2023.02.12 YES? NO? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Let your YES be YES and your NO be NO. 

So it is written in the Bible, both Jewish and Christian testaments. Go look it up. We tend to think that the word of God is absolute and clear. Perhaps, in our limited moral capacity, it is that clear and easily obeyed.

Jesus and other sages all through time are consistent in saying something that is designed to set up a panic in any vulnerable heart, a heart that wants to get it right, that longs for justice, would die to please any and all authority figures, any and all loved ones, and avoid the delicate nature of choice, the impossible gift of freedom. 

Let your word be YES /YES or NO/ NO be the same; anything more than this comes from evil.  (Matthew 5:37). Say YES when you mean YES and NO when you mean NO.

*  *  *  *

Just after I received a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School in 1982, and imagined myself as pretty smart—maybe a know-it-all, I was invited by our Connecticut local high school to teach a class on religion. This class of course was not required, but offered nonetheless. I imagine the schools were pretty desperate, because suddenly the school board decided to be whatever “liberal” meant. They could offer an optional class or two on religion which was off limits, because, after all, we Americans were still pledging allegiance to our nation as if it were God or at least “under” God. 

There I stood, quavering before a junior high school group of students, inquisitive and potentially hostile. They weren’t hostile, but they definitely wanted clear and definitive answers to their questions about faith, religion, church, sin and more. In those moments I felt alone and absolutely devoid of any and all knowing. 

A young girl waved her hand in the air and asked: “How do you know when you sin?” The room fell silent. I did too. Out of my mouth came these words: “You feel it.” I’m sure I elaborated a bit, but all I can remember is that these young students were satisfied, and I was saved. 

*  *  * *

YES and NO and MAYBE are matters of heart. or emotional intelligence. If you feel something to be wrong or right, it probably is. You are free to choose over and over. Likewise, 

God is free to choose love— over and over no matter what. 

 

2021.08.22 Who Is My God?

The disciples of Jesus asked him more than once what to do, how to do it, whom to trust, and the like. Finally they cave and ask again: To whom should we go, you have the words of eternal truth? We’re still asking.

*  *  *  *  

Do you remember the delighting children’s book called Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman about a tiny hatchling bird who hops out of his nest while Mama is off looking for food? The baby can’t fly yet so he walks/hops all over in search of his mother, asking every imaginable critter and object he encounters, even an old car: Are you my mother?  The book of course has a happy (resolved) ending, because all good books do, but I will tell you that the little bird alters his question to resolve his quest.  

I bet lots of people search for God the way the tiny bird searches for his mother—endlessly inquiring in every direction: Are you my God? 

The Church says: No, but people have called me a mother.

The Bible says: Not me, I ask all the same questions

The priest says: Close but no dice, birdie. I’m a man!

The tree says: Not God but God made me, I think. Check my roots.

The Buddha says: Don’t bug me, bird, I’m Oming.

The river says: Not me. I drown people who ask silly things.

The seagull says: Are you kidding, midget? Fly off.

The mountain says: Climb every one of my kind, kid. 

The Christ says: Check with the Father. 

The teacher says: Read another book. 

The psychotherapist says: Think of a time when you felt completely loved as is.

The theologian says: God doesn’t leave you, birdie. Get another God, not Mama.

The agnostic says: I don’t know.

The atheist says: There is no God. Get a grip!

The Virgin Mary says: I’m a virgin, but some think I’m God—gender aside.  

St. Ignatius of Loyola:  Pray and Discern 

The little bird collapses into exhaustion, sobs, and falls into a heap—when suddenly he hears a quiet voice: Try your wings, kid.

  *  *  *  *  

There is much more to finding God than the search alone. After you seek, you ask more and more questions, you find many, many answers. Then you seek, ask, and find more and more answers until you are exhausted. Do all the good you can, go home, look in the mirror, grin—and trust. 

2020.07.26 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal HIstory, Part Seven, Rights, Duties, A Rite

Chapter XVIII. Social Disorganization. My Rights?

I signed up for a college course, Social Disorganization, because I loved the title of it. It promised stimulation—something different. The professor Mr. Neal DeNood didn’t stride in and slowly approach the podium with professorial dignity, but rather bounced in and hopped upon the dais. I liked him instantly. He had zip, was extraordinarily handsome, and sported a small upper-lip mustache. Most all the other male professors were clean shaven. I’d heard someone in the religion department use the word charisma—sparkling with charm, maybe from God. Mr. De Nood was that.

“There are no rights without duties,” DeNood began the first class, paused, then repeated his dictum. I wrote it down twice. De Nood elaborated on his premise until it was embarrassing—humiliating. I had never thought of this equation. I had assumed my rights were legal, eternally guaranteed, personal, and secured by our constitution. I never thought of them as dependent on someone else’s duty to honor them.

Social DISorganization happened as a result of too much unevenness. It meant revolution, sometimes war, sometimes riots and crimes, even assassinations. It happened when basic human rights to things like housing, education, healthcare, and economic security were not supported by appropriate legal, economic, medical, and economic structures and policies, accessible to all members of that society. In a democratic society the people have a say in such policies, and politicians work to assure them.

I pondered about private schools and public schools. I’d started in private and switched to public. I was glad, thinking it would be less snobby/preppy. Smith was private and costly. Students earned their place by academic merit—and money. Wealth or merit?  Which?

Was my privilege my right? my duty? both? neither?  How much did it depend on money? This might have been the first time my own color—white—dimly occurred to me as a factor.

Neal De Nood was a full professor in 1958. He’d started his teaching career at Smith in 1937-38, the year I was born. Safe to say he was too old for me, but you can see how handsome he was in this archival photo. He is in the right hand photo, second from left. Perky, huh? The archivist wrote: De Nood “startled his colleagues and undergraduates with his prowess as a lecturer, his unorthodox views, and his penchant for the sensational.”


I never forgot that no rights without duties wisdom. It was inspirational—meant to tantalize us smart young people to go out into the world and take up our duty: make sure that every American is able at least to exercise her or his right to a good education of their choice.

De Nood’s equation floundered in American society. The duty half of it too often crashed like a seesaw.

Chapter XIX.  The Chaplain

I gave a glancing thought to God, the one I’d met under a table as a young child, the one in my book, the one sitting in a garden listening and loving every sight and sound on earth, the one who listened to me when I chattered on and on about the injustice of my parent’s nasty cocktail hour, the God I’d lost track of. But I remembered the Bible and bits about Jesus—all into rights and duties and justice and peace, but they killed him.

The next best option was the college chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Richard Unsworth—another crushingly handsome object for my affection. Still, I thought he might have some ideas about my rights and duty questions. He agreed about Jesus. He also listened to my yearnings for religious ritual—sort of Catholic but not. Listening was God-like. He suggested I try the Episcopal church—the very last thing I thought would help.

I’d grown up in the Presbyterian Church which in the 1940’s and ’50’s was dry as parchment. I had tried those Catholics that Betty Singer sang about and discovered at Mass, a Mystery called Eucharist which held me in its grip, even in Latin. BUT, the Roman Catholic priest I talked to was a bust. He did okay about racism (not a godly thing) but he failed at sexism (women were ungodly, except Mary-in-concrete). So now I would try this Episcopal Church, thanks to this gorgeous chaplain who wasn’t even an Episcopalian.

