2021.06.06 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdote, Part Eighteen. How Holy Is Holy?

Scene LIV. Divine Identity

Rudolph Otto defined the power of the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans a perfectly contradictory wonderment—and true. You can be afraid of something or someone, repelled, and at the same time fascinated and attracted. I used to feel that way about Ether, the large black woman who worked for my mother and lived with my parents for a time. She was strong, always kind and loving, yet a mysterious and separate presence—holy.

Is God black? I wasn’t sure, but I saw that God was obviously not white or male, because I was female, and Jesus was semitic. I went on to explore the Holy in many guises: Jewish? Christian? Episcopalian? Gay? Womb? Tomb? Male? Female? Father? Mother? Transcendent? Immanent? Almighty? Angry? Judge? Lover? Sexual? Asexual? Socialist? Capitalist? Communist?

My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced, dare I say incarnated, and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. I had written in my journal for a course in experiential theology about being sexually molested at age eight in a theater by an old man who looked like every image I’d ever seen of God. I wrote: “Terror is breathless. I am paralyzed. Then I feel a hot dimly pleasurable sensation as his finger probes. Why don’t I move? I can’t. I am trapped in a net, caught between the repulsion of molestation and the attraction of clitoral sensation. …I never tell. I think something is wrong with me. It’s my fault.” Tremendum et fascinans?

But what of God and sex? Is sex Holy? I wrote: “A sexual relationship is of God and flies free like the Gospel. Or it is sexual behavior out of duty, mechanical, rigid, conforming, conscripting. One message says: you are beautiful, and sexually responsive, and a woman. The other says: you are a dutiful and sexually performing wife. Ghosting these two is: you are a sexless mother.”  

I would say that, for me, there was nothing more holy than birthing and rearing a child. The exertion of birthing felt like God creating in the flesh. Holy. Nursing a child from the milk of my own breasts was also holy—exhausting and miraculous at once. Mothering is also holy, like balancing on a tightrope—how much to let go, how much to let be, have a net of support for falls and failures, and how much and when to intervene—for their own good you always claim. What is fascinating is how maternal love never abates, never leaves, and always keeps growing. What is tremendously mysterious is how much forgiving goes on—self-forgiving, forgiving between mother and child, and the gift of divine forgivingness for countless blunders, yours and theirs. Holy.

My search for God-in-me continued and burst the bounds of everything I thought was Holy—or was taught should be Holy. It was breakdown and breakout time when all kinds of immoral behavior felt holy to me—affairs, masturbation, divorce, sin— all of it viable in my search for sacred power. My New Testament professor  commented in my journal’s margins that my search reminded him of D.H Lawrence in Lady Chatterly’s Lover wherein “sexual energy so long blocked and finally released was seen as sacred power.”  Holy.

Scene LV. Anger

After the Episcopal Church turned me down in the ordination process, I felt the pain of shame and, strangely, the liberating energy of fury. Tremendum et fascinans.

Most of what I’d learned about anger was that it was “bad”, made trouble, and was unbecoming for women—as in hell hath no fury like it. Anger is damn hard to express without hurting or being hurt, and doubly damned hard to feel without a target to blame, self or other.  Nothing calming about it. But boy, does it release piled up energy, like a bull confined in a rodeo stall just before the door swings open. Free. Holy?

I began to empathize with the rage of others who felt trapped in patriarchal biases, unjust abuses, and those excluded from resources made unavailable to them by official policy and deliberate prejudice. Poverty is a death-dealing social disease, and worse, it is racialized and genderized.

