2024.02.11 Transfigured of Transfixed? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The very idea, or image, of myself permanently wheelchair-bound at first transfixed me. Stunned, I could not get the image out of my mind. This mental preoccupation drained me of energy, as any good anxious obsession would. Prayer became circular and boring until one day a story from Scripture popped into my mind. A very contrary story. Christians came to call this the Transfiguration. We celebrate it on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, as a preview of resurrection AND as its verification. 

Some days you feel upside-downed.

First of all, let me be clear, this story was witnessed by a few of Jesus’s closest disciples who saw it happen to Jesus, not me. What those disciples saw was a completely different Jesus, not the man with whom they traveled on the dusty roads. This Jesus was in prayer on the top of a high mountain—not an unusual practice, also one during which his three closest disciples would inevitably fall asleep. This time, however, they stayed awake long enough to see Jesus’s face and clothing suddenly shine with dazzling bright light. Then they saw Moses and Elijah, prophetic liberator and prophet of Israel. The blinding revelation did not last long before it was obscured by a cloud cover.  From the cloud they heard a voice saying, “This is my beloved. Listen to this One.”

Peter, utterly stunned as always, advised them to quickly build three booths, one for each faith hero, as if such brilliance could be confined or contained. The experience did not last long, and Peter was left unsure about what they were supposed to do with this revelatory vision.  The earthly Jesus rose from prayer and directed them back down the mountain to continue their mission of healing and preaching the gospel of Love. It was like a dream or a vision. It left them with more questions than ever. And it still does.

-We need more proof, clarification.

-Who is this Jesus?

-And which of the others mentioned should we listen to? 

-Was this a miracle or the beginning of a new religion? 

-And which of God’s apparent “beloveds” was THE chosen?

Unable to contain themselves, they asked Jesus as they stumbled after him down the mountain. Why Elijah? Because Elijah was here first. And Moses? Well, Moses restored the “Promised Land.”  

Today in Israel on the site identified as The Mount of Transfiguration there is a church called The Church of the Transfiguration. It is lovely to visit.

Well, well, well. There is more than one chosen.  

I saw no bright lights but I will tell you that I became— paradoxically— more motivated to strengthen my leg muscles for walking. 

You could say that my shift in perspective TRANSFIGURED my mood as my TRANSFIXED attachment to the wheelchair image vanished. 

Life In Death In Life—Stories, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 3/26/23

There’s a story in John’s gospel (8:3) about life-choices.The locals complained to Jesus about a woman who was caught in adultery. For this she should be condemned and stoned to death. [NOTE: The Inclusive Bible translation is: “A couple had been caught in the act of adultery, but the accusers only brought the woman.” This contemporary translation completely, and rightly, changes the slant of this story. ]  

Still, according to traditional translations used in most worship settings, we hear about the offender being female. Biblical stories are hefty, whether people take them literally or as symbolic stories. Think of favorite children’s story books. I bet they still tell you something about your personality, your soul, life’s big issues, about sins and graces. 

Sexuality is one such issue in the news daily, although sex is usually private. How did this adulterous woman get caught? You might think that the cunning politicians of Jesus’s day brought this case before him to trap him: Did he know the sin/sex-rules or not? Jesus, no fool, stooped to scribble something in the sand, such as “So where’s the guy?”  We don’t know so we wait. Jesus bought himself time to think before he offered the divine teaching/verdict, which is what these accusers wanted. He then stood to address the crowd: “Let the person among you who is without sin throw the first stone.”  Stoning, then and now in some places, was the prescribed punishment for such a sin.    

Silence fell. 

No stones were hurled.  

“Has no one condemned you?” Jesus asked the woman, who said, “No one, Teacher.” 

 “Neither do I condemn you,” Jesus said, sending her off with a warning not to sin further—not the couple, just the woman, mind you. 

This story speaks volumes about the breadth and depth of divine grace, no matter what our sins. It also speaks volumes about human vulnerability, spiritual naiveté, and ignorance about God’s love under all circumstances. 

Is it a Resurrection story?   