While driving my mind nuts thinking about rights, I found a rite—a ritual, a sacramental meal that required no thinking at all and engaged my body—kneel, bow, cross my chest with Christ, eat, bend a knee but not in protest. What struck me about this holy meal was that everyone was welcome at the altar table. No one was turned away. Of course you had to be Christian, but I brushed that requirement aside, because it looked like everyone had a right to come and be fed. This church fulfilled its duty. This Eucharist was a meal my mind could not comprehend but could love. 

Intuitively, I realized that this meal could not be racist if it tried—unless of course the Church and its control issues mucked it up.

The Episcopal Church and I bonded. While still in college I was confirmed.


Chapter XX.  A Psych. Test

I thought to major in English, because I love literature. I thought to major in Religion, because I love God. I thought to major in Spanish, because I love languages, could roll my R’s, and my favorite Spanish professor, a poet from Spain, no less, was one of my crushees. I thought to major in Psychology, because I needed clues to the inner workings of, well, everyone. Spanish poetry won out, in large part because the department was small and I thought I could shine.

While I was cogitating all this I took several psychology courses. One of them included some kind of a personality test, not Myers Briggs or MMPI. It was designed to identify personality types. I answered everything, hid nothing. I had a lot to hide, but I didn’t know it yet. The test revealed my personality type: RELIGIOUS. I was astonished. I’d hoped for something like adored-by-all or destined for literary fame. But religious?

Curiously, what the religious personality type defined was someone who tended to see things in wholes, who looked for and saw the larger picture, valuing it, in spite of contradictory details. I already knew I wasn’t practical, and now I knew I’d always be doomed to seek balance, this equity that is impossibly possible, dependent as it is on rights and duties.  

2019.05.19 Invigoration

Last week I had two invigorating experiences—speaking experiences that sparked my soul and brought light to my eyes, and fire to my heart. I was tired when I went in all prepared and—my armor—but when I came out I was alive, awake, fired up not burned out. I was the principle speaker. But I was the speaker in words only.  My listeners supplied the heft, the spiritual energy, and the authentic Word. (I capitalize that to mean that I think God/Spirit was present in the connection—not the whole cause of it, but the true essence.)

Part I  The Young

On Tuesday I visited a college class,The Psychology of Spirituality, at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. My oldest Granddaughter, Gillian Colbath, a SCSU graduate, had loved this class. The professor, Dr. Jessica Suckle-Nelson, aka Dr. S., had told me the class loved my talk last year, so I invited myself back. The seventeen twenty-something students wandered and straddled and finally assembled. They all sat along the edges or in the back of the classroom at lab table desks. I began: “This looks like church. Everyone sits way in the back or lines up along the side—as if you couldn’t be seen.” Everyone laughed. At ease.

Introductions with name, place, and serial number are always dry and boringly necessary. I invited each one to say something interesting about him or herself and simultaneously guaranteed that I wouldn’t remember any of their names. We laughed. Interesting things included being born with no pinkie knuckles, living in Greece for a year, playing three musical instruments well, feeling lost from a connection with religion or God, being agnostic but curious, and more. My own thing was: I am a wannabe Catholic, one-time Presbyterian, turned Episcopal priest—happily ever after, so far. I watched each face light up as each shared a mere snippet of what made them—them. No one balked. Analogically, I felt as if we all were baptized together in the gentle waters of the divine womb—all born together not of years, but by Soul.

I then invited them to go deep with apologias, not as an apology or regret, but as a way to say more about what mattered to them. Blank faces looked as if I were crazy. I even told them I had read the famous tract Apologia Pro Vita Sua written in 1864 by John Henry Cardinal Newman who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Handsome sage, no?

Newman's work was like a spiritual memoir in defense of his controversial choice. His contemporaries freaked out, as people do when you push an already tight envelop wide enough to split its seams. I told the students I struggled through Newman’s famous work and didn’t understand a word. I did, however, get the idea that it was good to know what I was doing and why. And hey, Newman’s tract raised such a fuss it became a best-seller, is still in print, and  in time qualified him for sainthood. Don’t be afraid of yourself and the depth dimension of life, I suggested. There’s wisdom to be found. Newman's lasting goodies include:
    To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often
    Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a                 beginning.
    Growth is the only evidence of life.

I felt invigorated by the openness and curiosity of these young people, even though I did most of the talking and had to be reminded that I’d just gone over the magic hour of class dismissal. Graciously, they applauded and left. I hope the time was as nourishing for them as it was for me. Perhaps the greatest joy of the day was getting hugs and grins from Gillian, a beloved first granddaughter with the loveliest smile and personality I think I have ever seen.

Part II The Older

On Thursday I spoke to a group of about twenty older women on the topic: “Am I My Sister’s Keeper?". They are part of Women Explore, a group that has been meeting since 1953 to hear speakers and each other on the sacred dimensions of a woman’s life. Men were admitted so I brought my faithful beloved chauffeur/husband. He is my personal GPS without whom, well, I get lost.

With this group I had as much fun. They were all white proper Bostonians mostly from Cambridge, so I began with my own apologia: I am white, elite, went to elite schools, privileged, and cis-gendered. I’m also religious—not a very politically correct marker these days. I am also sick of being labeled and typed. I’m not consistently aware of my privileges, but I try, and trying is divine. I use my privileges for those closest to me in love, and I use them for larger causes like social justice. But I’m sick of being stereotyped for my labels. So add that I’m a woman impatiently aging and pissed. I swear this country would elect a newt or a dishrag before it would elect a woman as our president!  

Again, humor eased us all into a loaded topic. 

A focus speaker talked about her personal experience with the topic. She said she devoted herself to caring for others and posed questions about how much "is too much." She was trying to figure out the difficult answers on her own, a strategy that rarely works. She apparently had left herself off the list of those who also need her caring compassion.

I advocated for collective spiritual keepership and focused directly on the biblical story about two brothers, Cain and Abel, and the poignant extremes of sibling rivalry leading to the first murder + cover-up in the Bible. What we notice—when we wake up—is that God knows what Cain has done, is not pleased, exiles Cain, and then gives him a “mark” assuring him of God’s presence and his survival. Look always for the last word! Simply so.

The Bible remains, mysteriously, a best seller, because there is every human problem imaginable in it. Believe me: your own story is in there. The wonder of it is that there is a consistent relationship pattern of connection/disconnection/reconnection. Astonishingly, the people and God reconnect even after the worst possible messes. Often God initiates the reconnection, though sometimes we do in our prayers and with the graces of forgiveness, advocated by all spiritual gurus. 

Collective spiritual keepership means that we all are keepers of one another. Benefits include: non-partisan politics, fuel for our prayers, healing collective shame, efficient action, awareness enough to build mutual relationships, commitment to organizing for the common good, justice, equity, truth-telling, peace, energy enough to save our drowning planet, Mother Earth.