I took courses at the UConn School of Social Work, mostly because they offered a joint degree program with Yale Divinity School, and I thought the Church might never ordain me. I encountered the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). He was a Marxist philosopher who developed a theory of cultural hegemony whereby the ruling class (moneyed) used established cultural institutions to reinforce norms and values that maintained their hegemony, and therefore capitalism. Tremendum.  BUT, Gramsci, a neo-Marxist, critiqued materialism and advocated a humanistic understanding of Marxism. He even helped to organize the working classes. Fascinans.  (His looks alone are tremendum et fascinans, no?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I took from this class was the idea that Gramsci was in favor of a capitalist economy and a socialist society. This idea fueled my ongoing arguments with my Republican father, and would influence my choice to change my political affiliation from Republican to Democrat. I didn’t like Communism or Socialism much, but thought socialist values had a better chance at empowering true Democracy and protecting the right of every citizen of age to vote. My change of party was also deeply influenced by my religious values. I thought Jesus would certainly be a socialist. Surely he despised wealth-ism, and was clearly against any kind of social or economic injustice, inequity—any and all -isms. He, and the God he proclaimed, were obviously not in favor of taxing the poor while the rich, by all means of unholy practices, got richer. But, he did not live in poverty, for if he had he would never have had the energy to travel the land, teach, preach, heal, weep, and pray.

I told myself: keep praying like crazy, continue chaplaincy work, love my children honestly and imperfectly, get a therapist, get a spiritual director, read radical stuff, and get political. The Episcopal Church votes, and will soon elect a new bishop in Connecticut. He might look with favor on this well-fueled aspirant.

He did. I was ordained deacon in 1987 and priest in 1988. Again, tremendum et fascinans—both.

And so…………My personal anger, my political choices, my sexual experiences, my religion, and my spirituality sealed me as firmly anti-racist—and yet.  Did I need any more training?  

2021.05.30 Becoming Forever

Today is Trinity Sunday—Creator/Christ/HolySpirit all becoming one at once.

Can you see how becoming this intricate, intimate, impossible, confused, and tangled doctrine is? It is quite unbecoming, in fact. It simply does not fit into any of our compartments of theological understanding. Nor does it lend itself to appropriation into the safe comfort zone of being spiritual but not religious. Not much soul-breeching Mystery does, does it? After all, how many voices, dark and bright, silent or aloud, thrum about in your own mind, blow out from your own mouth, and pulse away in your own heart all at once?

Becoming

What greater joy can there be
    than to be becoming?

My mother always used to say,
    “Oh darling, that dress becomes you.”
The coat I bought you is so becoming.”
And my father would say,
    “How much was it?”

But what’s more becoming than
    to become yourself,
And so to know that God becomes you?

Now look about and say to the tree, the tiny bud,
    the bunny, your stuffy, your neighbor:
God is so becoming to you.
            by the Rev.Lyn G. Brakeman


Healer

The healer seeks the venues of the harmed,
The stressed, the victims of the brunt
Of inhumanity unchecked,
Of those who have been plunged into
A porridge of unmitigated pain.

The hands of unobstructed love,
With time and patient, gentle skill,
Bestow a sense of healing peace,
And send the reassurance that
Goodness lives and can be found
In the embrace of a true Friend.
            by Peter L. Dal Negro


Tell Me My Tears

Tell my my tears,
I asked the gull.
Ratcheting her head
One moist eye beaded mine
She waddled—away.

Tell me my tears,
I asked the sun.
Ducking under some clouds,
He winked, a bold flirt
Then dried them—all.

Tell me my tears,
I asked the wind.
Combing my hair
With gusto and purpose
She blew them all over my face.

Tell my my tears,
I asked the sand.
Warm granules, cozy toe blankets
A single grain
stuck in a teardrop.

Tell me my tears,
I asked the sea.
Curlicued tides, looping, lost
Salty to heal
Between coming and going.

Tell me my tears,
I asked my Beloved—
and waited.
        by the Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman

 

Left Out Of The Bible

What Adam said to Eve
As they lay in the dark
Honey, what’s making
That dog out there bark?
        by Charles Simic

What Eve said to Adam
As they lay in the dark
Honey,  just noticed
Not ticklish anymore.
        by Lyn G. Brakeman

 

Last Prayer

Dear Coherent Mercy: Thanks. Best life ever.

