2017.07.09 Can You Still Love? Two Healing Stories.

My seminary learning experience at Yale Divinity School took place in a religiously diverse environment—one reason the school continues to thrive and is economically viable. But it isn’t just the sensible economics, or even the obvious ecumenicity, that gives this school, or any school, a soul of its own. It takes real people and real stories.

Nellie was a student with multiple challenges. She’d been in a car accident on her way to begin her college education. Her mother was driving. It was an accident—an accident that left Nellie with severe brain damage, unable to walk or talk except in very halting and barely intelligible ways. I was scared of Nellie. I didn’t know what to do or how to be with her, or what to do with my shame. I admit I avoided Nellie and feared for myself as well—hardly exemplary of a woman who wanted to serve God in ministry or take a shot at christlikeness.

I wondered how Nellie had forgiven her mother. I wondered why Nellie wanted to go to seminary and get ordained in spite of her severe limitations. One professor, an Episcopal priest, worked with Nellie as a tutor. He typed out her words for papers, and made sure she was accompanied safely to and from her classes. It all felt like a full-blown miracle to me—too difficult to digest.

Yet Nellie was a vibrant presence among us stressed-out, worried bunch of first-year seminarians, most of us not knowing a damn thing about this God we were there to study, if not master. Nellie stood out for her smile. Some days I thought she herself was a prayer. How could she seek God after all that had happened to her?  Some students reported that when she had a beer or two her speech suddenly became intelligible. Nellie’s being there among us must have had something to do with the impossible love of God—the love that scared me and made me run the other way. 

Now I wonder if Nellie's passion for God was not for the God the church traditionally presents, the Omnipotent one with all the power, but rather for the God she found in her own broken heart—the same one I’d found in mine as a young child.

I’ve thought a lot about Nellie over the 35 years since I graduated. What ever happened to her?

Google-god!!—the great connective search engine—helped me out.

Nellie did graduate from Hampshire which took her seven years. In that time she felt called to serve God. “Serving God became her salvation,” wrote Michael Vitez, journalist and Director of Narrative Medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Vitez has written Nellie’s story for his book on the healing power of story. 

Nellie went on to graduate from seminary and was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1993. She served in Chestnut Hill United Church (formerly United Methodist) until 2014 when she retired. It would take Nellie as much as five weeks with blurry vision and one palsied finger to type out 2000 words for a sermon. She then selected different parishioners to read her words to the congregation. Oh Godde, what a privilege! Nellie attended the Episcopal General Convention in Denver in 2000, where a special ramp for the entire altar procession was constructed so Nellie could read the Gospel using her voice box. 

Here is a photo of Nellie on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You see she is still smiling that smile I remember so well, the soul-smile that made Nellie shine.

Nellie died in August, 2016, at age 64. 



Only recently have I fully understood and wept deeply for Nelly and for me. The painful beauty Nellie gave me, stirred up as I read about Ed Bennett (1959-2017) in my Yale Alumni Magazine. Ed became a quadriplegic after a diving accident just before he entered his sophomore year at Yale University.

Here is Ed at a wedding in 1990, surrounded by his Yalie friends who called him “Edder”.

“Can I piece a life together?” Ed had asked a rehab psychologist, Lester Butt, when he was facing life with minimal movement in one arm only.

“Can you still love?" Butt replied.

The rest of Ed’s wheelchair-bound life was spent living the answer to that awakening question in the affirmative. He was the first quadriplegic to graduate from Yale College and went on to attend Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School but did not complete those degrees. He didn’t think his temperament was suited to pastoral work, although friends remember Ed as one with an “uncanny ability to bring people together.” Note that smile! The church could have used him. I wish he and Nellie had met. Obviously, they both could still love.

Ed wrote this in an essay for YDS in 1995:

“I have thought a great deal over the past few years about what is important to me. Perhaps my paralysis, maybe my acute experience of mortality  . . .  something has forced into my intimate, quiet moments the sense that God matters. My friends matter. The suffering of other people matters. And when I look at my profoundest satisfactions—friends, ideas, helping others, family—I do not see political or intellectual connections among them. Instead, I see a world of subtlety and wonder that lives in the spiritual world.”

Can you still love? 

I’m trying, Ed and Nellie. Thanks to you, I’m trying. And thanks be to God whose Hope incarnate forgives me—over and over—in my own clumsy efforts to love. And thanks to the Spirit who gives me eye and heart to spot healing stories, call them gospel, write them down, and send them forth—seeds for healing.  

