match the energy of my emotional investment in whatever I was writing about. 

Here’s an example of my own attempt to describe the mysterious power of an experience which is not earthbound:  

There’s no telling exactly why such attractions take hold and cement themselves into the human mind and heart, yet most of us know the experience, and most of us admit it feels irresistible, indispensable, immeasurable, irreplicable, mysterious, and tidal, all at once. So we follow it.

If I hadn’t borrowed Doyle’s word-courage I would never have dared to use so many adjectives, one not even a legitimate word. But I felt each one. To pay proper tribute to Doyle’s faith along with his skill with apt words, here is a poem he wrote called God. 
    
GOD


By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m
Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.
Everyone babbles about God but I saw God this morning just as
The bus slowed down for the stop on Maple Street. God was six
Girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat.
Of course God would wear a brilliantly colored tall dinosaur hat!
If you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever
Was in this blistering perfect terrible world, wouldn’t you wear a
Hat celebrating some of the wildest most amazing developments?
                        by Brian Doyle

Doyle had a vibrant sense of humor and was obviously passionate about God, his Christian faith, Roman Catholic brand, and basketball—not necessarily in that order. He also adored little stories and noticed absolutely everything that crossed his path, things others would pass by without a shrug. Everything, everyone, and every story is sacred—maybe religious and always soul-shaking. To perceive in this way is a gift—let’s say it’s Holy. 

Here is a poem he wrote in A Shimmer of Something. Lean Stories Of Spiritual Substance about tiny unnoticeable events of eternal magnitude. Call these poems Incarnation, Resurrection, Creation—or just plain Life, true and on the bone. 

THE SPARROW

Or, hey, listen, here’s a story for you.
A friend of mine who is 96 years old
And blind but still living in her beach
Cabin hears her cat capture a sparrow
Which the cat then presents as a prize.
My friend cradles the bird in a sponge
And goes to the front door and throws
Out the sponge, and then goes to wash
The dishes, only to realize she’s using
The sparrow, who objects strenuously.
Now, this is terrific story from every
angle imaginable: deft murderous cat,
Sparrow who didn't die, lady giggling,
The grin that just opened on your face,
The child who will fall down laughing
Later when you say now here’s a story . . .

And a favorite of mine.

THE SQUIRREL

Here you go. Here’s a moment to ponder carefully.
We think that there are greater and lesser moments
But how immensely and ridiculously wrong this is.
For here is a boy riding along the street in summer.
He is perhaps six years old. His bike is wildly blue.
He sees a smear of squirrel in the street. He pauses,
Using the heels of his sneakers as brakes. He looks,
He dismounts, he sets his kickstand, he looks down.
He kneels and gathers up the shredded creature and
Walks to the shady ravine where we saw the coyote
That time and he gives the squirrel to the tiny creek.
He washes in a muddy puddle and then he rides off.
I am the man who saw and testifieth of these things,
And what I say is true. I saw a boy bow before holy
Things, for all things are holy, and he reminded me,
And so now I remind you. Go thou and do likewise.
            


Brian was born in New York, my own home city, in 1956. He has been the editor of  the University of Portland’s (that’s Oregon)  quarterly Portland magazine since 1991. Author Annie Dillard called this “the best spiritual magazine in the country.” Brian died on May 27th, 2017 at age 60 of complications related to a brain tumor. He leaves his wife and three children. Here's the obituary link.

https://www1.up.edu/news/2017/05/Brian-Doyle-passes-away.html

2017.04.16 Palms, a Kiss, Betrayal, Prayer and Hope

Palm Sunday is a chaotic Sunday in the Christian church. Most churches pile in all our praise and stack up all our hopes in order that we will have enough stamina to get through the week ahead. We need all this triumphal hype. It wasn't so fine for Jesus who prayed his agony out in Gethsemane—while his followers slept. They didn't get it. Do we?

It's Holy Week. We are to follow Jesus out of Gethsemane and on his death march, inevitably leading to crucifixion and a hideous death. Will we hear him scream? Will we watch, or will we run away? We don't know.

For today, we are left with silence and hope. We've waved our palms. We've wept our tears. We've read our parts in the passion gospel very well, even standing up for the moment when Jesus is taken up to Golgotha to be executed. It is drama and trauma. We have done our part well. Now what?  Wait.