Personally, I never thought a cool woman would come close to understanding me, let alone understanding me but liking me anyway, but that happened!
    And You and I both remember that doctor in Boston saying polite but businesslike that we would not have children but then came three children fast and furious!
    And no man ever had better friends, and no man ever had a happier childhood and wilder brothers and a sweeter sister, and I was that rare guy who not only loved but liked his parents and loved sitting and drinking tea and listening to them!
    And You let me write some books that weren’t half bad, and I got to have a career that no kidding helped some kids wake up to their best selves, and no one ever laughed more at the ocean of hilarious things in this world, or gaped more in astonishment at the wealth of miracles everywhere every moment.
    I could complain a little here about the long years of back pain and the occasional awful heartbreak, but Lord those things were infinitesimal against the slather of gifts You gave mere me, a muddle of a man, so often selfish and small. But no man was ever more grateful for Your profligate generosity, and here at the very end, here in my last lines, I close my eyes and weep with joy that I was alive, and blessed beyond measure, and might well be headed back home to the incomprehensible Love from which I came, mewling, many years ago.
    But hey, listen, can I ask you one last favor? If I am sent back for another life, can I meet my lovely bride again? In whatever form? Could we be hawks, or otters maybe? And can we have the same kids again if possible? And if I get one friend again, can I have my buddy Pete? He was a huge guy in this life—make him the biggest otter ever and I’ll know him right away, okay?
    Thanks, Boss. Thanks from the bottom of my heart. See You soon.
    Remember—otters. Otters rule. And so:amen.
          by Brian Doyle

 

2021.05.23 A New -ISM To Consider: Single Storyism (Pentecost, 2021)

Look. See. Taste. Smell. Touch. Feel. Intuit. Speak. Praise. Repeat.

What Wisdom is the divine spirit of communication/communion creating now? NOW.

How hazardous it is for me to take the biblical story of Pentecost literally, as if the shocked and bereaved followers of Jesus were suddenly overtaken by rushing winds and tongues of fire, not to mention preaching prowess. Thus empowered, they preached in such a way that foreigners from all over Judea heard, understood, and proclaimed the good news of this new savior Christ in their own languages. Their babbling ecstasy raised such a ruckus that onlookers thought they were drunk. Many Christians still call this bash the birthday of the Church.

When I was four my whole extended family, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins gathered to celebrate me. Their whole focus was on me as they toasted and sang and showered me with attention. I received gobs of gifts, including a favorite doll, still intact after many repairs. There’s a photo of me sitting at the head of the table, wearing my pointed birthday hat and a special new pinafore, and trying to eat a huge piece of birthday cake. I was in tears—too much well-meant pentecostal hype for me. Being overwhelmed, even by God and the love of many, can be traumatic.

I do believe that the depth and breadth of the Holy Spirit is beyond my comprehension, but the image of “drunken” charisma spawns doubt not faith in me. Joy, yes, but I’ve survived enough drunken bashes in my life not to invite another, even metaphorically. Persuasive evangelism and conversion happen in many ways, I know, yet sudden unanimous conversionary zeal and ecstasy gathered up in a party is just not my style, and I do not think Pentecost, metaphorically or not, is the birthday of the Christian Church.

My experience tells me that there are many different stories about ways the Spirit shapes each of us. God after all has no way to us but through us. Everything created is always becoming, not like a new dress, but as a matter of sentient Life breaking forth through a single Creator known by many, many names, and incarnations, and stories—all valid.

I’ve noticed that we are quick to attach -ism to a phenomenon. Ism reminds us to pay attention to something important. That’s positive, however, -ism carries with it the danger of spawning a fanatic, a single-minded purist, a rigid proselytizer, or worse, a violent warrior who rarely talks and listens but easily fights. Isms can endanger the becoming process. For example, my own waking up process led me to feminism—the general need to pay more attention to the growth, maturation, and full value of women beyond domesticity and at all levels of society.

For me, feminism encouraged my desire to grow beyond being a stay-at-home wife, mother, and homemaker. It meant focusing my spirituality, getting a seminary education, and pursuing ordination as a priest of Word and Sacrament—a traditionally all-male vocation—in the Episcopal Church. I never burned a bra or shot a bishop, but believe me I seized my mid-life awakening, my free-to-be womanhood with wild  “pentecostal” abandon. I hurt my children and others. I soon ran headlong into church politics, chose resilience over shame, and engaged in a long, painful fight toward ordination, one I almost gave up. Some wounds are still in need of healing.