We live in a tragic time of renewed holocaust mentality: burnt offerings—guns burn, fires burn religious structures, kids in schools burn, tiny children burn with loss and terror. With the resurgence of white supremacy comes the supremacy of terrorism and holocaust as strategies of choice.

The women asked many questions. They burned with the fuel of longing for change, and for a new way of being people together. The young burned with the same energy. Such inner burning is not holocaustal. It is the fire of spirituality, burning within us. It is strong. It is alive. It is available. It is what connected the nuns and the “nones”, both fueled by the same activist energy, now working together for change. It is what fires up all religions. It’s what inspires Goodness, what Creator God started in the beginning. In today’s gospel Jesus re-reminds us to Love each other. Yes, and while you’re at it love yourself.

You may not believe in God, yet you can believe in the fire within you, and you can act with Love as its fuel. Love is the only fire vigorous and hot enough to burn out destruction by holocaust fires. Love will save us and our drowning planet. And, for Christians, it is the ONLY mission Jesus fired up.

And so may we try. 

2019.04.14 Three Cheers. Three Palms. Three Words of Wisdom.

Palm Sunday involves much hullabaloo in the Christian church. I’ve always wanted to downsize the hype, introvert that I am. Do we have to re-enact the triumphal entry story of Jesus on a donkey entering Jerusalem, raising a rumpus, bringing cheering jeering crowds, and raising the hackles of the reigning authorities charged with maintaining order? I feel sorry for them. Jesus was a trouble maker—for the sake of justice we argue.

And then—post-triumph—we re-enact the rest of the story with us all playing the hostile turncoat crowd, betrayers all, shouting: Crucify him. Crucify him. I want to shout STOP don’t crucify him. Don’t crucify anyone! Thank God there’s no sermon on Palm Sunday, save this morning’s brief fervorino, aka pep talk—in this case for Jesus. No need to say more than the complicated tragic story already says.

Sometimes these reenactments feel pale, with people lined up in front reading their parts from scripture. It’s pretty stiff theater, but it is better than to abandon the biblical story completely and write our own little play version—dumbed down as if we all were in kindergarten. So I’m stuck with the Palm Sunday hoopla.

We act all this out and pretend, or pray, we too are going to reform our systems for the sake of justice and love and peace. Does this ritual work? Does it inspire, set on fire?

Well, sometimes it is effective. It helps me return to the beginning and imagine the primordial chaos into which the Creator infused life and hope. This creationing process keeps on and never stops. It gives me hope.

I bring my palms home, drape them over beautiful pictures—icons, a landscape, a cross on the wall—where they will stay until next year’s hope-packed whoopee. Some may even make it to the burning pot where they will be turned into ashes—forehead reminders that we all are dust and to dust we all shall return—for Ash Wednesday. I am happy to have had their company for a year, and to have them renewed for another year.

Ancient repetitive rituals have inner value. Below are three quotes of my own. They were lifted from my blog posts by a spiritual director who used them for her facebook group ministry. She’d started the group to promote her own practice, but it morphed into an online ministry. It was fun for me to see my name and my words, on her site—framed and decorated in colorful ways.
  
Heed the intimate scriptures of your own heart and intuition.
    
Religion without spirituality is arid and spirituality without religion is lonely. 
    
Spirituality is a matter of training your heart and your eye to see beyond or inside a simple ordinary scenario and marvel at its sudden inexplicable grandeur. Do you ask: Is this God?
   
I'm humbled and honored in the best way—though not too humble to feel surprised at my own wisdom and wonder: Is this God AND me together co-creating?

2019.01.06 Oh, My God. Epiphany LIghts.

The church begins the season of Epiphany today. It’s the season of light, of manifestations of Christ in our lives, of new beginnings. Epiphany light makes what was hidden come to light, often startlingly. We ask: What is this? Is this God?  Our biblical ancestors asked this about Jesus: Is this God? It took them a long time to see, and longer to say: yes, we see God here. It took more time to realize that after Jesus died, they still saw and felt Jesus’s presence. They called this the Light of Christ, and said again: yes, this is God.

Epiphany invites us still to see that light, and still to say: yes, this is God. And yes, God in Christ illuminates, and yes,  it's not always easy and sweet.
                                         OH, MY GOD.

Seriously, I have a black tee-shirt from the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City with Oh, my God., in white calligraphy on it. Note the emphatic period not an overenthusiastic !.

Do you have epiphanies that feel spiritual? Spirituality is a matter of training your heart and your eye to see beyond or inside a simple ordinary scenario and marvel at its sudden inexplicable grandeur. Do you ask: Is this God? Listen to how often you, or people around you, say or text: OMG! OMG!
                                            *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Across the street from us there’s a creche—not unusual at Christmastide, but this one is a standout, not for its artistic beauty or creativity but for its inner glory. The creche scene is squeezed into the small fenced-in strip of concrete alongside the front of the house.The traditional manger figures are all present, including a camel tied to a fence post so it won’t blow away. The figures are life-sized, colored pink and blue and yellow, save for the camel and Joseph who get to be browny/goldish. Each figure is illumined. It is honestly a most gawdy scene, yet every year out it comes—set up faithfully, tenderly by its owners. This year all the lightbulbs, save for Joseph and an angel, were out. The creche stood darkened. I thought maybe the owners had lost their enthusiasm. But, Oh, my God!  on Christmas eve new lights bulbs suddenly flickered on for Mary, Jesus, Magi, shepherd, sheep, and the other darkened wise men. Some work went into that illumination, some money and effort, some God.
                                         OH, MY GOD.

A young man rode by on his bike with his small son in a seat on the back of the bike. He was going fast, possibly in a hurry to get home before pitch dark. I watched and saw the little boy gesticulate with his arms, and also no doubt shouting. The dad screeched the brakes on and executed a swift, not without risk, u-turn. Why? Oh yes, the siren call of the train whistle, the clang clang of the crossing gates coming down, and the train’s light approaching. The child simply had to see this, so dad whipped around so the child could wave vigorously to the train from his little seat.
                                         OH, MY GOD.

A very self-important man holding the highest office in our land had a conversation with a seven-year-old child. He asked the child whether he believed in Santa Claus. “Oh yes” said the boy. “Isn’t that a bit marginal for a seven year old?” said the man. Undaunted, the child nodded, saluted the man and stuck to his answer. One can only hope the child did not know the meaning of “marginal”—or better yet, rejected it.  

When I was seven, a friend in school told me in no uncertain terms that there was no Santa Claus. She had a very good reason for her surety: Santa certainly couldn't afford all those presents. I went home and told my parents: “You won’t believe the stupidest thing Nancy told me in school.” I scoffed. I continued to believe in Santa Claus. I still do, marginal that I am. This might explain the fact that no one has ever dissuaded me from my own devotion to God and all things religious.
                                        OH, MY GOD.

Daniel Jackson, author of "Portraits of Resilience", a book that brings light to people’s stories of depression in order to reduce the stigma of shame that surrounds mental illness, keeps a blog called “Resilience Postcard.”  Recently he posted this idea: Civility = Optimism

“You can’t solve a problem with the very means that created it in the first place. Radicalism and incivility got us where we are now; only thoughtful compromise and relentless civility will bring us back.  . . .  Civility is essential in our personal lives too. It’s not just that being civil to each other makes our interactions more pleasant. Or that behaving in a civil way, and restraining our anger, is curiously empowering.