*  *  * *

Jesus went on his way to preach and to heal. Before long he encountered the sisters of his best friend, Lazarus. They were angry because Jesus wasn’t there when Lazarus fell ill and died. To them, Jesus could have prevented the death. A moving scene then played out in which Jesus openly wept over his friend’s death.  

Much has been made of this open expression of emotion. It tells me that we human beings have strong and, even holy, feelings, even when we simultaneously have faith that God’s grace is also always present. Jesus’ tears remind me that Jesus was fully human. Did he weep over Lazarus’s death or because he wasn’t there when the sisters needed him? I don’t know. The story tells us that Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus and called the dead Lazarus to come forth from the tomb. Lazarus is raised from the dead.

I am far less impressed by this miracle than I am by the tears of Jesus.  

The Lazarus story, however, is a crucial building block in the Christian story. It’s a springboard for theological statements about Resurrection—not as doctrine but as experience as viable as Jesus’ tears. Resurrection stories abound, and all of them create emotional intelligence that is missing in doctrinal interpretations. 

Today, I saw the first Robin redbreast strutting about on the dry un-flowered earth. Resurrection.

Today, I got a message that an old friend had suddenly died. I felt tears well up, then remembered this friend’s robust humor—her regaling clergy at a somber clergy conference with a joke about a poor guy with a highly communicable disease who had to be isolated/quarantined and fed a strict diet of flounder only. Q: Why flounder? A: It’s the only thing flat enough to fit under the door of your room. In itself, this  joke is only mildly worthy of a grin, but when this friend told it, her laughter was robust and contagious. It filled the air with sudden joy as we all fell into peels of laughter. Resurrection.  

Today, I heard from a friend in a nursing home who is a steadfast atheist. She called to tell me that she was no longer an atheist. “I’ve moved to agnostic!” We laughed together. Resurrection. 

If our Constitution were amended to include the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)?  Resurrection. 

So let’s get out there, each with our own abilities, gifts, and personalities, and let’s resurrect, revivify whoever, wherever, however. 

RESURRECTION IS  NOW. 

2021.04.11 Doubtless?

We are in Easter season, a time to rejoice over a Mystery most cannot comprehend, fully grasp and hold. Death, grief, murder, doubt, fear, and despair we get. We know these realities all too intimately—personally and globally. We expect them. But when confronted with no body, with Resurrection, well, it’s unexpected, not easy to believe at all, except to say that by faith we love, trust, and adore a God who brings life out of death, even ultimate biological death.

This poem is about an experience of abuse I had when I was eight years old at the hands of a stranger who happened to look just like the traditional bearded image of God. For a time this experience dimmed, but did not obliterate, the strong connection I’d experienced with God from early childhood. Writing puts it out onto the page where it has less power over me.

Missing the Rockettes

The theater darkened
    slowly.
Chatter and patter died
    down.
A thin line of light
    blinked
        winked
From beneath the thick maroon velvet curtain
    hidden wonders glowed.

A small girl edged forward
    eager
         ready, ready.

Now music from the orchestra pit
    arose.
Now the curtain lifted slowly
    slowly
    
Exposed two stories
    the one
        flashing, daring, dashing dance
    the other
        untold, unclean, unseen, unbidden

As the old man’s withered hand
    crept lightly up the child’s thigh
        it stole the show. 
 

Healing, for me, was a process of resurrection. Like Thomas, it took me a while before I could touch my wound or trust my God.  
 

2017.11.05 Paschal Symbol

What does this magnificent and majestic tall red sculpture look like to you?

It looks like a massive candle holder without a candle. It stands well over six feet tall and is rubber—not very romantic. [Colorful polymer cast rubber molded from stacked architectural elements, balusters, finials and monumental urns.] I was mesmerized.

The Boston-based sculptor Niho Kozuru, born in 1968 in Fukuoka, Japan, calls this piece Rising Column. I first saw it and photographed it at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusett
As I contemplated this vibrant work of art near a window I saw light shining through it. I thought it was reflecting the sunlight, but read that the rubber substance is, in fact, translucent, and was chosen by the artist for that quality.  

