2025.06.29 ALL Time Perspectives ALL At Once. Lyn Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.    

As a writer of memoir I remember time mostly from the point of view of the past into the present. I’ve paid too little attention to the future. Luke’s gospel tells/warns us never to look BACK but to go forward.

Today in my aging I think that if we do NOT look ahead and move ahead we all, the entire community of Life on Earth, will stagnate collectively. We will eliminate ourselves. No one is able to thrive on memory alone. 

The only biblical writing that suggests such a forward-looking vision is the book of Job. Job has been critiqued and analyzed and “scholarized” practically to death— and yet it remains alive and well! 

I live now in a community of retired whities. We don’t talk about religion, yet when I dare to wonder about it, some people tell me they do not even have a Bible. So get one and read Job, I suggest.  What’s Job?  One resident ordered a bible, found Job and read it. Within weeks she reported with a grin: “Job and I are okay.” 

My theory? The Book of Job contains and lauds ALL of Creation and includes ALL the time values. It carefully and fully articulates the past history of this character, including all the sins and bad stuff alongside every critical perspective possible within Job’s own life, his autobiography. AND it tells us the envisioned future. 

The best part is that scholars and casual readers alike all are fascinated. Job has more written about it—more plays, works of art, scholarly texts, and so on—than any other work of art, literature, music, on and on. It covers ALL the time values. 

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.   

2021.06.13 Time Passes—And Passes

The passage of time is neutral. How it may feel, what it can mean, and what one does with one’s time is what matters.

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love
by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn’t fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.

They’re not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.


Jennifer Michael Hecht, “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” from The Next Ancient World. Copyright © 2001 by Jennifer Michael. From The Writers’Almanac, 6/6/21.


The title of this poem alone is enough to make me reflect once more on the holiness of trying. Jesus of Nazareth was idealized at birth, then as he grew was accused of being possessed, crazy, heretical, criminal, and last but not least, suicidally critical of all religious and political authority of his times. For this he was worshiped and executed—all within a short 30 years. He made the most of his time.

In July,1998, I was driving too fast along the Massachusetts Turnpike, racing down to Connecticut, my eyes wet with tears as I munched on a hastily prepared, soggy tunafish sandwich. I’d received a call from the nursing home where my mom had lived for the last four years. The nurse apologized for the first call in which she had informed me that, although Mom was fading toward death, there was no rush. Now there was a rush. She was nearing death as I drove. Would I make it? Please God, let me make it?

My sister was on vacation and not coming home. I’d asked my oldest daughter who lived close by to go to her grandmother’s bedside. She told me later that Gahmy, as she called my mother, had ordered a peanut butter sandwich for her “last meal.” The nurse wondered if that was such a good idea, and Mom replied, “Can you think of a better one?” She then told my daughter that she saw an angel and said of her dying: “This won’t take long, darling.”

But I was speeding. Why? One more goodbye? To say what exactly? I wasn’t sure but, as I checked traffic in my rear-view mirror before I moved into the passing lane to increase my speed, I saw a clear lane. I also say my mother’s face. The image was clear, its message even clearer: “She tried.” I knew suddenly, after a lifetime of struggle with my mom’s zeal over me which I experienced as overbearing “sMOTHERation”, that she had tried. She tried to make everything nice and good for me and my family. Yes, it felt controlling to me, and yes it was her way of trying, the only way she knew. She had tried.

She was dead when I arrived at her bedside, but not by much. My daughter and a chaplain friend were there. What exactly does one do in such moments? You follow your own instincts—not Hollywood’s. I sat beside her and looked at her pale face. Her mouth was agape but not yet stiff, so I closed it, noting that on her lips there was a crooked line of fresh lipstick she’d painted on—by body memory. It was exactly how she would want to look to meet her “Maker”—possibly her own beloved father who had died and left her heartbroken at the tender age of twelve.  