"More than anything, I believe, it’s that civility is a form of optimism, because it draws us back from the precipice. Civility tells us that our society is not yet in such dire straits that we must take up arms against each other. That people are fundamentally good, and that rational and sympathetic discourse can change minds. That each human being deserves as much respect as any other; and that many small actions can bring about big changes.”
                                      OH, MY GOD.
                                          
Sometimes what is unspoken carries more power than what is spoken. Some inner explosions represent truth, even when civility keeps us from speaking them aloud. Well-meaning religious idiots often say in the face of a sudden trauma of unimaginable death: “God never gives us more than we can handle.”  Here are Elaine Pagels’s inner reactions from her memoir, Why Religion?, after her young son and her husband died a year apart:“How dare you speak of this as a gift from God? What do you know of what I can—or cannot—handle?” Never stifle the soul-truth of a profound spiritual outcry with religious platitudes. Never, never do it. Never. If God is God, God cries out. Christians ought to know this. Let’s not give God a bad name or demolish divine Love.
                                   OH, MY GOD—NO.

On a sweet note, here is a photo of a tree ornament my son John created, with help I'm sure, when he was in nursery school in 1973. On the back are his initials and date:  JTB, 1973. His nursery school teacher saved some of these ornaments and hangs them on her Christmas tree. She is nearing ninety, and John is nearing fifty. Memories, like Love, never die.
                                   OH, MY GOD—YES. 

2018.03.18 Pay Attention!

On International Women’s Day this year the former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, delivered a keynote address, “Time Is Now for Change in the Catholic Church,” to a full house at the Jesuit Curia in Rome. The event, entitled “Why Women Matter” was sponsored by Voices of Faith, an international women’s organization. 

Now why would I, an Episcopal priest, care about the politics of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church?
    -Because Catholicism is the largest religious faith in the world and what happens there matters to us all. It’s naive to think otherwise.
    -Because Ireland’s former president is a brave woman whose blatantly honest words are still relevant and have even prompted a civil exchange between an Irish bishop and herself.
    -Because for years I’ve harbored a strong antipathy toward Ireland, or at least the Irish Catholic Church.

I write in part to heal my own irrational anti-Ireland hatred. I’ve felt this ever since I saw the movie, “The Magdalene Sisters” in 2003. Oh yes, I know how beautiful green Ireland is, and I know it has changed over the years, and I know this is about the Irish Catholic Church not about the whole country, but . . . 

“The Magdalene Sisters” is set in Ireland in 1964. It’s a true story of four teenage girls who were committed, by their own families no less, against their will, to Magdalene Asylums (also known as Magdalene Laundries) an institution run by Roman Catholic orders from the 18th to late 20th centuries. It was an institution of confinement for “fallen” women. After a mass grave was discovered and media investigations occurred, a formal state apology was issued in 2013 and a compensation package was set up for survivors.

The Roman Catholic Church has to date refused to contribute to the fund. Some religious orders have contributed to a compensation fund, including the Religious Sisters of Mercy of which I am an Associate—and proud.

The film was made to publicize atrocities and to make money for compensatory practices. I tell you it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen that gave me nightmares— and still could if I allowed it. Maggie Smith played the sadistic Mother Superior who presided over this torture. I love Maggie Smith, but in this film I had a hard time remembering that she was an actor playing her role. Her embodiment of the Christian Gospel she vowed to serve was violently opposed to Christ’s kingdom of heaven on earth.

The “fallen” girls whose stories the movie focuses on were considered in need of redemption. One was raped; one was beautiful and normally flirtatious; one an unmarried mother; and one an intellectually disabled unmarried mother. These girls, innocent save for their gender and its natural expressions, endured unspeakable cruelty while imprisoned like slaves in forced labor camps. Some had spent their entire lives in this toxic squalor.

Humiliations, such as satisfying Father XXX’s need for penile stimulation, being paraded for regular breast-size contests, complete isolation from family, including their children and babies they were forced to give up, and the outside world, and harsh labor, not to mention constant verbal and physical abuse, were wrenching to watch. The girls coped by befriending each other and snatching late night times to engage in conversation, otherwise forbidden. Once they got even by placing poison ivy into the washer with Father’s linens, then watching him jump around frantic with itching.

The only way a girl could get out was if a relative of age, that is 21, came to get her and attest to her sanity. One girl of twelve had to wait until her little brother who had been seven when she was dragged off in the night by her father, got old enough (do the math) to come for her release. Release meant what was left of a lifetime suffering from torturous post-traumatic paranoid stress and terror of the Church, probably even of God.  “Redemption” for these Magdalenes consisted of hell on earth.

I was shocked by the institutionalized cruelty, horrified that no one had bothered to notice that history has redeemed Mary of Magdala who was falsely branded as a prostitute, and even more shocked when at the end of the film I learned that these laundries did not get disbanded until 1996. I’d fantasized that all this must have happened in a former century!

These women had been trapped in a culture whose dominant religion was so fouled by misogyny that in 2018 former Irish president McAleese would still call it “an empire of misogyny.”

McAleese met Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law in 1988. They had a verbal battle after he commented that he was “sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President.” 

McAleese was elected president in 1997 and served till 2011. She succeeded Ireland’s first woman president Mary Robinson and was the world’s first woman to succeed another as President.  She was also the first President from either Northern Ireland or Ulster. She worked as a barrister and a journalist and championed issues of justice and and social equality and inclusion. Imagine! As I read about McAleese my anti-Irish feelings softened. McAleese is also a practicing Roman Catholic who boldly and bravely critiques her religion. She has redeemed my hostility.

 McAleese’s words ring prophetic: “Back in this hall in 1995 the Jesuit Congregation asked God for the grace of conversion from a patriarchal Church to a Church of equals; a Church where women truly matter not on terms designed by men for a patriarchal Church but on terms which make Christ matter. Only such a Church of equals is worthy of Christ. Only such a Church can credibly make Christ matter. The time for that Church is now, Pope Francis. The time for change is now.” McAleese said in a BBC interview. “A Church that is homophobic and anti-abortion is not the Church of the future.”

It was time then, 22 years ago, and it is more urgently time now!  Do we have such credibility in any religion? 

Godde, help us credibly make Christ matter. Credibly!  Amen.

2017.12.31 Threats With Promises

Threats in world many. Each carries promise. Indulge year-end blogger rant in headlines. Bless you.

1. Drugs: far more abundant with cheap choices and more omnipresently aggressive in their demands for attention. It’s hard to say no.
     YET many do, and many heal from addictive disease through medication and therapy, and from love, faith and hope—three unconditional spiritual values. Yes, unconditional.

2. Venomous American political conversation: escalates to violence, government paralyzed, guns more available to more people than ever—and considered indispensable to some. To inject sanity and, godde forbid, love for all, into this environment risky as hell.
    YET good people, political and priestly, keep praying and working for good gun control legislation and an end to violence in speech and action. They are the blood donors, the organs our culture needs.