Of course I projected Resurrection onto the rising column—the simple yet mysterious idea that God is unconditional Love that lives forever. We see resurrection when it shines through us. I don’t believe this just because I was taught to, or because it makes sense, because it doesn’t make sense.

I see resurrection when it shines through something common—nature’s bloom, new ideas, extraneous acts of kindness, children at play, transcendent music, art, and words of poetry and prose. For something to signal resurrection to me it must lift my soul in surprise recognition of Life even where it might not belong—like in death, dying, sin, suffering or evil.

On All Saint’s Day (November 1) Christians let resurrection light shine through the dead we no longer see but sense and through the embodied living we do see, touch, hear and applaud, mostly through infants whom we baptize into the life and death of Christ. Nonsensically, we do this all in one breath. On this day, other feast days, and through the fifty days of Easter we light a paschal (Easter) candle—a resurrection light.

Most paschal candles would be dwarfed by Kozuru’s Rising Column. Wouldn’t it be splendid to have a huge symbol of resurrection in our midst all the time?  We’d never forget resurrection life. We can’t afford such grandeur, of course, but we can’t afford to forget resurrection either.

It is my intuition that the Christian church has devoted some fifty years of energy making sure the Eucharist returns to the center of our Sunday liturgy. The altar and the lectern are the upfront focuses, well dressed and lit. Everyone looks to these. Less so the font. I'd like to visually beef up baptism and the font? 

Eucharist and Baptism are the two sacraments Jesus ordained when he was alive, according to New Testament  recollections. Baptism ushers one into the faith of Christ, and Eucharist provides regular nourishment and strength for being a Christian: practicing the faith OF Jesus—not at all the same as belief IN Jesus. When you practice the faith OF Jesus, light shines through you.

Wouldn’t it be fine to have a paschal candle stand more prominent—one so big and central you couldn’t miss it, lit or unlit?  So big you can’t forget you are Christian—sealed with the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever— and what a huge gift that is.

I wish many things all the time, and pray for at least half of them half the time. Some come true. 

When I saw this enormous sculpture my heart leapt and said, YES. Its towering red magnificence announced to me the presence of God. Just the sight of it knocked my socks off, jarred me into remembering my baptismal promises and how I will keep them—every day as my baptismal day. 

I need jarring. Therefore, my humble photo will now live on my home altar. It gives me hope.

 

2017.01.22 Breakdown/Breakthrough?

Often a breakdown is a necessary precursor to a breakthrough.

We know this in personal experience, and we see it in the Biblical stories, in which there is a regular pattern of breakdown and breakthrough. Remember Peter, the putative “pope”?  He denied knowing Jesus, let alone following him. Jesus predicted this,  signaled by the old cock crow, cock-a-doodle-do times three. At the cock crowed Peter broke down. Peter was a disciple who thought he had solid faith and did not.

Judas Iscariot, on the other hand, thought he had no faith, abandoned the Jesus movement, and left.  After Jesus died and stories arose of his resurrection, Judas discovered faith. He was a disciple who thought he had no faith at all and did. In one account he took his own life in remorse. 

Both men had a breakdown to have a breakthrough. Both of their stories live on; both  characters live in each one of us; both are integral parts of a whole gospel proclamation of divine love ever-evolving toward cosmic wholeness. 

I am assured that the story of Jesus lives on, and that its message is still heard today by people who think they have faith and don’t AND by those who think they don’t have faith and do.

Peter’s breakthrough took time. He experienced visions, wept himself back to life, and joined with Paul to use his gifts to make sure that what Jesus had envisioned did not die. One could argue that the institutionalization of the gospel was not such a good thing. OR . . . one could grin and realize that that’s the way things are preserved—until the next breakdown and breakthrough.

Are we now living in breakdown/breakthrough times?  The irony is that what looks like breakdown to many feels to others like breakthrough into light.  In the time of discerning directions, I look to my Christian faith. I also look for small lights.  