Silently I prayed, Oh God, if you do this sort of thing somewhere in the universe of all our projected heavens, tell my mother our whole story and wipe away her tears—and mine. Oh, and tell her I’m trying, too.   
        
            *  *  *  *

Time passed, and in time, many who knew Jesus well recognized Divinity in his gospel and in his behavior. They wrote it all down, and now, centuries later, many still compete over the correct definitions for goodness/Godness in the world.  And just as many, and more, keep trying, for that is the way of it.

Simply so.

2011.08.17 Habit & HIgher Level Spirituality

Vacation time is so gloriously sluicy it skitters by almost unnoticed or marked, a bit like retreat time. (That’s why this post is longer than my usual posts.)

Vacation is un-timed time. I love it in limited hunks. At the end of two weeks of vacation I feel both sad to leave and also glad to be getting back home to my routines.

I find comfort in my habits and quickly wonder if I’m therefore deficient spiritually. It’s like judging rosaries as rote and therefore spiritually immature. Still, I’m routinized more than I like to admit, and I need it.

In a wonderful book I’m reading by Judith Shulevitz called Sabbath World she researched human habits and discovered that we humans are wired for habits. Habituated behavior can change the shape of the brain enabling automatic responses to stimuli. That sound like instinct, like animals not of the human kind. Shouldn’t the human brain be beyond that?

The power of habit according to William James is the “flywheel of society, a conservative agent.” Oh yuk. Now I feel defensive and repelled. Conservative?

Shulevitz writes about the value of keeping the Sabbath. A a Christian priest I ascribe the same value to participating in the Eucharist. You gotta do something holy with your body, not just talk about it. And you gotta do it over and over again.

Shulevitz points out that we would rather be masters of our fate than creatures of habit but that, according to James, habit is necessary and efficient because it “reduces unnecessary expenditures of physical and intellectual energy AND FACILITATES HIGHER LEVEL THINKING.”

Imagine!

Thinking leads to doing and back to more thinking. So I see what it is that habits conserves, more energy to stretch yourself, and life itself. One value in keeping “sabbath” is that it becomes a habituated sanctuary of time and place to cultivate leisure, silence, love found in relationships with loved ones. Such habits are not dependent on the force of will but create AUTOMATIC core values on which to build a civil society—PEACE.

Once a toddler grandchild had mastered walking to proficiency, made it a habit ie. few falls and faster paces, he then developed higher level thinking which consisted in his case of a new activity: piling up a box, a hassock and a couple of blocks to get up to the counter to reach his heart’s desire: the missing box car to the train he was assembling.

I remember hearing a nine year old concert pianist execute prodigious musical wonders. The conductor asked him how he got his small hands to extend over the octaves required for the compositions he so skillfully played. The child thought for a minute and said simply, “Practice.”

I’ve practiced prayer, just talking to Godde and sometimes shutting up to listen in the silence, since I was a small child. Originally I did it to assuage loneliness and exercise my curiously religious imagination. Now it’s a habit. I just do it, like walking.

Prayer as habituated spiritual practice gave me the context in which self, Godde, church, Jesus, eucharist, priesthood, soul, and the occasional mystical experience thrive.

Ritual/habitual prayer and sacrament facilitate HIGHER LEVEL SPIRITUALITY—closer to Godde or the missing toy box car.

On vacation I take time off from good habits even organized prayer. Wherever I am is sabbath, is church, is prayer. I let myself float about in un-timed time, maybe eating lunch at five and dinner at 9, taking 3-4 walks a day, gazing at the sea or kids in the sand, indulging in random reading and writing like this. I pray with no pattern and make gratuitous assumptions about Godde’s presence.

But after a couple of weeks I need my habits back, those practices that make me both pharisee and monastic—until the next spate of un-timed time.

* * *
It just occurred to me that memoir and its current popularity may relate to the human need for habituated spirituality because it provides, for reader and writer alike, an anchor in time and space, some stability amidst time that is more fluid than fixed. Zazen, eucharist, sabbath serve similar purposes.