I’m glad Christianity has no -ism attached to its name, although Christian evangelical-ISM encourages Christians to believe that their religion is THE ONLY ONE TRUE way, as if one version of divinity offered some kind of guarantee of spiritual correctness, if not salvation. To absolutize this one way, one gospel, one story has led to the painful politics of exclusion with its obvious extension into hatred, violence, blind devotion, even war. It doesn’t do much for divinity or humanity.

Racism is currently an upfront focus in religion and culture. It doesn’t simply mean bias against people of color, which is bad enough, it means that ONE race—the white one, the right one— has self-selected as dominant, its story the ONLY story worth honoring, teaching, telling, and privileging. This phenomenon holds true for other -ism-bound words: sexism, heterosexism, able-ism, individualism, colorism ( skin whiteners, really?), truism, individualism, and yes, American-ISM. I am a patriot who loves this country and detests patriotISM. PatriotISM can create peace and/or war.
            *  *  *  *

Associate Professor of New Testament and Ancient Christianity at Yale Divinity School, Michal Beth Dinkler, is offering a summer course, “The Danger of a Single Christian Story.” The title made me shiver with hope. Could someone else be wondering like I am? 
 

Her talk was inspired in part by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie’s  2009 TED talk,“The Danger of a Single Story",  in which she tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice —and warns that “if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.”

Dinkler focuses on the variety of stories in the Bible itself and on the four different canonical gospel narratives. The tendency in church and academy is to try to merge these four. But the stories about Jesus are different. What if the Christian imagination is restricted when we believe there is only one right way to understand Jesus stories? Or only one right way to worship God?

Well qualified with natural curiosity and her willingness to pursue theological education at an evangelical seminary, Gordon Conwell, and at Harvard Divinity School, Dinkler critiques storyism. She has landed at Yale Divinity, a non-denominational seminary.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “It was like, wait a minute—there are all these different people who say they are Christians but believe very different things than I did at the time,” she said. “I had to think, ‘Am I going to double down on what I believed before [Harvard]? Or am I going to open up and allow for these differences?” The Holy Spirit itself prohibits such limitations. 

“Every retelling of a story is an attempt to persuade in some way,” Dinkler said in a recent interview. “And these four gospels show us the importance of context, for the person who is telling the story and for the people to whom they’re telling it. Coming to any biblical text and trying to force it into one kind of truth is an unimaginative way of understanding God’s work in the world. The New Testament itself tells us that diversity has been present amongst followers of Jesus since the very beginning.”
 

I love Jesus the Christ and all his teaching and ways. He is not an -ism; nor am I; nor is the Christian story. I appreciate Dinkler’s  critique of Single Storyism. I am, gratefully, not a Christian-ist.

2021.05.16 Spring Forth

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.         

                   Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was a short-lived (1844-1889) and short-of-stature Jesuit priest and English poet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He suffered with various depressive disorders, I’d dare call serious right-brainism. He struggled with what he thought was the conflict between his poetic expansiveness and the rigors of humility he felt his religious vocation demanded. Although his life in years was short, his poetry made up for it with a long, if not eternal, lifespan.                

                                 *  *  *  *  

Nothing is so cruel as the brevity of Spring.  As soon as its luxuriant blossoms have burst in full—a feast, a pallet worthy of only one divine Creator’s artistry—they fall to the ground. Rakes, efficient and painful, dispose and depose.

It’s a short reign this precious lifetime—with plenty of sin and sadness, crime and punishment. Choose it all—one tiny bright effulgent blossom at a time. Live it all—one tick of a second hand, one thump-thump of a heartbeat, one tear drop, one death, one breath, deep pure or wheezy raspy—one, one, one, one day at a time.  

I am privileged, being white, middle-wealthy and all, but my privilege is not what makes me happy. I am happy because there is Godde and prayer, and because I love. Love sighs, reaches fingertips, and heaves beside me in bed. Love cracks bold jokes, remembers my dusty pink voice, rages with me at institutional torpor and bad theology, argues vociferously as well.

Love is also within a short drive’s distance, forgiving and passing on more love, all the way down the line to a small boy who makes sure his daddy knows that learning to read is “just not interesting,” and besides, interrupts his play time. Furthermore, he asserts that he did talk in class despite no-talk rules, because, after all, if someone talks to you, you should talk back, right, Daddy?   