Our new president in his inaugural address called America a wasteland of carnage —a harsh assessment. Is there anything good here? The speech was a set-up for Trump to step in and offer himself as the savior. What upset me the most however was that he guaranteed that God would protect America (that means North America, note…) ALWAYS—helped by the people and the military, just in case. America first and only as a sign of divine will is idolatrous, painfully exclusive, and a sign of patriotism run wild. Where is humility? Where is grace?

Still, this culture was on the way to such self-idolatry anyway with its consumerism and its win/win/me/win attitudes.

    I did see some bright spots in the inaugural events.
    -I noticed that Melania Trump quietly went over to Hillary Clinton and gave her a small box nicely gift wrapped. I could not help but see this as a woman-to-woman gesture.
    -And then good old W. Bush got Hillary laughing with a hug and a chuckle—a very compassionate in-house gesture.
    -At the luncheon Trump did invite the Clintons to stand, and they got a standing ovation. I just wished he could have said something in his campaign-ish speech.
    -The Rabbi who offered a closing benediction used a phrase that stood out: “Any nation is blessed by its values not its vaults.” Amen. I pray that our “vaults” of corporate wealth will be opened and shared.
    -The January 22 Women’s March was enacted all over the world in cities. It was a massive demonstration of solidarity in favor of equality for ALL. To me it felt like a return of second wave feminism —this time as a tidal wave with potential to sweep away patriarchal assumptions and rank-ordering systems of social organization that defy our constitutional principles. A breakthrough.
                     

Do you remember the movie Awakening?  It was based on a book by Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), a physician who had a deeply traumatic childhood, predictive of many painful physical and emotional effects. The miracle is that there are always sound medical and psychological predictions and some come true, but there are no prescriptions for what the human soul will do. None.

Sacks made schmutz of his medical career as a lab researcher. They told him to get out. “Go see patients. They matter less.”  A breakdown!  He also bumbled at his writing, until the poet W.H Auden suggested to him that he be “metaphorical, mythical, whatever you need.” ( Not such a bad approach to holy scriptures.) Sacks began to see illness as metaphor and myth. It lead to his taking risks with catatonia and a new medication for Parkinson’s disease. The medication gave some life to the all-but-dead. A breakthrough.

Watching the movie, I was entranced at what happened when these zombie-like people awoke. It was resurrection. One scene sticks in my memory. Sacks was tossing a ball to catatonic patients, hoping that someone would wake up to its movement, when suddenly a woman lifted her arm and caught the ball. Sacks tried it over and over and each time the woman caught the ball in her right hand. “Mrs. XX you caught the ball!” Sacks began to dance about with joy. Eventually, so did Mrs. XX.  An apparent near-complete breakdown became the breakthrough for at least partial return to health—new life. For Sacks as well. Resurrection.

What was required was close and careful observation, listening to all the patients first, the ones deemed by the research labs to “matter less.” It took intense empathy,  devotion and creative imagination. It took a passionate awareness of what it was like to feel destitute, terrorized, alone. It took enormous faith, hope and love. And then, as Sacks wrote in 1973: “To use a biblical term, I would ‘bear witness’ to their condition.” Is that not holy scripture? 

All it took was daring to follow a new idea.

What are your own new ideas? Do you voice them or keep silent? Do you deceive yourself about your own worth? About God’s love? Do you give up as Sacks might easily and expectedly have? 
In times of breakdown where are your breakthroughs?  How do you bear witness?
                                                          


I confess to a kind of catatonia in the face of the crisis of culture we are in and the denial about its depth. The death throes of patriarchy are painful and necessary. It hurts me to listen to a leader who styles himself as THE savior, the agent of breakthrough. Yet that too is necessary.

At a recent meeting of our deanery clergy I said something about needing a breakdown to breakthrough, and a colleague replied a bit cynically, “Yes, but sometimes there is a collapse.” Isn’t that what a true breakdown is?

Blaming and shaming keep me paralyzed and negative—catatonic. Holocaust memoirist Etty Hillesum wrote to God: “Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last.”   (Essential Writings Maryknoll: Orbis Books 2009 p. 59)

Theology calls this perspective, this practice, deep incarnation—deep reaching into the soul. 