What Really Do We Celebrate On Independence Day?

It’s July 4th, almost, a time when Americans wave American flags and celebrate our independence from British occupation and control of our land. We appreciate the liberties we enjoy, and we know there are other nations who do not have such freedoms. Some of us wonder if we're as free as we think we are. Still, we wave our national flag with pride.

Our flag has great colors. Fifty white stars on blue, each representing a state—the pluribus (many) of us. Then the thirteen red and white streamers, flowing freely and representing the thirteen British colonies that declared independence from Great Britain and became the first states in our union—unum. We are meant to be many AND one. Our nation is only 241 years young, and we are having trouble with the unum of our motto E pluribus unum. Yet we still wave our flag.


I like our flag. I do not, however, like our national anthem. "Oh, say can you see. . ." doesn't see far enough. It is time-limited, written to celebrate a particular military victory, and full of the language of bombs and war—hence fireworks with rockets and booms of bombs "bursting in air" through the night. I don’t mind making noise to celebrate but I admit to resenting the consistent language of war and destruction attached to patriotic celebrations.

Warlike language is also attached, disastrously I think, to issues of health, mental and physical—we “battle” cancer, “fight” depression or a cold, enter “combat” against diseased parts of our very own body, then speak of “winning”or “triumph” when we feel better? What is this odd war we wage right within our own flesh?  And what if we don’t “win”?  Warlike language is a habit to change.

On July 4th do we celebrate battles and victories won, or are we celebrating— with light and sound and loud booms in the sky— the sheer joy of our diversity "bursting in air?


The spiritual meaning of this day, I believe, goes far beyond our own nation’s independence. There’s no" us" and "them". We honor ourselves, and we must also honor national freedom and dignity for all lands. It’s a day to remember the mutual interdependence of all humankind, all species of animal life, and all vegetation—an interdependence founded in the measureless vision of a Creator God. Trying to live too independently is perilous. We live well together or we perish together.

I feel the same about my religion. It’s mine and I cherish it. But other hearts have faith as worthy and beloved as mine. We live well together or we perish. That’s worth a firecracker or two! A vision to keep us alive.

Nothing expresses this spiritual magnanimity better than the beautiful music of Jean Sibelius (1899) and the expansive lyrics of the Finnish national anthem, Finlandia.


Finlandia

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace, for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.


My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine;

But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.






      

2017.06.25 A Retreat To Consider

Words Matter: A Conversation About Theological Language and its Impact

Tuesday September 12- Friday September 15
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Led by Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman and Rev. Richard J. Simeone

A young rabbinical student raised her hand, and the Rabbi gave her a nod. “Rabbi, does G-d have a gender?” Students laughed. The Rabbi answered respectfully: “No.” The student had more to ask: “Well then, if G-d has no gender why do we use only one gender when we talk about G-d?” To this the Rabbi had no answer. It’s not easy to stump a Rabbi. He could have said that the Hebrew noun for god was masculine, but that, he knew, was inadequate. The student had awakened the teacher. The Rabbi who told this story some years ago still ponders that question.

How does theological language and imagery shape the divine image? How does it shape our souls? What about all that familiar and beloved liturgical formulae? What about pronouns? What would you change? Why or why not? Is this simply a women’s issue? Is it an issue of spiritual formation of human souls? Is it just politics? Or is it a theological issue? What would Jesus do?

Cost: $ 350; deposit: $80

To Register, call the Guesthouse Office: 845.384.6660, ext 3002


Holy Cross Monastery is the mother house of the Episcopal order of brothers (yes, monks) The Order of Holy Cross. The Monastery, in West Park, New York, sits atop a sloping hill, often dotted with deer, overlooking the majestic Hudson River.

The house is comfortable (nice new bathrooms), the landscape alluring, the food near-divine. The regular worship in the monastery chapel led by the brothers gives rhythm and structure to the soul and peace of the mind. You can follow from the Book of Common Prayer easily, or you can sit and let the chanting of psalms and canticles flow over you.

The retreat will include meditations by the leaders with ample opportunity for conversation, questions, humor, experiential learning together.  There will also be plenty of time for quiet reflection and prayer on one’s own. It’s a chance to have fun together and relish a few days away from the pace of the world in silence, solitude and community.  The monastery website is:  www.holycrossmonastery.com

2017.06.18 When Your God-School Dies

What would it be like to have a school from which you graduated close its doors—for good? And what if it was a seminary, your God-school?  I can’t imagine. Maybe it would be like losing a beloved father/dad—too soon, which would be any time really.