3. Sex, as in practice thereof and orientation therein: acceptance, no, expectation, that sexual behavior, yes, intercourse, is the normative even for teens, common—and competitive. When did you have your first lay—or get laid? When did you lose your virginity first? When did you have your first smoke, beer, snort—gun? Kiss feared old-fashioned. It may have lost its supremacy as a sign of young, tenderly-cautious, physical attraction-towards-love.
    YET older teens and twenties are engaging in less sex than past generations. No one knows why. Possibly choosing to explore getting-to-know-you love first? Psychological data: females depend on mutually supportive relationships for their well-being. So do men, GLBQIS. Dating around, sleeping around, hooking up, one-nighters can’t satisfy the deep longing for relationship; nor can erections and orgasms.

4. Marriage: uncertain and faraway goal for many. In olden days girls pushed and shoved into it by the fear, no terror, of getting pregnant. Currently, more choice. Birth control seen as  protective, except for STDs, but the safety it provides can hinder long-term relationship security aka marriage.
    YET emotional commitment, whatever one’s orientation, is, yes, still nourishes mind, heart, body, and soul—if nothing else to practice the sanctity of marriage should one choose it in the future.   

5. Technology: broad range of options, bordering on omniscience (Google) and omnipresence (i-phones actually text you to let you know your parents are tracking your whereabouts—true), and omnipotence (Amazon Prime.) These attributes used to belong to God (by whatever name) aka divine Mystery. They still do. Technology unable to provide flesh-and-blood love, unconditional beneficence, or shared audible visible embodied rich laughter. Easy to hide behind emojis.
    YET social media technology does give people a community of understanding, support, advice, accompaniment, and safety.

6. Religion: weak in the northeast; humanism, atheism, secularism viable options; religions fail at apologetics. What does this or that religion mean? Who or what really is God? Christ? Moses? Is there spirituality beyond morality and rules of conduct? Is it enough to be a good person?       
Researcher at Harvard Divinity School, Angie Thurston, calls millennial generation “religiously homeless” in opinion piece by Zachary Davis:“Has Secularism Gone Too Far?”  (Boston Globe, Ideas, 12/24/17) Response letters (12/31/17) unanimously—tellingly— defensive, angry.
    YET secularism thought too rational, pessimistic. Davis identified a mismatch between the job religion is supposed to do and society’s floundering search for that job to be done. The job? Not the preaching of morality, but the steady inspiration of hope, not just in afterlife but now: “. . . a hope that goes beyond reason—to give us the strength to pursue a world beyond reasonable expectations.”  Religion stretches the possible.  Granddaughter asks, with an edge: “Grammy, why do you pray?” “I pray because I love. And because my love is not enough.”

7. Public education: public schools forbidden to teach religion as a cultural phenomenon, as the spawn of great works of philosophy and literature, even some biblical literature and moral principles. Something missing. Separation of church and state necessary good. Still, young seekers in public settings unable to study every blooming thing they wonder about. “Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates.  But not in our public schools. Religion not even an elective. Religion condemned as proselytizing to fill its coffers. Good teaching never proselytizes.
    YET  . . . slowly religion and wonderments sneak in and silently infect and inform many curious hearts. The same granddaughter searches on line, not in school. Tries pantheism, atheism, agnostic theism, and many things. Trust God will find her and she will find the Love therein that she seeks.

8. Theology/God: how we think and speak about divinity, factor in sociological analysis. Religions consistently allow one image to dominate, a theological stereotype, a superpower deity who is almighty, transcendent, masculine, and interventionist. Image idolatrous. Limits divinity; limits human spirituality.
    YET traditional theology has always proclaimed God as equally immanent. God lives and moves deep within flesh, strengthening, encouraging and empowering love us to love—no matter what. In this God I trust. In this God possible to love, live, move and have being. For this Christians, this is God Jesus died for—to die and so to live.

8. Spirituality: name for what all humanity deeply craves and often does not find in society or church.
    YET Love discovered available in ditches and trenches, in pews and sewers, on streets and in mansions, in life and in death, and in one’s own lonely unlovely flesh. A woman, struggling for years to create/enhance her own self-esteem, suddenly hugs a friend and sobs:“I’ve just discovered that there is a little piece of God in all of us, and in me, too”
    YET God is Mystery—beyond our words—and small enough to adore them.

9. Personal: beloved husband and wife born on same day three years apart. Wife has seniority. Today both alive and well, bloated with gratitude—also fret, spat and grieve changes and terrors that seem to take away church and country. 
     YET  . . . they can still laugh and hug
    YET . . .  one day both will die and leave this beautiful place and all the people they love.
    YET . . .  there is something more Godde has in mind, they hope. Creation never stops.

2017.12.24 The Under-Genius of All Things—At Christmas

There is no joy that is not mixed with muck and muddle and cynical commentary and genuine pique, even if you hide it, eject it, silence it, blame it on the weather.  And  yet . . .

This morning we listened, my dear spouse and I, to the annual Kings College, Cambridge England, service of Nine Lessons and Carols. It is nothing if not utterly traditional. I admit to feeling tired, once again, of gendered language for the Holy. And yet  . . .

My emotions, my love of creativity, Creator God, and Beauty itself took over. Later I contented myself with a small addition to the wondrous words of the text of English poet Christina Rosetti (1830-1894) for the final stanza of the Christmas Carol: “In the bleak mid-winter.” 

What can I gave him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a wise man, I would do my part;
but since I am a woman, I would give my flesh;
yet what I can I give him:
     give my heart.

To abandon one’s very correct political correctness for the sake of God’s holiday—and ours—is what I think the late poet Brian Doyle means by having the courage to discern the “under-genius” of  it all at Christmas. 

Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas

Putting up ye old fir tree last night, and pondering why again we slay a perfectly healthy tree ten years of age, not even a teenager yet, and prop up the body, and drape it with frippery, and then finally feed the brittle former vibrancy into a chipper, paying a grim Boy Scout five bucks for the privilege; I watched mine bride and children quietly for a while, from behind the tree where I was struggling with that haunted cursed string of lights, and I saw the under-genius of it all: I saw beneath the tinsel and nog, the snarl of commerce and the ocean of misspent money; I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding, no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. And then I remembered too that the ostensible reason for it all was the Love being bold and brave enough to assume a form that would bleed and break and despair and die; and I was again moved, and abashed; and I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.
Do you risk having eyes and ears and nose for the under-genius of it all? 

As a child I was seized by my father’s absence from the tree project. Oh, he was present in body but he was preoccupied with his cocktail and didn’t join in. Perhaps he had suffered the epic tangle of lights. I don’t remember. I worried about him. I longed for him. I couldn’t understand why my mother and my sisters were jollily going along unheeding. There was something wrong with this picture, and I wept.

I could not yet see the under-genius of it all. If I had, I might have been able to join in and trim the tree without fear and inhibition. If I had, I might have called Daddy to come join us—just put one little bright ball on our tree. And he would have smiled, thanked me, and declined. If I had seen the under-genius of Christmas, I would have known that Daddy was there with us even if he couldn’t participate in the way I wanted. And that would’ve been enough. I also might have realized that my Daddy was not God— and maybe that there is a manger inside all of us. 