The only way this works for me is to get brutally honest with myself and with God. Like Etty did about God’s nature and her own. Sacks, too, didn’t kid himself about the state of his patients. Abraham didn’t kid himself about his advanced age, his sexual impotence, and Sarah’s. He said:  Well, let’s get food for these angels and listen to what they have to say. Sarah, bless her, laughed at the idea of a pregnancy. And Jesus didn’t play games with the conditions of his time. He knew the risks of bearing witness to limitless love without condition versus limitless power without condition.

We may have to maladjust, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to Trump’s  ME # 1/AMERICA FIRST/GOD-BLESSED ALWAYS vision. Exceptional in some areas we may be. Superior in all areas we are not. This vision goes beyond jobs, education, healthcare immigration reform. It wraps our souls up in a hubris that is disastrous—a spiritual breakdown.

Our new president could be kidding himself, and us too, but he can’t kid God, whose Love within us breaks through—no matter what.

2016.01.31 Feminism, What Brand?

I am an unashamed feminist. In the same way I’m an Episcopalian, a Christian, and a woman. Feminism is a movement working on behalf of women to assure that they be accorded equal respect, status, and, yes, pay,  ($$$) all over the world and in the church.

I never burned a bra, just stopped wearing one—for the most part. I’m not militant, or a radical, and I don’t hate men. I just keep noticing and speaking and writing about women—what they do and say with courage, and what they suffer. I never stop wondering, questioning, observing, and working for gender equity. I'm a determined but not too noisy feminist—no warrior. 

 

My favorite definition of feminism comes from the writer Roxanne Gay, professor of English at Purdue University and author of an essay collection, “Bad Feminist.” Her definition of who feminists are: “Women who don’t want to be treated like [expletive] for being a woman.” 

  

Feminism is a movement, not an eccentricity.  Gay is a truth-telling feminist.

Gay expands on her pithy, expletive-reinforced definition to say that “women deserve to have full and satisfying lives in the same way that men do.” (NY Times Magazine, July 27, 2014) But I don’t mind the expletive. It gives clout to her commitment, and it’s not exactly violent speech.  We all know which four letters belong between those brackets. But isn’t it fun to pretend innocence with brackets?

Camille Paglia (b. 1947, Endicott, NY) writes essays on feminism, culture, art and politics for mainstream publications.

A self-described feminist, and a fierce one, Paglia is a critic of the movement. Paglia’s parents immigrated to New York from Italy. Her father, Pasquale, was a high school teacher and World War II veteran. Young Camille was argumentative in school; her former Latin teacher said of her in 1992, "She always has been controversial." Once, at camp, she poured too much lime into the latrine and it exploded. She told The New York Observer, "It symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness.”

This feminist is angry, and no narcissist. She observed that the increasing narcissism of feminist politics and spirituality has derailed the movement from its goal. She is a fighting feminist and a skilled writer, not afraid of her voice. 

Paglia wrote: "Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses." (A neurotic is one who takes too much responsibility for everything and loses her sense of herself. But, with focus, any good neurotic can also take some responsibility for change and making justice anew.

Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), historian and author of the pulitzer prize winning book, The Guns of August, said: "If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.’" She probed deeply the annals of history and found pieces that had not been accurately recorded about the Great War. She exposed lies, a scholarly feminist.

And what about our biblical sisters? In the gospel of Mark (14) there is a story of a woman who is bold and wise enough to enter a gathering of men, Jesus' followers, with a plan to anoint Jesus with the only gift available to her, some costly ointment of nard. She knew a woman would not be welcome at such an in-house political gathering, yet she discerned that Jesus himself might need some soothing, given that he seemed to know he would face violence and death in Jerusalem. This  unnamed woman approached Jesus and anointed him (not just his feet) beforehand for death. Jesus' disciples were enraged at this intrusion and offense, but Jesus scolded them. He said: "Leave her. She has done a beautiful thing for me." This anointing woman took great risk to offer a tender and compassionate, also realistic, touch. She was a quietly compassionate healing feminist.