My dad died at 71— too soon for the length of our love. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I’m so glad you were there when I graduated from my seminary at Yale, your undergraduate college.

Now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the  Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) just closed.

A seminary is a particular kind of graduate school. It’s about learning to be who you are through studying who God is. How strange that sounds as I write it. How true it turned out to be… And how sad that many denominational seminaries are closing. Some, like EDS, are moving to affiliate with other thriving schools of theological education where they will maintain a presence, a dean, and some faculty.

The viability of independent denominational seminaries is obviously uncertain, but I wonder what the Spirit might be asking us to consider, besides just how to merge and survive as a kind of half-breed? I wonder if God might be calling us to examine the viability of denominationalism itself as a way of re-presenting Divinity to the world? 

I went to Yale Divinity because I could commute, and loved it, ironically, because it was not  denominational. I got courage there to sacrifice my fear of pushing for new ideas about sacred traditions and sacred language. Godde is bigger than all traditions. I will grieve if it ever closes. That said, I live now in Cambridge and will sorely miss having an Episcopal seminary right in my neighborhood—a presence.

I will sorely miss EDS, but not as much as its graduates, like the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates, Bishop of Massachusetts who wrote with candor about his own grief, memories and blessing.   

 “As a member of the EDS Class of 1987, I was marking my 30th reunion year.  My memories of EDS in the mid-1980s are not without complication.  It was a time of some considerable conflict and challenging community dynamics at the school.  Chapel life in particular was fraught.  And yet it was simultaneously a place of manifold grace and genuine formation for ministry in church and world, a blessing for which I have always been deeply grateful. At last week’s final Alumni Eucharist I found myself offering prayers of deep gratitude for that blessing.

What I had not anticipated was the level of deep grief that I experienced in that moment.  St. John’s Memorial Chapel and its surrounding campus was a place where I had been taught well by so many devoted faculty members; a place where I formed lifelong friendships; a place where our elder son was baptized; a place of altogether singular influence on my identity as a priest.

As we sang and prayed all of this was viscerally real to me, and I could not help but weep.  Momentarily present there in that chapel were all the remarkable, committed and quirky professors from whom I had learned, in both classroom and refectory.  Present with me were classmates and friends with whom I had exegeted Scripture; conjugated Greek verbs; wrestled with process theology; practiced chanting the collects; dreaded the GOEs; and contemplated resolving the campus housing shortage by turning the quad into a KOA campground.  Present also were support staff personalities who oversaw with an eagle eye my operation of the refectory’s Hobart dishwasher, and insisted (unfairly!) that I must have put coffee grounds down the kitchen sink at Kirkland Street housing.

All of those saints and more, living and dead, joined with alumni, faculty and friends as we celebrated the final moments of this final Eucharist of the final school year at EDS in Cambridge.  They were all there!

In coming days we will pray earnestly for the fruitful vocation of EDS at UTS.  On this day we pray with the deepest gratitude for the manifold gifts offered and received at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.  Thanks be to God.

Here is the final blessing which I offered at that closing Eucharist.

Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
May the God of faith grant you the courage born of the assurance of things not seen;
May the God of hope renew your confidence and preserve you from despair when that arc of the moral universe seems to have bent in the wrong direction;
May the God of love empower you as an agent of that love, having been strengthened in this place to strive relentlessly for the justice which incarnates love;
And the blessing, mercy, and grace of God Almighty, Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit, be upon you and those you love and serve, this day and always.  Amen.”
 

2017.06.11 Graduating Into Godde

If I were giving a graduation speech or trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a bunch of eager, scared, impatient grads, I’d offer one idea to practice and a soul-poem that dared to mention God by name.

AT EVERY MOMENT, STOP TO WONDER AND ASK YOURSELF:WHAT MATTERS HERE? PAUSE. THEN ASK YOURSELF: WHAT REALLY  MATTERS HERE?

Do You Believe in Godde?
     by Lyn G. Brakeman
 
I say I believe in God
when I see a seventeen-year-old girl-child
catapult down
center aisle
–late–
 shot from a cannon.

Wait! she shouts;
her bright blue graduation
robe flaps open
to reveal bare knees ending in fuchsia sneakers.

She races— winged— up the steps
to the stage
then stops,
straightens her square hat
until it settles over her curls, then walks with slow steady steps
towards the school principal
—who waits.

