Girls at eight are often at their most engaging, creative, uninhibited best. Eight is great!
One such girl, the niece of a good friend, regaled her family with her own personal theology. It went something like this: “God is Maud. Did you know that? Yes, God’s name is Maud.”
Curious adults wanted to hear more, so the child continued with her theology, quite obvious to her: “Well, when I take a bath or a shower, I wouldn’t want some man-God watching me, would I?”
Would you?
So much for the omni-present, omni-masculine deity. Bring me Maud. And seriously, as far as I’m concerned, most of our highfalutin ideas about Divinity could be eliminated in favor of Love.
Take omniscience, for example: would a loving Godde not respect everyone’s need for privacy, even secrecy at times, especially teen-agerish times? Some argue that God is all-knowing, but waits (cunningly?) for us to reveal, knowing we will. I doubt that very much.
As to omnipotence, it’s quite obviously errant, unless divine power is only that of Love with no conditions.
Omnipresence might work, but only if that means that Godde is available and accessible from within—something like, give us this day our daily strength.
How about All-Seeing? Perhaps Godde is a futurist, massaging souls gently, lovingly, and slowly forward into new and mysterious experiences that enlighten, and awaken, and refresh. Like the unexpected (and wise) resignation of the present Pope? Who knew? There may be pink smoke over the Vatican yet.
All kinds of holes can be punched in my ideas. They’re just offerings to query by. It’s really not about who God is, but how God is experienced. And there’s more commonality in such experiences than most would imagine.
Recently, a friend and sister Godde-buff and I had to agree, after batting around different images, needs, words, and concepts about God, that we both were talking about the same thing, basically a Mystery we knew nothing—and everything—about. A Mystery for whom we both long and linger over lunch about.
Meet Maud.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
2013.02.17 Why Heaven Now? A Modest Proposal
Reading Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven, and finding it
as engaging as his talk, but with much more detail, both personal and
scientific, including some fascinating backstory, I sort of wish I’d
nearly died and had such a glorious taste of the spiritual realm.
I wondered, why now? Why has this book come out just now? I predict it will be a bestseller, and Eben Alexander will promote it with all he’s got, because he is earnest about the message of ultimate eternal love he calls God.
When I was very young I had a similar experience, though not as grand. I called it God because I’d seen God in a book and figured God was the right name for feeling so utterly affirmed and accepted without question. I have spent most of my life trying to preserve, protect, even simply remember and retrieve, this experience of pure being-loved. I have wanted to shield it from my own doubts. I also it hasn't magically made me a perfect person!
My sister remembers me under the table a lot, but I have no proof of my own small but ultimate experience. All I can do is trust it, and write about it, and try not to get preachy-insistent about it.
To me, the most resonant thing Alexander wrote about God was: “One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine god as impersonal. Yes, God is behind numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But—again, paradoxically—Om (means One and is another name he uses for Divinity) is “human” as well—even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly than we can imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.”
That’s like what I felt as a child and I can’t go abstract with it, no matter how much I think I should, and no matter how much I know God remains Mystery to be grasped occasionally by sheer grace. Believe me, however, I’m in no hurry to die.
Alexander doesn’t refer to God as He. Okay with me. Might the Holy Eucharist be, for Christians, a ritual of anamnesis, a state of no amnesia about Divinity? Could the “human” God have many identities, like Jesus, Buddha, Moses, and how about Betty Friedan, or Anita Hill, or Gloria Steinem, Julian of Norwich, Pope John XXIII, or you, or me—and so many more.
So, why now? I think it is because most of the world has made science an idol. There is lots of evidence, biblical and beyond, that God finds a way to insert a “punctuation mark” into this universe to remind people that science, as necessary and wondrous as it is, is not God.
I wondered, why now? Why has this book come out just now? I predict it will be a bestseller, and Eben Alexander will promote it with all he’s got, because he is earnest about the message of ultimate eternal love he calls God.