When I stop and notice the under-genius of Christmas I can see that joy is not happiness or maple syrup. It is an inner feeling of hope, hope so huge and defiant it counters all reason. It's the under-genius, the under-joy.  So I give my heart. 

Merry Christmas.

2017.09.10 On Change—A Wee Parable

In between aimless transportations of soul— letting myself get lost in the vast expanse of sea, sky, and white sparkling sand of summer— I ground myself in reading. I’ve been reading Richard Holloway’s A Little History of Religion. It is structured in short chapters organized to present, one by one, the story of all the world's religions in historical order. How little I knew. My favorite chapter is our Anglican one of course, “The Middle Way”—how England’s church reorganized itself after the Reformation.

Holloway, former primus of the Church of Scotland now retired and admittedly disillusioned with religion, offers some wisdom, gleaned as a young student from a church history lecturer who began his course with a parable. 

“You have a wee son and he’s been out playing with his pals. When he comes home at bedtime his face is filthy, covered in mud from the fields he’s seen playing in all day. When you see the state he’s in, what should you do? You have three options. You can send him to bed as he is and lay his dirty wee head down on your clean pillow case. You can chop off his head. This would get rid of the mud certainly, but you’d kill him in the process and no longer have a son. Or you could give him a bath and clean him up before tucking him in for the night.”

These three choices signal: continuity with no change; change with no continuity; or continuity with some change. The16th century English church chose option three— not to get rid of the established Church altogether, but simply to wash its face, clean up the grime, and go forward with a new Book of Common Prayer and a broader view of authority i.e. no Pope.

In the wake of a successful effort to raise capital in our local parish, there is money, and with money comes opportunity and many decisions—all meaning change. Change could mean change in attitude, change in priorities, change in traditional ways of making decisions, both personal and communal, change in personnel as needed, change of heart, and God forbid, a change in theology, the way we understand God, including words we use to speak about God.  Shivers!

No wonder most of us fear change. Today many of us fear continuity about as much as change.

I have chosen to be an Episcopalian, choosing the "middle way" as much as I can and embracing brave change with some continuity. It’s always messy and always a blessing at once. But this kind of change, ironically, grounds me more deeply in continuity.

Raimundo Panikar ( 1918-2010) Spanish Roman Catholic priest, scholar of comparative religion, and proponent of inter-religious dialogue, puts it the way:  “I left Europe for India as a Christian, and I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian.”

2016.07.03 All Things New

It seems fitting that on this weekend when we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of our nation, we should celebrate all things new–and the possibility thereof. Our country calls for e pluribus unum. We keep losing sight of either the unum or the pluribus. Does our religion?

In our present world we are challenged to integrate the pluribus as we adjust to pluralism, now the  norm of oneness—for both cultures and religions. How to keep the old and integrate the new to make a new whole? 

Change is upon us, nation and church. So is fear. Still, what sets us free will also make us whole—especially if it hurts everyone along the way.

There’s nothing wrong with Christianity’s essential vision of goodness in the whole. Do you need to go to church to live good and loving lives, to see divinity in everything? Do you need to believe in God to live these values? Apparently not. Apparently.
   
Some things I know from experience about change and making things new:
      It hurts. You can’t change without contention, conflict.
      You can’t change by staying within a rigid status, or by silent striving in prayer.
      Change doesn’t happen by staring at our own reflection, like Narcissus. Outside perspectives are necessary, even if it means  systemic stress.That’s how the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team found new energy to expose the deeply-rooted scandal of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. The team was embedded in that culture and couldn’t see far enough beyond it to question it enough. A new editor could see the whole. They followed his lead. Jesus wasn’t new to his culture and religion; nor were the prophets of Israel. They just sounded new because they issued a recall which led them back to the basics: what you hate do not do to your neighbor—any neighbor.    
      Change requires new thinking, deep reflection by a core group who work together to make plans, get honest, and listen to outside voices.
      Change requires patience, hope, humor, prayer, true grit, and the grace of God.
      Change requires recognition that what we believe reflects what we pray as much as what we pray reflects what we believe.
      Change awakens minds, hearts and actions. Why change? To live.
      Change requires a mantra of encouragement, such as that spoken about the biblical Esther by Massachusetts Bishop Barbara C. Harris:
                           She used what she had to do what she had to do.

I was recently inspired by an approach to change and making things new from the secular world. Matthew Teitelbaum, the new director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, offers a vision for the future and a practice of quiet innovation—gradual change without operatic drama. Teitelbaum is a Canadian art historian, born in 1956 in Toronto. His vision for the MFA is one of diversification in funding and audience. (See “The Art of Innovating Quietly” by Malcolm Gay, Boston Globe, June 26, 2016.)
Many Christian churches are facing change and innovation for the sake of a lively future. Survival is not enough. Here are a few things to consider from Teitelbaum’s approach.

    Experiment. Just try something new. For example Teitelbaum, instructed his curator to “Put the Monet here.” Usually the most famous of impressionist painters would get his own gallery, be showcased as the prize. The newly installed Monet gallery is a “preposterously gorgeous space that radiates with the collective glow of some 20 freshly hung works.” It covers the artist’s whole career in its historical context. Works are installed in a gallery with other artifacts of the era, furniture, other impressionist paintings and sculptures on pedestals that make them all at eye level. All of it together tells the story of one artist’s evolution and an era. We knew something was different; some things had been put together that would not traditionally be juxtaposed. The expansive effect was praiseworthy.
This is what diversity accomplishes. It’s also what divinity accomplishes as we evolve.
    Look, no, examine, everything the museum does: admissions, hours, café menu prices, food served, exhibits, permanent collection and passing exhibits and their interface.  EVERYTHING.  Why? To discern what makes all kinds of people feel welcome. The church must do the same. What can be done differently? What will we vary in our liturgy? Our theology? Do we tell the whole story? Jesus didn’t just die for us.There’s more to the story.
    Diversify.  The demographic of the MFA is diverse, but its audience is mostly educated white people. In our recent visit we observed this truth. But this is a museum for ALL Boston people and beyond. There is the art of the world here! Whom do we serve? It’s a crucial question. Can world and local demographic be served at once?        
   Afford.  “We have to diversify our revenue and our audience—the two are connected,” Teitelbaum said. Financial health and audience growth are primary.
    Ask. Do we retire debt quickly or fund it over a longer time? Debt must not be crippling or a balanced budget an idol.
    Risk. Discern what and why and how. The two most besetting problems for small churches now are stewardship and welcoming/attracting new people. Is a church too homogeneous? Who feels welcome here, as if they belong?—more than a smile and some food.  Is there something that speaks to the experience of diverse groups? Many churches are about as diverse as the museum, which is not diverse at all.
    Go beyond. Who lives beyond our doors? What do they value? What do they need? What do we have to give? In the church, deacons are ordained to help make these connections.
    Ask. Think. What MUST change? What must NOT change? And why?
    Refrain from rank-ordering gifts.  “  . . .the European work is not higher than the African work.”  Is that not a gospel value? Teitelbaum takes advantage of the museum’s whole collection, sparing none. His motto is: Bring it all on. Is it too much? Is it junky? Go see for yourself.
   