Supposedly, we are now in a fourth wave of feminism, one that will include attention to spirituality as well as politics, one that will pay attention to what is happening to women and children the world over, one that concerns itself with the quality of women’s lives both in church and society, one that lobbies for women in leadership positions, one that rages in protest at the current rise in violence against women,

We live in a celebrity-driven culture and it’s going global. The latest celebrity seems to be violence itself. Violence is part of our daily diet of news. Words like trauma, torture, horror are almost glamorized or at least over-sensationalized.  I mean who really wants to read about Whitey Bulger or see a movie about him and organized violent criminality? We do! Why are we Americans not beyond the Billy the Kid/Bonny & Clyde/Mafia/Don Corleone/Tony Soprano era?  Our tastes are conditioned to a degree by media, but that’s facile. 

Sensationalizing of violence has two main effects: (1) It dulls our senses, inures us, so we hardly feel its impact or startle at the sound of guns and screams of victims. “Just Another Death In New York City,” a folk song by Australian singer Judy Small, says it all. Oh, someone jumped from a skyscraper window to crash on the pavement below—noticed and unmourned as quotidian.  (2) It attracts us to violence, so we think that large and small scale violence is actually a solution to any and all problems. It’s exciting and glamorous. We can be heroes, celebrities—dead or alive. It makes us violent! Have we made an idol of violence itself while preaching against it?

What to do? I don’t know. Just keep on singing, crying, howling, writing, praying, lamenting. Above all, use whatever gifts you have to make sure you don’t yawn at the next report of violence.

Be a Christian feminist. It only means that, as a Christian, you don’t want anyone to be treated like [expletive]. Jesus was treated very violently. He also advocated for women. Women first recognized the risen Christ and spread the word. No one believed them. They just wouldn't shut up. Women persuaded men to see this: resurrection is the divine last word.

God would be a great feminist if we’d let Him [sic] be free of any gender. 

2015.04.19 LOST. PLEASE HELP: A LOVE NOTE

There was a note in the bathroom of a local restaurant.The note was an e-mail copied and distributed about the neighborhood. It read something like: Lost, one quadroceptor. Please watch for it and please, please return it. E-mail us if you find it.

For some reason the note broke my heart. It was like one of those painful postings you see on phone poles or in restrooms, or anywhere where someone might notice it and come to the rescue. You know the kind: Lost: a black and white kitten named PussyPoo, or worse, a little boy who answers to the name of Timmy, has disappeared from the park. Last seen wearing a blue jacket—and you stop reading. 

But I’ve never seen a note about a thing, a toy I figured, obviously precious to its owner. Did a child write this e-mail?

I had no idea what a quadroceptor was but I knew this one was very important to someone who was very important to whoever posted the sign—a love note.

A quadroceptor is the classic toy reinvented. It's autonomous.  It flies like a  helicopter, zooming all over the house or outdoors. It even flies through windows. It's a drone!  And some small pilot mans the remote controls.

I imagined that the handwritten note was dictated by a child to a parent. I imagined that they went around together to post it. I thought that the parent couldn’t bear the broken heart of a child, and would do everything to try to fix it, and hopefully would not have launched into a little lecture about, “It’s only a toy!”  Or something more shaming. 

I still look for that quadroceptor—more than a toy. 

Children teach us about hearts and show us the lost art of grieving. Young children feel things deeply and do not easily discriminate about relative values until they mature. Death becomes an enemy only when children listen to adults talk about it. Often, then, death becomes an act of God, a God who “takes” someone away. Is this a body-snatcher God? Honestly I do not know how divine love survives with all the errant projections upon its graces. But children are naturally more given to profligate loving, grieving, saving, and finding than they are to destruction, a behavior they learn soon enough.