When I was very young I had a similar experience, though not as grand. I called it God because I’d seen God in a book and figured God was the right name for feeling so utterly affirmed and accepted without question. I have spent most of my life trying to preserve, protect, even simply remember and retrieve, this experience of pure being-loved. I have wanted to shield it from my own doubts. I also it hasn't magically made me a perfect person!
My sister remembers me under the table a lot, but I have no proof of my own small but ultimate experience. All I can do is trust it, and write about it, and try not to get preachy-insistent about it.
To me, the most resonant thing Alexander wrote about God was: “One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine god as impersonal. Yes, God is behind numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But—again, paradoxically—Om (means One and is another name he uses for Divinity) is “human” as well—even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly than we can imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.”
That’s like what I felt as a child and I can’t go abstract with it, no matter how much I think I should, and no matter how much I know God remains Mystery to be grasped occasionally by sheer grace. Believe me, however, I’m in no hurry to die.
Alexander doesn’t refer to God as He. Okay with me. Might the Holy Eucharist be, for Christians, a ritual of anamnesis, a state of no amnesia about Divinity? Could the “human” God have many identities, like Jesus, Buddha, Moses, and how about Betty Friedan, or Anita Hill, or Gloria Steinem, Julian of Norwich, Pope John XXIII, or you, or me—and so many more.
So, why now? I think it is because most of the world has made science an idol. There is lots of evidence, biblical and beyond, that God finds a way to insert a “punctuation mark” into this universe to remind people that science, as necessary and wondrous as it is, is not God.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
2013.02.24 BIG FAT UNMANAGEABLE THEOLOGICAL WORDS
Most people today palaver on about our tendency to use too many words, especially in the Church. It’s true. We do.
Talk is cheap but words are precious—and remain our primary symbol system for communication and formation.
Words are also spiritual. I love languages, even Latin, and majored in Spanish. I clearly recall the moment when I suddenly realized that I was actually reading Spanish words in my head without first translating them into English. You wouldn’t call my feeling ecstasy, but you would call it awe.
Christians use a lot of loaded words. But we have lost the meaning and truth of many of our words. Rather than throw our ancient words out, perhaps we need to reclaim and re-understand, our precious vocabulary. Here is an invitation to join me as you wish.
BIG FAT UNMANAGEABLE THEOLOGICAL WORDS—BROUGHT TO HEART
Saturday March 16, 2013, 10 to 3, a quiet retreat day offered by Episcopal priest, author and spiritual director, the Rev Lyn G. Brakeman, at Miramar Retreat Center in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Retreatants will be invited to explore, through meditations, conversations, journaling, and personal prayer, some basic Christian vocabulary, words we often use without really knowing what they mean in lived experience. Little things like grace, sin, salvation, the holy are not cereal brands, but rooted in ancient and biblical contexts. What do they mean to you? Individual spiritual direction will be offered for anyone who desires it. The goal is to enrich and enliven Christian spirituality in a beautiful space with lots of places to rest in God and pray, and enjoy a good warm lunch.
You may register on line at Miramarretreat.org, email at miramarma@aol.com, call 781-585-2460. Check website for more information. Fee is $39 with a deposit of $15.
Talk is cheap but words are precious—and remain our primary symbol system for communication and formation.
Words are also spiritual. I love languages, even Latin, and majored in Spanish. I clearly recall the moment when I suddenly realized that I was actually reading Spanish words in my head without first translating them into English. You wouldn’t call my feeling ecstasy, but you would call it awe.
Christians use a lot of loaded words. But we have lost the meaning and truth of many of our words. Rather than throw our ancient words out, perhaps we need to reclaim and re-understand, our precious vocabulary. Here is an invitation to join me as you wish.
BIG FAT UNMANAGEABLE THEOLOGICAL WORDS—BROUGHT TO HEART
Saturday March 16, 2013, 10 to 3, a quiet retreat day offered by Episcopal priest, author and spiritual director, the Rev Lyn G. Brakeman, at Miramar Retreat Center in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Retreatants will be invited to explore, through meditations, conversations, journaling, and personal prayer, some basic Christian vocabulary, words we often use without really knowing what they mean in lived experience. Little things like grace, sin, salvation, the holy are not cereal brands, but rooted in ancient and biblical contexts. What do they mean to you? Individual spiritual direction will be offered for anyone who desires it. The goal is to enrich and enliven Christian spirituality in a beautiful space with lots of places to rest in God and pray, and enjoy a good warm lunch.