Passing on life to life to life to life. That is privilege. That is love. That is Godde. That is One— + one + one+ one—forever and forever. 

2021.05.09 Mothering Day

Just two days ago I awoke in a funk, feeling sorry for myself, sure no one of my four biological children would remember the M-day, or make a last-minute quick phone call or maybe a card from CVS. I moaned to myself in an orgy of self-pity when a phone call from my youngest son on his way to work. He was telling me about the heart maps he helps his young students make for their moms. I asked him to make me one. He said he was at work on it.

I remembered our blended plethora of mothers: step-mother, mother-in-law, their own wives/ significant others who have mothers, not to mention their wives' mothers, a few grandmothers—and godmothers! And this doesn’t even account for the many mothering friends and female mentors along the way. I’ve know plenty of mothering men as well. It is the quality of unstrained mercy. The count got unmanageable and quite beyond me, so I rolled out of half-slumber, checked my phone to discover that it was only Friday not Saturday, then thanked my own mother, dead by 23 years now. I told her I wished she were here with her lavish excesses always overboard for me. I could use her boostering.

Mothering day is always a Sunday. In church we hear Jesus remind his followers of old and today to love each other as he loved them—without condition, forgiving regular lapses in affection, faith, and loyalty. He loved with trust in God, a constant presence no mother can ever replicate. Some hearty clergy dare to speak of God as Mother, but being averse to any theological genderizing at all, I wouldn’t slap the title of Mother—or Father—onto Divinity.

My thoughts strayed to Molly (not her name) a 95 year old resident in our apartment building, who is mother, grandmother, great grandmother, maybe even great great grandmother—beloved of many, loving many. Last night I, by pure luck, was walking down to the dining room and saw Molly, dressed elegantly in blue with earrings and necklace of pearl, standing in the doorway of her apartment, clutching the handles of her walker. She looked bewildered, not quite right, so I stopped and asked. She began to say something with great intention, but it was gibberish. She managed to say with slurred speech as I came close that she’d “never felt this way before—all dizzy and nauseous.”  

Another resident came by, and we managed to get Molly back inside and seated. Her lifeline was buried deep in her brassiere arrangement. Molly then tried to remove all her clothing in a great rush. I asked if she was anxious and her frenetic eyes answered. I felt my own panic rise in my throat, but I breathed and focused on Molly with soothing reassuring words—prayers for us both really. I knew time was of the essence.

At last we located the magic “savior” and pushed the button. A voice answered the call from a box on a table in her living room. I managed to locate numbers for her family. Her landline had large buttons with names on each. The message I received from family members was firm: Do not let them take her to the hospital! We’re on our way. The adamancy of their message alarmed me. Why would a family give such an order?
 

Within ten minutes the EMTs arrived with their gurney. Three energetic young men burst onto the scene and began to spray Molly with questions. How many fingers? Who is the President? What year? Molly’s face screwed up with effort. She knew these things but her mind was scrambled. We waited for the family to arrive. The men fumed and paced. I inhaled the swirling angst, exhaled to calm myself, and prayed. Finally THE family of authority arrived, daughter-in-law and a grandson. The daughter-in-law ran in as she loudly announced: “I’m a nurse. I’m a nurse.”  It was time for me to leave and join my beloved husband for dinner.

Molly did have a stroke, not her first. She is in the hospital receiving proper treatment. I continue to pray for the best outcome for her. Sometimes the most desired outcome is death—hard but not the enemy.  
                *  *  *  *

From Molly I learned some things about myself, about fear, and about mothering, chiefly that I can swallow fear and take charge when needed.

I learned some things about emergency behavior in general. First, when in an urgent situation like this, stay calm, firm, and kind. Breathe. Do not raise your voice or shove your own anxiety into another’s face. Second, make sure you have a conversation about your own desires with your own family. NOW. Third, have your information—instructions, medication, doctors, medical condition/history, insurance card, phone numbers of healthcare proxy— written out clearly on one sheet, laminated, and placed on the refrigerator to consult in a glance.

To die or not to die, that is not the question.

No one knows how they will die. Make a plan and share it with loved ones and professionals. Then pray, let go, and live.