I say I believe in God
when I see this girl
walk with no swagger.

The principal waits still.

When she arrives he hands her a diploma
He says her name
—all of it, out loud—
even the middle name she hates: Victoriana.

At the sound of her name she leaps into his arms.
He holds her tightly,
the diploma still in his hand.
It has her back.

I say I believe in God
when I hear murmurs of shock
ripple through the crowd of praise-addicts.

I say I believe in God when
—one-by one—they rise to applaud.

Two people in the very back row
keep on clapping
after the girl flings her tassled
hat into the crowd
and runs off the stage.
No one is there to snap her photo,
except the invisible Godde*
with the invisible camera that images all Earth.

I say I believe in God
when I witness such jubilation,
and keep on believing
long after the applause has died down.

I say I believe in Godde when years later
I see this girl
hard at work packing groceries
with neat precision into bags.
She grins at every customer
so broadly that the whole world can look down her throat.


*Godde is the Middle English spelling of God. It is used quite frequently in modern times, because it nuances femininity in the divine name and softens the hard "d" ending. 

2017.06.04 Yirah

The word yirah (pronounced yir-aw/) is Hebrew for awe/fear/awareness. It does sound a little like a cheer—hurrah. And yet yirah is not a superficial “yippee” that passes quickly, as when you cheer for a sports team to win. Rather it is a sensation that grips your gut with a combination of awe and exhilaration—like seeing a bull fight.

When I went to a bull fight in Spain, I was horrified and disapproving. Taunted by my Spanish hermano in Madrid, I relented when he called me “timid Americana—grrrl.” This was not complimentary. I went with him to the fight. We sat in the cheap seats facing into the sun. Baked and pissed, I waited.

A bull fight is a ritual: hot and fiery, alive with music and the alacrity of picadors on horseback, toreros with sparkling costumes and red capes—the essence of macho eroticism. The crowd, intimate players in this drama, roars and sways rhythmically. Suddenly, I could not resist this dark power. There was something beautiful, sensual, unavoidable about this gruesome dance. I was swept into shouts of olé and toro, toro. I was fully alive.

This was liturgy. This was biblical.

    -like being part of the multi-voiced multitudes of Jews gathered from all the corners of the earth on the day of Pentecost—expecting God’s promised Spirit to show up and make it all  better—lost in divine pulsation, knowing it is supposed to be ecstatic—but it isn’t, quite. Yirah.

    -like being present at Jesus’s crucifixion, a horror-show everyone thought would never happen, despite predictions. This scenario, even now, we Christians reverence and detest and do not understand and cannot forget as we sit in pews and pretend we are not part of the mob. Yirah.

The Spirit of yirah  is one of overwhelm. It can be frightening in a mystical way, as if one’s individual identity will be lost as all boundaries, even those of language, dissolve. The particular is subsumed in the universal. Believe me, Christians, this day we call Pentecost is no simple elation, no little Happy Birthday to the Christian Church. It is is much more, much much more. It’s breath-halting, heart-waking, near-intolerable yirah.

Yirah can cause a whole crowd of people to grow suddenly silent with collective quivering, simultaneously paralyzed and transformed.

My friend and poet Jinks Hoffmann wrote a poem called Yirah in her book It’s All God, Anyway.
The poem catches this mystical mix.

YIRAH

The hiccup between
here and there
now and then

is less

than a full breath
when you know

you cannot trust
your ground,

when you know

there is no-one,
no thing,

between you,
your life and death.

When you stop,
there is nothing
to do
but be aware of
how damn exquisite
how damn awful
is all is.


The feeling this poem first generated is me was puzzlement. I couldn't parse the words. Angry, I read it over and over. I looked up everything, trying to contain, interpret. Having no control is scary.

I even tried Google where I discovered that a Rabbi, Alan Lew, had defined this word. He at least is immersed in biblical Hebrew. He’s also a Zen Rabbi with a mystical bent and the author of One God Clapping. (No, I did not go to Amazon to order it.) According to Lew, one meaning of yirah is “the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to inhabiting.” 

This is being IN God—a bit of what I felt at the bullfight and what I feel reading this poem —hanging among the stars helpless yet not dead. I am myself and not myself.

How damn exquisite and damn awful it all is. It all is—this particular moment of knowing and not knowing who the bejesus you are, and yet you are.

Yirah. 

2017.05.28 Goodbye and Thank You Brian Doyle

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

THE SPARROW

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

And a favorite of mine.

THE SQUIRREL

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


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

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