You may register on line at Miramarretreat.org, email at miramarma@aol.com, call 781-585-2460. Check website for more information. Fee is $39 with a deposit of $15.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
2013.02.19 Proof of Heaven?
Hearing Eben Alexander, author of the book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife, speak was a moving experience for me—not because I needed proof of heaven or bolstering for my religious faith. In fact, I’d pretty much decided to wait till I was much older to worry and wonder about resurrection theology—and never have fretted about “getting in.”
Nor was I interested in hearing one more, albeit from a medical scientist, testimony about near-death experience.
No, I was moved because Dr. Alexander was NOT charismatic. That is not meant as an insult.
Alexander spoke almost casually and in a low-key way about the exhilarating, exotic, colorful, yes, heavenly according to age-old religio-spiritual imagery, experience he had while he was in a week-long coma induced by bacterial meningitis (inflammation of membranes that line the skull and enclose the brain and spinal cord).
“My neocortex was not running at all,” he told us. It was dead, or more graphically, a “neocortex soaked in pus.” In such a condition, the physical organ we call brain, could not manufacture consciousness such as Alexander experienced.
Does human consciousness exist outside the brain? It would seem so. The brain, in fact, actually limits consciousness, according to Dr. Alexander.
Alexander came out of the coma and back into life, armed with a life-transforming experience, and a memory. His son, a physician studying neurosurgery himself, told him not to talk to anyone or read a thing before he wrote everything he remembered down. He wrote 20,000 words in six weeks.
Medical doctors, who had all but pronounced the case hopeless, called his recovery a medical miracle. Alexander called it the result of being in heaven. The publisher chose the book's title to promote sales, but it's really about Divinity. He described his vision of divinity (his word) in great detail, including a perfect mystical melody, a beautiful woman, swirling colors, an infinitely knowing presence, and a powerful message of unconditional love. All the ingredients of a perfect first date, I’d say.
No stranger to religion, in part because of a physician father with a strong faith, Alexander, nevertheless, looked to science to answer life’s questions. But after his spiritual awakening he testified: “I knew what happened to me was beyond science, and that if I said anything at all as a scientist ever again, I had to say this.”
Science and theology are not at odds, as many in both camps have maintained. They are soul mates driven by similar quests and using different methodologies. Such an interface, to me, is not “brain” (or rocket) science! Still, for such a conversation to succeed, both camps must be motivated by respect, accord the project the dignity it deserves, speak with mutual respectful, and have no attachment to agenda or outcome.
I will not describe more of Alexander’s compelling details, save to add that he left us with a tantalizing cliff-hanger, the final discovery that, for him, secured the truth of the heavenly realm as he experienced it.
Do I find this witness credible? Yes. Why?
-I didn’t feel the impulse to argue with him or critique, one of my favorite resistances.
-He never used the word resurrection, or tried to pump a Christian agenda.
-He was humble, far from culture-bound celebrity, although he has achieved media fame.
-He did not point to himself, but beyond himself. When asked if he thought God “arranged” all this with a higher purpose, Alexander said, “No. I was not chosen.”
I was glad to hear that theological line of thinking dispelled. God doesn’t choose anyone, make anyone special, or manipulate human freedom, even for a godly agenda (That’s our specialty.) We are all called, and chosen.
-The message of Love was clear, as was the message that Alexander would go back and be a messenger—the job of “angels.”
-When he, against all odds, awoke, his first words were: Thank you.
-His second words were: All is well.
-All “near-death” accounts are consistently the same at the core, though there may be descriptive imagery from earthly culture or religion ie. seeing Jesus, Buddha, etc. Atheists would leave it abstract, Alexander noted, but made no fun of that approach.
-One does not have to almost die to have such experience.
-If you have such an experience you will never forget it, although you may question it and try to understand it by many means.