For myself, I think I will have a sense of when I’m done with life and want to say goodbye to loved ones. I hope to die in peace at home or in a hospice with professionally managed palliative care. Trust your tears and your laughs, your memories, fears and prayers.
                

                   *  *  *  *

It was hard for those who loved Jesus to let him die. It was hard for him to agonize about his choices. He chose the way of integrity with courage. He confronted the powers with his gospel recipe—not new news but good news renewed. He chose to die, leaving his words to the bereaved to find their own ways to love, and fail, and try again to love as he had loved them.

2021.05.02 Very First Things

The biblical story in Acts about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is fantastically sci-fi and charged with spiritual energy. It’s an Easter story, acknowledging earthly life in full with heavenly life alongside. Philip runs into this eunuch, an Ethiopian court official in charge of the palace treasury no less, on the road. The eunuch by chance is reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah and doesn’t understand its meaning until Philip explains. The passage is fierce, all about sheep led to slaughter making no protest at all, humiliated and facing death soon. Such a God!  Philip leaps in with the the Good News of Jesus Christ, and the ecstatic eunuch leaps into a quickie roadside baptism administered by Philip who then vanishes.

Instant Christian conversion has not been my experience, yet I can understand the sudden burst of energy that accompanies a brand new awareness—irresistible so you leap or plunge.

I can identify with this eunuch a bit. When I was a child I sought to flee too much positive attention, while the eunuch sought to flee too much negative attention. There is something shaming about too much attention period, unless that attention is unconditional love—Godlike.  

I thought my spiritual story began at three under that dining room table, but in fact there’s a prequel. I’ve recently “unearthed” my baby book called “Tot to Teens,”written by my mother who, thrilled with my existence after several miscarriages, went overboard with her praise. I’m really not that great!  

My mother recorded EVERYTHING!  
    -first words Mmmm, DaDa and Ba—presumably my bottle.
    -seeing across the room at 3 1/2 months
    -played with rattle at 4 months
    -turned 1/2 way over at 4 1/2 months
    -ate prunes and baked apple at 6 months, asparagus tips at 6 1/2 months
    -first shot for whooping cough at 5 1/2 months
    -used the “toidy” after her first time on it at 6 1/2 months
    -crawled at 11 1/2 months
    -walked alone at 13 1/2 months

By two and a half I could button my shoes. I was real “olympian”. Notable: my next “first” words were boy and car.  No comment!

“Talks fluently (no exaggeration) and distinctly at 2 1/2 and can tell what is written in her book on any page from memory and is always right.”  I am delighted to read this prophecy, because I grew up to read and write with great pleasure always.

Equally prescient and humorous is the description of the celebration of my first birthday: “We gave a cocktail party but no babies on Lyn’s 1st birthday.”  There followed a complete list of guests and gifts, including a hot plate for my cereal, a monogrammed silver hairbrush, and a pearl necklace I still have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dental record included a diagram in which every tooth was labeled by number in order of appearance. No tooth fairy yet, but there was much concern about my thumb sucking and my front teeth—at 2 years and three months! “She looks like Eleanor Roosevelt.” If they’d only foreseen the orthodontist bills they’d later pay, not to mention my later becoming a Democrat! 

As to pets and playthings I had numerous dolls and animals, including two elephants named Lodie and Lodelot. My favorite was a white cat I named Pussy P’Sandra. I still have her lookalike but I machine-washed her, poor thing, and all her long white “fur” shrunk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first birthday party at 3, “wearing a little white dimity dress with a pinafore with red rickrack and red slippers.” My mother thought I was “adorable”—which I might have been, save for photographic evidence to the contrary in black and white. But the shoes are on my home altar. High fashion, right?  