Once a cat we had in NYC flew out of a window and fell six stories down onto concrete. She used to race back and forth across the width of our apartment, jumping up onto the radiators at each end and pivoting to race back. One of the radiators was under a window. That day the window was open. I was about nine. My back was turned to the sight but I remember my mother’s face shattered into a thousand pieces. She had seen what happened. She cared little, not at all really, for the cat whose name was Lilliput. But it was my first pet. Sobbing and choking with terror and grief, I ran to the window, climbed up on the radiator sill and looked down. I saw, not a flattened, limp heap of mangled and bloody fur on the pavement, but a small cat slowly rising to its feet to look around and let out the loudest yowl imaginable. Then it walked around trying to figure out a way out of the back alley while my mother and I raced to the rescue as fast as we could. Lilliput was uninjured, though she yowled  inconsolably for hours, which was her right really. She rose up. She lived on for years.  

The note about the lost quadroceptor could have been written by God. And the amazing risen cat  seemed to me as a child like God’s doing. It still does. It’s a heart thing.   

2015.04.05 Resurrection is What Exactly?

Some Christians get hooked on both the literalness and the singularity of Resurrection. They call it THE Resurrection, as if it belonged to Jesus Christ alone, and as if it were a one-shot deal, taking place at one time and in one place. 

Resurrection is an absolutely terrific theological idea. It's a God thing, though not unique to Christianity, nor particularly historical at all. The meaning is simple: God brings life out of death of any kind. It’s a spiritual phenomenon, a mystery of course, but so what? You can choose to hope in resurrection, or not. You can choose to believe in God, or not. So far there ain’t no proof.

Although.......I will say that, from biblical times and all through history, there has been a ceaseless flow of witnesses to resurrection power. 

I choose to put faith in this mysterious energy I call God, and because I do, I tend to look for resurrective happenings everywhere at any time. I figure that’s my spiritual vocation.

Just today I got an Easter card on line. It featured a beautiful song, sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. The song lyrics come from an A.E. Hausman poem, “The Lent Lily.” Tradition has it that the daffodil’s yellow trumpet opens on Ash Wednesday and dies on Easter day.  The last stanzas of “The Lent Lily” go like this:
   
    And since till girls go maying
    you find the primrose still,
    And you find the windflower playing
    With every wind at will
    But not the daffodil.

    Bring baskets now, and sally
    Upon the spring’s array
    And bear from hill and valley
    The daffodil away
    That dies on Easter Day

 


I already knew daffodils did not last very long. A week ago my husband brought some home for our indoor easter garden. They sat bright and beautiful in a vase, trumpeting the good news of spring.  Slowly and surely, they wilted— much faster than the tulips. On Easter day they went to compost.

Resurrection is a daffodil, brief and fleeting and life-giving—like Easter. The only way to keep the brilliant hope of resurrection alive is to watch for it to come in small fragile doses and let it lodge in your heart as hope—springing eternal of course. 

I observed one such resurrective happening at our parish where adults and children were rehearsing for the Easter liturgies. Everyone was stressed, just trying to follow all the complicated instructions about who followed whom and what was read when.

It was time to practice the readings. A young boy, ten or so, was practicing his reading for the Easter Vigil liturgy. He is an earnest soul, smart and full of life, plus drop dead handsome. As he read from the Bible he stood on a pew kneeler in order to reach the high pulpit. He wanted to see and be seen.  He read perfectly, until he came to one place and stopped cold.

“There’s a mistake here,” he said, pointing to the text, which was a reading from the Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel, about God’s promise to give us all new hearts and new spirits and to enjoin us, once again, to follow God’s ordinances and statutes.

 “See here,” the boy pointed.  “There’s an extra T in this word. It’s supposed to be statue.”

No one laughed.  This day the boy learned a new word and those few of us present felt resurrected.


P.S.  People have sent me poems, YouTube renderings, and simple opinionations about resurrection. I conclude that resurrection is still a hot topic, one we care about enough to deny, affirm, or discern over and over. That is good. Theology evolves like history and here is what I, and I’m not alone in this thought, feel sure happened after Jesus died: his Jewish brothers and sisters, fans and followers were radically disillusioned by their own theology. It was insufficient. 