-Images sync with biblical and other ancient and modern mystical witnesses.
-Extended consciousness is not a new topic.
-All things are one in God.
I felt affirmed in my own spiritual experience and pleased that Alexander’s witness answered some of my questions: Why, in spite of being exposed to lots of traditional negative God images, even in the Bible, have I never believed a single one? Why have I never believed that God created goodness, and therefore must also be the author of evil? Why have I never thought God was judgmental or controlling, never? I was never afraid of God.
My theology comes out of my own spiritual experience and often has made me feel out of step, although, thankfully, I didn’t have to get pregnant, exiled, crucified, or nearly die for it.
Oh, I’ve been hurt and lost connection with the God I early experienced, and I’ve doubted my self and my own memory, but I NEVER forgot what happened. And yes, I’ve felt angry at patriarchal images and language, plenty, but, from my beginning I knew it was NOT God—not simply, not MY God, but NOT God at all.
I write about the talk I heard with some trepidation, because I may have heard some things wrong, and I haven’t read the book, only reviews and articles. But I will read the book, then keep on writing my own book. As Alexander said, it’s good timing for this message—and its source.
Nor was I interested in hearing one more, albeit from a medical scientist, testimony about near-death experience.
No, I was moved because Dr. Alexander was NOT charismatic. That is not meant as an insult.
Alexander spoke almost casually and in a low-key way about the exhilarating, exotic, colorful, yes, heavenly according to age-old religio-spiritual imagery, experience he had while he was in a week-long coma induced by bacterial meningitis (inflammation of membranes that line the skull and enclose the brain and spinal cord).
“My neocortex was not running at all,” he told us. It was dead, or more graphically, a “neocortex soaked in pus.” In such a condition, the physical organ we call brain, could not manufacture consciousness such as Alexander experienced.
Does human consciousness exist outside the brain? It would seem so. The brain, in fact, actually limits consciousness, according to Dr. Alexander.
Alexander came out of the coma and back into life, armed with a life-transforming experience, and a memory. His son, a physician studying neurosurgery himself, told him not to talk to anyone or read a thing before he wrote everything he remembered down. He wrote 20,000 words in six weeks.
Medical doctors, who had all but pronounced the case hopeless, called his recovery a medical miracle. Alexander called it the result of being in heaven. The publisher chose the book's title to promote sales, but it's really about Divinity. He described his vision of divinity (his word) in great detail, including a perfect mystical melody, a beautiful woman, swirling colors, an infinitely knowing presence, and a powerful message of unconditional love. All the ingredients of a perfect first date, I’d say.
No stranger to religion, in part because of a physician father with a strong faith, Alexander, nevertheless, looked to science to answer life’s questions. But after his spiritual awakening he testified: “I knew what happened to me was beyond science, and that if I said anything at all as a scientist ever again, I had to say this.”
Science and theology are not at odds, as many in both camps have maintained. They are soul mates driven by similar quests and using different methodologies. Such an interface, to me, is not “brain” (or rocket) science! Still, for such a conversation to succeed, both camps must be motivated by respect, accord the project the dignity it deserves, speak with mutual respectful, and have no attachment to agenda or outcome.
I will not describe more of Alexander’s compelling details, save to add that he left us with a tantalizing cliff-hanger, the final discovery that, for him, secured the truth of the heavenly realm as he experienced it.
Do I find this witness credible? Yes. Why?
-I didn’t feel the impulse to argue with him or critique, one of my favorite resistances.
-He never used the word resurrection, or tried to pump a Christian agenda.
-He was humble, far from culture-bound celebrity, although he has achieved media fame.
-He did not point to himself, but beyond himself. When asked if he thought God “arranged” all this with a higher purpose, Alexander said, “No. I was not chosen.”
I was glad to hear that theological line of thinking dispelled. God doesn’t choose anyone, make anyone special, or manipulate human freedom, even for a godly agenda (That’s our specialty.) We are all called, and chosen.
-The message of Love was clear, as was the message that Alexander would go back and be a messenger—the job of “angels.”
-When he, against all odds, awoke, his first words were: Thank you.