I return to the Monet collection. I love impressionist art, because the farther away you stand from the paintings the clearer the images become. It gives perspective. The same is true of an era, or a religion. Monet is the prize, showcasing depth in the midst of what is temporary. Is that not what we want to do with the unconditional grace Jesus embodied?—permanence, eternality in the midst of what is passing—and all of it lives together in the one gallery, just as all living things thrive in one cosmos. Is that not what makes scripture holy: that the divine Word is embedded in the many human words and voices, so the whole reflects the divine image? Does God not love it all deeply and equally? It’s humanity that labels things good and bad, of God and not of God.

Teitelbaum is helping the MFA create a brilliant and engaging mix. Can the church of Jesus Christ do the same? Put Christ here and here and here. How many stories are in Christ’s? Everywhere you turn there is the face of Christ when we make all things new within the old.

2016.03.06 A Woman Unseated But Undaunted

Renée Rabinowitz, a lawyer with a PhD in educational psychology, is the plaintiff in a discrimination suit against El Al Airlines. Her experience of discrimination provides a test case for liberal advocacy groups dealing with disputes about religion and gender in Israel’s public places—including the wild blue yonder. In December Dr. Rabinowitz suffered the unpleasant experience of being asked to move her seat on a plane because an ultra-Orthodox Jewish male passenger did not want to sit next to a woman—for religious reasons. (New York Times, “The Saturday Profile”by  Isabel Kershner, 2/27/2016)

“Despite all my accomplishments—and my age (81) is also an accomplishment—I felt minimized . . . For me this is not personal. It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am an older woman, educated. I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?” 

Is having escaped the Nazis in Europe  as a child not sufficient credential to entitle Dr. Rabinowitz to honor, divine and human, forevermore, gender or no gender? With feminists I believe that the personal is political.

When we were in Israel in 2012 we noticed the ultra-Orthodox Jews, also called Haredi or Hasidic. They lived in cloistered communities yet stood out, mostly because of their dress: black suits/coats/long skirts, head coverings for women, and black fedora hats and long dreadlocks for the men. Ultra-Orthodox men hung out in clusters in public places and walked hurriedly, scurried you might say. We were instructed not to bother them or make fun of them, a bad habit that helped to keep Jerusalem boiling. I was obedient, but did gawk a bit.

God, according to Isaiah 66:2, refers to the Haredi: “But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, the one who trembles at my word.” (Haredi in Hebrew.)

Now I would not mind being honored in such a way by my God. I would even tremble. These religious people are as sincere as I am in wishing to please God and live in reverent humility. However, their culture of separatism is easily confused with elitism and seems the very opposite of right-sized humility. I’d respect modest dress codes but wouldn’t expect to be invited by a flight attendant to change my seat because my female gender was offensive.  

Dr. Rabinowitz is not alone in questioning such exclusions. The advocacy group needed her case to show that El Al had internalized the commandment, ‘I cannot sit next to a woman’. When any biblical mandate is internalized it gets under your skin, becomes unconscious—toxic within and dangerous from without. I am quite sure that it is no sin to be born a woman, although I can find that in holy writ.

Reading about this case, I thought of Rosa Parks, another woman unseated but undaunted, arrested in 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. Parks spearheaded the civil rights movement in Montgomery Ala. against racism and segregation. Racism and sexism are closely linked and both are matters of public safety and health, not to mention religious spirituality.  When President Obama unveiled Parks’ statue to stand in the Capitol building, he said:  “In a single moment with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world.  . . . She takes her rightful place among those who shape the nations course.”

One day there may be a statue of Dr. Rabinowitz  in Jerusalem where she moved from the U.S. about ten years ago. She says she is not anti-Haredi and one of her grandchildren is of that persuasion. “The idea of having a Haredi population is wonderful, as long as they don’t tell me what to do.” There are prejudices she does not like in her beloved land. The El Al flight attendant engaged the Haredi man in a conversation about the seat/gender issue. “The flight attendant treated me as if I was stupid,” Dr. Rabinowitz said, “but that’s a common problem in Israel if you don’t speak Hebrew. They assume they can put one over on you.”

Under pressure from lawyers, the airline offered a $200 discount on Dr. Rabinowitz’s next El Al flight. They argued that the flight attendant had explained the whole thing and assigned the plaintiff a “better” seat. Oy!

With time to ponder these things in her heart, Dr. Rabinowitz agreed to litigation. “This whole idea that you cannot sit next to a woman is bogus.” She cited orthodox scholarship to support her point of view.  “When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman? Our heroes in history were not modest little women.” Dr. Rabinowitz cited the biblical warrior Deborah, the matriarch Sarah and Queen Esther to name a few. I would add the New Testament  Mary—faithful Jewish woman, mother of Jesus, mother of the Church, blessed and holy— to her list. She pondered Christ in her heart and questioned God—no modest little woman. 

Pondering things in one’s heart can be dangerous, liberating—or both. 

2015.12.13 Guns and Hope—Unlikely Peace Duo?

I had a stunning thought just two days ago: I wonder if we should get a gun? I scared myself. My very next thought was something like: But if someone armed and with intent to kill harm or terrorize into submission broke into my house, how likely would it be that I’d be sitting there with a handgun in my pocket, or next to me on my computer desk, or on my bedside table— ready and loaded? Really! Or maybe my husband should wear a holster like a cowboy? Okay, I was humoring my fear, but honestly being armed seemed a little silly. It was the very thought of it, however, that alarmed me to chills. No, I don’t want a gun in my house. EVER!

In the 1970s, my dad bought a gun. He’d never had one before. After the Truman Capote book, In Cold Blood, came out Dad immediately went out and bought a huge shotgun. The idea that strangers could break into one’s sacred home and brutally murder all its occupants was beyond my father’s capacity to imagine, even though he knew this story to be true. His fear got the better of him. He kept the gun under his bed, at the ready. But who knew if he took instructions to operate it?

  

Dad was a city-bred “Mad man” just retired. I suppose the move to a semi-rural country setting with lots of land and no urban or suburban surroundings, like people and buildings, made him feel naked. I was a young mother of four living close by. But my sister was living with my parents at the time, and she was afraid of the gun. One night she wanted to go into my parents’ bathroom to get a Tylenol, or some such, and was terrified to do so for fear of being shot. My dad’s gun made us more afraid of him than of any stray killers, the likes of Leopold and Loeb. That gun changed the tenor of the house just by its presence.

I nevertheless remember that, as a child and true girl, I had a brief pre-estrogen phase of fascination with guns. My favorite show (yes, on the radio!) was the Lone Ranger. I was in love with all the cowboy heroes, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. I wanted to be one of them, not one of their girlfriends.  I had a horse on a stick I used to mount and gallop around our NYC apartment with my cap gun, shouting Hi Ho Silver away!! I loved the loud bang of my weapon and the smoke and the smell that came from the fired pistol. Honestly, I felt very powerful and fierce.