 

 

 

 

As to religion, we were members of the Brick Presbyterian Church where I went to nursery school. “Lyn adores school and has learned the 23rd Psalm and “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I did love school and I do recall being excellent at memorizing—good enough to later reject all those omni-words I realized were inadequate descriptors for God. Who needs a know-it-all God who is also power-hungry!  I did like the choir and the music. Here I am at 6 or 7 in the New York Herald Tribune—my first publicity photo. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As I write this I feel such sadness. I felt over-mothered and longed to wear dungarees and be free of incessant pinafores. I also knew I was loved, if a bit too attentively. One baby book entry brought tears. It was under the heading, Aptitudes. Mom, who loved to dance and was good at it, had missed her chance to follow her dream. She also wanted to be married with children. Back in the 1940s she couldn’t do both, so she wrote about teaching toddler me to dance: “I taught Lyn to “Truck” “Shag” and “Minuet”. She points her toes very gracefully and has a semblance of rhythm and timing. Is very graceful in nursery school and keeps excellent time to music. I was very proud of her skipping to music on a witches broom stick at the school Halloween party.”

Descriptions of my advancing years in parties, pinafores, and adulations continued till I weighed in at 33 pounds at 4. Then the notations stopped, although the book provided space through 9th grade. I’m sure Mom got too busy with two more daughters and life itself.

Today I can honestly say that I loved my mother, have forgiven our differences, have no pinafore regrets, and, as a mother myself, wish she were here to laugh and cry and dance.  

2021.04.25 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Seventeen. Learning Without Studying.

When I started this series on my “racism” I realized that what moved me came from many pressing scenarios, not precisely relevant to racism, or any skin color, but building in me a spirituality of deep appreciation for the sheer brilliance of every living thing. This extravagant enlargement of my perspective has made me know that Love beyond all understanding neither created nor ordained ANY privilege, nor ANY ONE single image of God/Godde, nor ANY race.

Scene LI.  Noah

We read the fable of Noah’s ark to begin Lent. It is part of what is called the primeval history, after Creation, the Eden fiasco, and the listing of many generations of humanity—each one more corrupt than the last. Evil abounds. This biblical pattern continues as generations accumulate, each one more corrupt than the last. God seeks and finds one blameless man who builds an ark, saves animals, and keeps Creation alive through a devastating flood of waters.

Children and adults love the two-by-two animals up the ramp to safety; and we delight in Noah jokes, like how much excrement he’d have to clean up daily, but no, his wife probably did that, right?  We bypass the image of God who, according to ancient spirituality, brought on such a great flood. No one cares much about causality, because we are sure we’ll be on the ark. Floods were common in those times. But…….. do we give equal weight, or more, to what God proclaims about the rainbow, also common after storms?

Exactly what does God say about this rainbow?  “When the bow is in the sky I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Genesis 9:16)

This so called Noachean covenant is the first one mentioned in the Bible. It represents a covenant for life between God and “all living things on earth and in the heavens.” Covenants are mutually binding on all parties. I had heard all this many times. Why now was I suddenly aghast? Why now was I feeling the grace and the burden of it?  Because of “weeny sounds” I’d made at 3, reading the whole darn Bible at 14, in seminary plunging into the intricacies of scripture called holy, a world I thought I knew and didn’t fully. And now I was embedded in a world full of people whose lives I could hardly imagine—or deny.

Noah’s deal was no longer a sweet story. It was mine—hardly rosy and overweeningly peachy keen, yet I felt God’s calling me into the same covenant. I felt scared. Where was this Lord my shepherd?

Scene LII.  Lessons on Dying

From the sick-unto-death I learned to be well.

As I completed seminary my mind felt swollen to the point of explosion, yet equally drained of energy. I was full, as if I’d overeaten. I could not learn one single additional thing. Not one more world of wonder would fit into my soul—even for safekeeping. Not one more prayer could get me ordained. My already wheezing lungs could not inhale one more breath—for the Lord or anyone. And my eyes wept dry tears.

Still, there was one more requirement—one more torturous shredding of my ego. They called it Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short. I would be trained to work in a hospital, to give solace, comfort, and spiritual hope to the sick and the dying. I had nothing to give.

My God, how I wished I could just hop into one of those beds with the crisp white taut sheets, push the button to summon a kindly nurse to wash my feet or offer sweet oblivion with some pain killer drug. Instead I took lessons from the flesh, not from a book. You don’t learn humility, it is given.  

From a child I learned to choose life—anyway.

I was a hospital chaplain, first trained at UConn Health Center by a Roman Catholic nun, then accumulating more chaplaincy hours at Hartford Hospital. I was buying time waiting for the Episcopal Church to ordain me. Limbo.  