They could not let it rest given the teachings of Jesus about his idea of God as love and their own experience of this kind of love in their lives. They shared memories, stories and perceptions. Together they discerned a new theological direction, a new idea about their one God: that crucifixion and other violent acts are not divinely engineered or inspired as they had thought; and further, that divinely inspired acts are resurrective not destructive — always. 

Christians are not in agreement about this, but I suspect that a new theology is emerging, one that will allow God to be “love alone all loves excelling” as the hymn line says. And perhaps humanity will finally accept that we are beloved of God, and that we too will be resurrected, daily and after our biological death. In meantime, it is our calling to notice and create, where we can, resurrective acts, and to live embodied lives of compassion, peace and justice toward all living things. 

2014.10.05 Don't Suffer Fools Foolishly

While writing my memoir, I connected with my women lunch buddies at Yale Divinity School, my God-school. We were mostly commuters, somewhere in the middle of our lives, and of different denominations. We majored in lunch. It wasn’t for the food; it was for the spiritual food of this small company of women, sharing gallows humor about the church, and perfecting the fine spiritual art of the lament while honing our debating skills on arguments about each one’s favorite heresy.

Excited by all the new knowledge we were exposed too, and being fools about how much we really understood, we weren't foolish to celebrate it in this informal way—a holy communion that felt just as holy as the altar one.

Beneath our ignorance and hilarity lurked truth: the late 70s was a crucial time for women in the churches. Doors were opening wider than before to welcome female flesh as ordained presiders at the altar and preachers from pulpits. We weren’t sure who could fit through. 

Oh, it was so hard to leave the refectory and trudge back down halls, and more halls, to get to the next class, or to the library where we read, and read, and read—alone.

I loved these women as much as I loved God—more because they gave hugs. When I found them all years after we left our seminary, we swapped memories. I asked each one the same question: Which big Christian idea is the hardest for you to believe?  Incarnation won.  It’s crazy to think of God becoming human. Or was it that humanity, chiefly of the masculine sort, inflated to fill big shoes? 

Incarnation seemed too demeaning for a big God, and yet, too impossible grand for humanity, even those at the top of the food chain. Is there a narrowing, a claustrophobic squeeze into which divinity is willing, for the sake of love, to enter? Do we suppose that our humanity, chiefly of the masculine sort, inflates to become God?  Although Incarnation is more common in world religions, it’s easier for Christians to swallow resurrection, the idea for which we cheer mightily and sing plethoras of alleluias in or out of Easter season.

Ah, we had so much fun battling out all these puzzles, not solving a thing but loving each other in the suffering of it all. We all knew that suffering was the mark of a good Christian, after all, so why not suffer intentionally over theology too slippery for any of us individually, or all of us collectively, to hold onto. Perhaps the point:)

I find Incarnation easier to swallow than Resurrection, possibly because it feels more intimate, and possibly because I like to think that my own fleshly womb has participated in Creation’s unfolding, and contributed its share of labor and suffering. This could be a control issue of course, or it could be simply a wonderment. God knows, having children transformed my life and still does.

And if suffering means anything at all it’s transformative. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote in April of 2014 in a Meditation "Transforming Our Suffering": 


"All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. . . .  Unless we can find a meaning for human suffering, that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, humanity is in major trouble."

A God who comes into human flesh as in Jesus Christ, and me too, help me live through suffering—not without much kvetching and lament, but with some assurance that the God in my flesh suffers with me. Incarnational spirituality sacralizes my smallness and my wounds, and resurrection spirituality gives me an out with hope. 

Theology aside, I prefer the religion of Christmas (Incarnation) to Easter (Resurrection.) This may change as I get older—and older!  Yet even the secular images represented by infants in creches or fat old men in red suits with beards, or by bunnies, chickies and colored eggs, carry spiritual messages of divine generosity and humility (Incarnation) and generativity (Resurrection.)  

Whatever your preferences, we all must face the truth of our condition and its limitations, the sheer humility of the flesh with all its foolishness.

I must admit, however, that, foolishness and preferences aside, both the Christmas idea of Incarnation and the Easter idea of Resurrection  merge divinity with humanity in such inextricably lovely ways that either way we, what?, are not alone—ever.