-His second words were: All is well.
-All “near-death” accounts are consistently the same at the core, though there may be descriptive imagery from earthly culture or religion ie. seeing Jesus, Buddha, etc. Atheists would leave it abstract, Alexander noted, but made no fun of that approach.
-One does not have to almost die to have such experience.
-If you have such an experience you will never forget it, although you may question it and try to understand it by many means.
-Images sync with biblical and other ancient and modern mystical witnesses.
-Extended consciousness is not a new topic.
-All things are one in God.
I felt affirmed in my own spiritual experience and pleased that Alexander’s witness answered some of my questions: Why, in spite of being exposed to lots of traditional negative God images, even in the Bible, have I never believed a single one? Why have I never believed that God created goodness, and therefore must also be the author of evil? Why have I never thought God was judgmental or controlling, never? I was never afraid of God.
My theology comes out of my own spiritual experience and often has made me feel out of step, although, thankfully, I didn’t have to get pregnant, exiled, crucified, or nearly die for it.
Oh, I’ve been hurt and lost connection with the God I early experienced, and I’ve doubted my self and my own memory, but I NEVER forgot what happened. And yes, I’ve felt angry at patriarchal images and language, plenty, but, from my beginning I knew it was NOT God—not simply, not MY God, but NOT God at all.
I write about the talk I heard with some trepidation, because I may have heard some things wrong, and I haven’t read the book, only reviews and articles. But I will read the book, then keep on writing my own book. As Alexander said, it’s good timing for this message—and its source.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
2013.02.14 V-Day Excerpts
I came down to breakfast today to see two large red envelopes on the table. Love and humor cards from my beloved husband. Oops! I forgot it was Valentine’s Day, and immediately justified myself by saying love was every day all year round.
Then, I went to my email and there was a beautiful e-card from a friend in Estonia where it is “Friends Day.”
Then, three heart-shaped cookies arrived from another friend, theologian and professor at Boston College, who also sent an email with an article he’d written in 2005 in defense of Eve Ensler’ s Vagina Monologues, which students perform yearly at this Catholic college. It is as an educational experience, he contended—and more, it is empowering, even if it offends.
My oldest daughter’s beautiful blog post humbly and eloquently extolled the merits and complexities of maternal love for her two daughters. An “unrhythmic jaunty dance” she called it.
On today’s Writers’ Almanac, I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poem to Robert Browning that begins,” How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and ends “ If God choose, I shall love thee better after death.”
Now ..........I’m out the door to get a card—or three for my at-home Valentine.
*******
Walking home with my cards in my pocket and love in my heart for my family, friends, God and my own self, I remembered my own V-experience.
Of course, not everyone will think the Monologues is education or art, but most agree it is politics with a punch and a large dose of chutzpah.
I performed a script in the V-Monologues when I was in Gloucester. It was to benefit the Coalition for the Prevention of Domestic Violence on which I then served. My monologue was about a mid-life woman who went to a vagina workshop—in secret, in trepidation, and in hope. In the workshop, the woman discovered and explored her own wowser secrets while lying on her mat with a group of other women, all being instructed by a slim young chippy who probably had at least three vaginas, or clitorae:) Anyway, I wore my clerical collar in the play, and added a line about the institutional Church and its need to discover its own vaginal power. Well, I didn’t say it quite that way, but it was clear that religion needed women and it mustn't dry up.
The parish I served got two new young women parishioners out of that show. They sheepishly admitted that they came to the parish because they'd seen me in the Monologues. I was identified as an Episcopal priest in the playbill. Also, a lesbian friend in my Yoga class brought her 90-year old mother to see the play, and after it the mother said to her daughter, "Can we go to that church?" This is called V-evangelism.
May I add that six women from the traditionally more conservative 8 a.m. liturgy sat in the front row! Never heard a word from them, but I saw a grin or two.
Life is love, and there’s plenty of both left in all of us. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.
Then, I went to my email and there was a beautiful e-card from a friend in Estonia where it is “Friends Day.”