I stood with a family at the bedside of their dying child. They had three daughters, all with muscular dystrophy—a wasting disease with no treatment. The oldest had died; the middle daughter lay dying; the youngest, maybe 7 or 8, sat in wheelchair next to her sister’s bed, her face twisted in agony. A machine whooshed, sucked, and sighed as it pumped last-minute breaths into the dying child’s lungs.  

The family had seen this before. The nurses had summoned me, a small plainclothes female chaplain, also a Roman priest, a robust specimen as well done and rounded as a pot roast, and brandishing healing oils. He stood next to the child in the wheelchair and said too many prayers. The rest of us surrounded the bed with powerless presence, keeping watch. I thought I should say something, but nothing occurred to me, so I stood. The Roman priest looked down upon the now sobbing child in the wheelchair and said, “Oh now, don’t cry. Aren’t you happy your sister will soon be with the angels in heaven.”  The child turned her small tear-stained face up and countered him fiercely: “NO. NO. I don’t care about angels. I want my sister!”  

This was the most honest prayer I’d ever heard. I knew God wept with us all as together we watched the machine unplugged, and we listened to the dying girl’s breaths space out slowly—slowly.  
            
From a dying man in his seventies, I learned about God.

We both knew his death was close. We’d talked about it, and he was as ready to die as anyone ever is. I was not ready for him to die. He told me he’d prayed a lot that God would change things, but he seemed also peaceful with the truth, and thought it must be God’s will. I, however, had come to know and care about this man, and uttered the following stunningly unprofessional spontaneous idiocy: “We pray, believing that God saves, heals, and all this, but why would such a great big almighty God bother?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” the man said.  
        

Scene LIII. Lessons From Blacks

I met O.T. in my Hartford Hospital chaplaincy group. He was the most contagiously jolly man I’d ever met.  I don’t know how he did it, but O.T. could laugh—always. It was his greatest pastoral gift and never offered insensitively. From him I learned to laugh—no matter what. He offered what I called kindness laughter. This was essential when one of us hospital trainees felt helpless, or had just uttered something utterly real but clumsy.

Once one of us chaplains stopped to make a pre-surgery visit to a patient who said he was having his lung removed, and before he could explain about transplant, this chaplain, pale with horror, blurted: “The whole thing?” The chaplain (me) was consumed with guilt, and O.T. said “Don’t fret, honey, they remove it in halves.” O.T. was never disrespectful, always listened, and then he brought things round so we all were lost in hilarity. Who finds honest humor in death? He did. From him I learned, again, and more forcefully,  that God was not the ultimate dour potentate we’d been taught to revere and fear, but that God gave us laughter as well as tears. How else does one cope in this ministry?

Dick and I socialized a bit with O.T. When he landed his first job at a big Baptist church in Newark, he invited Dick to deliver the pastoral charge, that is a pep talk to the newly ordained minister about what to do in this first official ministry, chiefly, follow the teachings of Jesus, and try not to get fired before you burn out. Dick accepted O.T.’s invitation with fervor and tremors. O.T said: “Just say it, brother.” Dick hit the pulpit running. Neither of us remembers what he said, but it passed muster. I felt proud of Dick—and something else. A white preacher in a black church receiving enthusiastic talk-back felt like a just-right miracle.
            *  * *  *

Chester was another black man I met in the CPE training. He was shy and unassuming, a gentle gay man, partnered with a white man named John. Chester was completely different from O.T. but just as engaging. We also socialized with him and his partner. Their specialty was cooking, and boy did we get treated to good food and good company. Chester’s creative specialty, besides cooking, was making bears with fully jointed limbs. These bears could march!  From Chester I learned modesty and, yes, sweetness. This is Chester when I first met him and one his bears.

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A black woman writer named Alice Walker taught me about prayer and female sass. In her 1982 book, The Color Purple, she wrote in the voice of her main character Celie:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

“...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder.” 

                                            *  *  *  *

How odd that so far I would get my anti-racism training from biblical story, academic theology, the dying, black ministers, secular feminism, and my own secret spirituality. I needed some kind of a shepherd for my bloated soul, or at least a structure.