HOPE
    by Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
     it shakes sleep from its eyes
     and drops from mushroom gills,
          it explodes in the starry heads
          of dandelions turned sages,
               it sticks to the wings of green angels
               that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
     it lives in each earthworm segment
     surviving cruelty,
          it is the motion that runs
          from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
               it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
               of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.


Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg in 1924. She is a poet and translator, daughter of teachers. With her family she fled to the U.S. from the Nazi regime when she was 15 and settled in a suburb of Chicago. Mueller is fond of language, imagery and memory, obviously a writer after my now heart. She is aware of her good fortune and the grace of God—“the miracle and the accident it is that any of us are who we are.”  (from her volume of poetry entitled Alive Together.) “We all live together in the world and in my poems.”

We too wait today, and each day, in hope. We wait together. We pray and sing together. We are doing our part in the best way we can.

And so our hearts are shaped today
by palms, a kiss, a friend’s denial,
to hold a very simple prayer—
God, save us from the time of trial. 
                   Michael Hudson

2017.03.26 Hail Mary/Ave María

Dios te salve María, llena tu eres entre todas las mujeres. El Señor es contigo. Bendita tu eres entre todas las mujeres y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre Jesus. Santa María madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora ye en la hora de nuestra muerte. AMEN  

(Hail May, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb: Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. AMEN.)

Congratulations on your big moment, Mary: March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation (Luke 1) when the angel told you you were to be pregnant—with God, no less—and you said OK, adding a few questions of your own.  Good woman!

And congratulations to me as I remember the 29th anniversary of my priestly ordination on March 25th, 1988. Mary’s day in ancient times—and mine in 1988. We share.

I first learned to say the "Hail Mary" in Spanish when I spent a summer with a very pious family in Santander, Spain. In 1960, Santander was a smallish fishing town in northern Spain. Now it is my bank. I love the connection, and, despite complaints about questionable banking practices, I will never change banks. Nor will I ever forget Spain, the cradle of my devotion to Mary. I lived with a family who said prayers every single night. The Señora would clap her hands loudly like two small shofars, and we would all come running—for our food, yes, but first for our prayers. 

Lucia Perillo, who wrote this poem to Mary, was known for her humor and being shaped by living with multiple sclerosis. She was born in New York City in 1958 and died in 2016. I find her humor most attractive, because it does not attempt to hide truth but rather expose it. Perillo was a Pulitzer finalist, a blythe spirit. May she rest in peace and make angels laugh with her as they pray.

HAIL MARY

The worst of it was the fruit of thy womb business,
through which the boys muddled in pig-latin sniggers
but being a girl you thought of plums, then grapefruit,
a catalog whose offerings led incrementally
to the one in school who’d gotten breasts,
her mother alky and her dad a pencil mark rubbed out.
After the bell rang she bundled her sadness
and walked it home in her serious coat,
the kind of girl who carried an umbrella, whose socks
defied the gravitational tug. And if other prayers
had someone offstage fumbling sheet metal, this one
made the woof of a broom swatting a rug,
a rhythmic thump below the scream
of the laundry tree she sent off on its wheel
around the backyard like a minor angel
flapping underpant-and-towel wings.
Someday she’d get pregnant by the shy and not-
unhandsome captain of the variety baseball team
without even getting a bad rep; everyone knew
they’d marry quick and he’d die slow
from all those years of Red Man packed behind his lip.
But she wouldn’t have loved him if there wasn’t something
about him to work on; you know the type:
you loved her, you hated her
for ruling your life as penmanship queen,
and you wanted to be her friend except you knew
beside her you’d be dirt. As far as Hailing Mary,
all you wanted to do was get through its last word,
though everyone knew this death was second-rate.
A man-god could get you bread or heaven, but pray
to a woman and all you got was prayed for in return.

    Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck. Poems. Random House, 2005


Red Man, in case you didn’t know, which I didn’t, is chewing tobacco. But if you don’t pick the poem apart too much, which is a great temptation because you want to understand it, you get the full picture of a Roman Catholic girl trying to make good as she tries to grow more than breasts and wombs in a patriarchal world and Church full of Mary-Hailing. 

I was a Protestant girl of twenty-one in Spain, also trying to grow more than breasts and wombs while ingesting Catholicism on steroids—too much and never enough. I found a woman who prayed for me.

Yes, Perillo is right: when you pray to a woman all you get is prayed for in return. I will take it with gratitude and affection. Gracias, María, and all women who pray with open heart and blessed intention. I will pray back.