Then, three heart-shaped cookies arrived from another friend, theologian and professor at Boston College, who also sent an email with an article he’d written in 2005 in defense of Eve Ensler’ s Vagina Monologues, which students perform yearly at this Catholic college. It is as an educational experience, he contended—and more, it is empowering, even if it offends.
My oldest daughter’s beautiful blog post humbly and eloquently extolled the merits and complexities of maternal love for her two daughters. An “unrhythmic jaunty dance” she called it.
On today’s Writers’ Almanac, I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poem to Robert Browning that begins,” How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and ends “ If God choose, I shall love thee better after death.”
Now ..........I’m out the door to get a card—or three for my at-home Valentine.
*******
Walking home with my cards in my pocket and love in my heart for my family, friends, God and my own self, I remembered my own V-experience.
Of course, not everyone will think the Monologues is education or art, but most agree it is politics with a punch and a large dose of chutzpah.
I performed a script in the V-Monologues when I was in Gloucester. It was to benefit the Coalition for the Prevention of Domestic Violence on which I then served. My monologue was about a mid-life woman who went to a vagina workshop—in secret, in trepidation, and in hope. In the workshop, the woman discovered and explored her own wowser secrets while lying on her mat with a group of other women, all being instructed by a slim young chippy who probably had at least three vaginas, or clitorae:) Anyway, I wore my clerical collar in the play, and added a line about the institutional Church and its need to discover its own vaginal power. Well, I didn’t say it quite that way, but it was clear that religion needed women and it mustn't dry up.
The parish I served got two new young women parishioners out of that show. They sheepishly admitted that they came to the parish because they'd seen me in the Monologues. I was identified as an Episcopal priest in the playbill. Also, a lesbian friend in my Yoga class brought her 90-year old mother to see the play, and after it the mother said to her daughter, "Can we go to that church?" This is called V-evangelism.
May I add that six women from the traditionally more conservative 8 a.m. liturgy sat in the front row! Never heard a word from them, but I saw a grin or two.
Life is love, and there’s plenty of both left in all of us. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Ash Up for Ash Wednesday—AND Choose Life
So many avid Christians use Lent as an opportune lead-in to-Easter season to take off pounds, exercise more, get healthy—or at least prepare to fit into the Easter outfit they’d planned to wear for their twice-a-year visit to Jesus.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
2013.02.10 Thirteen-End Stereotypes for Lent?
How about we give up stereotypes for 2013, starting with the superstitious demonization of the number thirteen as unlucky?
Today we are shoveling out from under the snow blizzard of 2013. Such abundance of white natural beauty fills me with awe. Awe is, stereotypically, supposed to elevate my gaze to the heavens, but instead it immediately plunges me downward and into awareness of earthen reality: Please God don’t let anyone freeze to death. And I never thought of carbon monoxide deaths from snow-clogged tail pipes. Remember to clean them if they've been buried in snow.
Still, the shouts of joy and delight of all the children sledding in the park brought tears, and warm memories.
Nothing is all good, or all bad.
This morning on the Interstate I looked over to my left, and there was a woman in a brand new Cadillac doing 65 mph with her face up next to her rear view mirror putting on her eyeliner.
I looked away for a couple seconds--to continue shaving --and when I looked back, she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.
As a man, I don't scare easily. But she scared me so much, I had to put on my seat belt, and I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand. In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car, using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear, and it fell into the coffee between my legs, splashing and burning Big Jim and the Twins, ruining the damn phone, soaking my trousers, and disconnecting an important call.
Damn women drivers!
This joke made me laugh and also reminded me again how stereotypes can rule our hearts and make us certain, for example, that all women are bad drivers, and all men are unconscious.
For many women today, 13 has come to be the number of the divine feminine.
And consider the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution with the Emancipation Proclamation proclaiming that all people are equal under the law. Also see the movie "Lincoln" that proclaims the astonishing political process of that challenging time. Sometime politics works for good— and for God, who shapes souls through the chaos of politics, and the quiet of prayer.
And how many of us know, or remember, a 13 year old freshly-minted teen? Grounded in glory—enough to trip over.
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