But a gun? Now? Cowboys aside, and despite the current cultural idolatry of guns and the security they represent to so many people, having a gun would not make me feel safe. I do not believe that having a gun would protect me from anything or anyone; nor do I think it is my civil right to purchase a gun. Having a gun in my home would symbolize everything I despise—yes, even organized military or religious violence. It would signal an abandonment of my spirituality, my trust in Godde, whose divinity, I believe, is implanted within all human flesh as the healing and saving power of Compassion and Hope and Peace. These were Jesus’s “weapons" and they’re good enough for me.

I want our government, specifically our paralyzed Congress, to get its act together, cross the aisles, establish a bipartisan approach again, have clear-headed conversations, and draft some reasonable legislation to regulate guns and who gets to purchase them. I don’t care if the time-bound second amendment is either radically amended or eliminated. 

Sometimes when I hope and pray for peace, odd, ironic ideas slip into my mind—ideas that confuse me, amuse me—and help me practice what I preach.

Heck, I thought, Congress, and religions, have been “shooting” smoking cap guns across aisles for years. And now they argue over the control of real guns with real bullets? But what if guns can force the issues of peace onto the table, make us disarm, verbally and literally? God knows they're loud enough! 

Bang bang! You’re dead?
       OR
Bang, bang! Let’s go! 

2014.09.07 Who/What Is God/Godde or god?

A wondrous tweenager I'll call Tweenie  got in a ‘tween-fight with other girls at school. What in the world would girls fight about but boys, or maybe fashion?  These girls were fighting about religion. Excuse me?

One of their number was from an Assembly of God tradition and had very clear ideas about religion. To her, God was Jesus, and you had to be “saved” to get right with God, not to mention the community. My Tweenie, having been less “carefully taught” in the Episcopal tradition, thought that her friend's brand of religion was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. The girls got heated in their dispute about salvation and ended up in the Principal’s office. (I bet it was the first time this principal had to arbitrate this kind of an all-girl dispute. Rather refreshing, don’t you think?) 

The Principal managed to extract what had happened and to arbitrate some mild reconciliation—with a bonus. Tweenie had said some very nasty things to the “religious freak.” There were witnesses. She was seized with remorse, so much so that she agreed to go to church with her freaky religious friend, at which point her mother called me—worried that her daughter would become a Jesus freak, or some kind of a politically incorrect fundamentalist.

I told Mom not to worry. Worse things than Jesus can happen. She wanted me to talk to her daughter.  I told tweenheart just to go to church and observe. Be curious. I explained about altar calls and told her that God had given her a good mind and heart and trusted her to make her own decision in matters of faith—something like, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, though you might feel pressured. I may have said Jesus wasn’t all that bad, but I don’t remember.

 So Tweenie went to church, and of course she came home with an "annunciation": “I am saved!”  Turning to her older sister, she added: “You really should be saved. It would help you a lot.”

Out of the mouths of tweenagers.............   Mom was relieved and told Tweenie she'd go to church with her the next week—good Mom. By the time next week rolled around, "salvation" was out and the mall was in. Annunciation # 2 and #3, just as vociferous, followed: “I am an atheist. I'm thinking about majoring in religious symbolism."

It’s easy to laugh at such innocence. It is quirky and wonderful. But I never scorn sincere confusion about God. You don’t have to be a teen to get confused. Many days I wonder myself.  I just wrote to a friend whose dear friend, a young woman of 45, had finally wasted away and died from cancer and its treatments. I’d met this woman, whom I will call BFF-Beloved, and had been praying like mad for remission. My friend has as many queries about God as Tweenie.

I had no good words except those of my Christian faith in the God of Jesus Christ, by no means an easy-answer religion. And I had the memory of a primary experience of this God I’d met under a table as a very young child who listened to my every word, even the nasty ones, and let me know I mattered. On these two poles I balance, most days precariously, like the spinning plates of a juggler, all my faith and all my doubt.

So I wrote: “I want to hold in my mind my memory of your friend's former vibrant self, which, by my faith, is still there and will be resurrected in God. God, you know, is only a name, a vocabulary word really, for the unfathomable mystery of Love. Most of us know how inefficient love can be, yet it is always effective. And most people believe in the power of love, finite and infinite. You loved well. love, Me"

Tweenie has loved well, too. Now 15, she is about to be a godmother. A GODmother?  I wondered what she’d do about the God she didn’t believe in. Still, she is honored to be chosen and proud to take on this role. Annunciation #4:  "I am now an “agnostic theist.”

Could you do better than that?

2014.06.01 Words Matter, Spoken and Unspoken

Ludwig Wittgenstein (below) was born Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge, UK, in 1951. He was was a philosopher interested in language. He wrote: "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."  I wonder.

What if you have no words?

I’m no philosopher, though I think a lot—too darn much in fact. But I do love languages, even Latin. (I had a great Latin accent.)  Curiosity, wonder, and yearning make us humans reach for heaven—sometimes even touch, like Adam and Creator-God in Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. Both reach. Both touch. No words.

When I was a hospital chaplain at Hartford Hospital I worked on the spinal cord team. It was a terrifying ministry—quadriplegics and paraplegics all. I saw young teens who had dived off piers and cliffs and broken their necks; I saw young people who had flown through car windshields to land on open road; I saw middle-aged people who’d fallen off ladders. I saw everything—lives snapped off at the neck, literally. I cried myself to sleep often.

Some could still talk, but others were without speech, without words, although, cruelly it seemed, their minds could still function. Most could still hear. We invented ways to communicate, a bit.  What got me through was the poetry I read to people, smiles, prayer, and staying in the tension of my desire to know what it was like and my desire to flee.

Also nurses.

Nurses are the most bold and creative people I know. They are not afraid of bodies—sick, disabled, paralyzed bodies. They flip them and turn them and shove them around the bedclothes, and rarely speak down to them.

I visited a quadriplegic nurse in the hospital and in a rehab center. She finally made a decision to die—or not to live in a paralyzed body. She could talk very little and think, but not move. She set all her affairs in order, had her priest anoint her, and somehow willed herself to die. I prayed helplessly by and never tried to “talk” her out of it. I will never forget her courage and felt sure, for no reason, that Godde was present throughout. Suicide is not a sin!

What I learned in my time on the spinal cord team was that there was a language of the soul, a language without words. I wrote about it. I had no skill in this silent language, being such a cognitive wordy freak, but I could sometimes feel eyes speaking, read twitching mouths, and hear sound in the silence. And touch was visible even when it could not be felt. 

Wittgenstein, the word man, offers a metaphor that helps me define soul-speech: "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."

It’s possible that the imagination has a life that travels far beyond the body and the mind. And that it has its own keyboard and its own music. The Church calls this the Holy Spirit and uses the image of a dove flying about and landing inside human hearts with a wordless word.

Perhaps, all those years ago, the feeble words I uttered mattered anyway. Maybe they struck the imagination of some of my patients and we made a chord. I have no idea. I just made my rounds, used all kinds of words, was glad to be rotated off the spinal cord team.

Godde, you are sometimes imaged as the Word, a word of grace and wisdom. Be the Word in our words, and help us to be more conscious about how very much words matter, how very much they can enhance or impede the flow of your divine love.  Amen.

Amen, in soul-speak, is three blinks.