2022.04.25 What Does It Mean? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/22/25

This week recognizes St. Mark the Evangelist’s calendar day, April 25th. I wouldn’t just automatically know that,  but I have one of those calendars that has red numbers for saints’ days.  

Mark was/is very important, not because his gospel was written first, nor because it is one of the three synoptic gospels, but because it’s my favorite. “Synoptic” comes from the Greek word meaning synopsis. Mark, Matthew and Luke write to different cultures and audiences, and each has a particular slant on the happenings of Jesus’ ministry on earth. 

Mark begins his gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”  (NRSV)  We are at attention. This is one of the best once upon a times I’ve ever heard. We are about to hear a story, a very ancient story, one we will never forget, even though we will probably never quite believe it. 

Mark’s writing is clipped, clear, concise, and concrete. He leaps onto a scene and simply writes what he sees and hears and what happened, as any good reporter would. )f course much of it was on the streets being told and therefore subject to some distortions. Yes, it was all news fit to print when printing became possible. What is news stays news when it changes people’s lives. 

I was a newspaper reporter of local news many years ago, and I know how very hard it is to report accurately on any event while keeping your own interpretative thought and opinions out of it. Of course Mark was probably not present at every scenario he reports, but there is a very good chance that he knew lots about Jesus even if he was not in the original twelve of Jesus’s closest fellow travelers who became official disciples and had eye-witness advantages. 

In general, it is important to remember that a number of years elapsed before anyone went public with the revelations they’d discovered. Also, that Paul was the first to write about Jesus’s divine identity, the Christ, the Anointed One.  Christian orthodoxy tells us that Jesus is the word made flesh. He is God incarnate. He has two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine, neither compromising the other.  I tell you a Mystery. What else is new?  Still, be not deterred or discouraged, just read the story and you will find wisdom and parts of your self within the ancient story. I believe that the Bible is a collective memoir—full of truth and grace and wonder. 

Why do I like Mark the best? Well, I didn’t always. At grieving times in my life, I’ve been drawn to John’s gospel, because it is more mystical, allows for offbeat spiritual reckonings and acknowledges the sorrow of Mary Magdalene, crouched before the empty tomb where her dead teacher and Lord was buried. BUT, he is gone. Where is the body?  This is the way any great mystery novel begins, before it peels off into elaborate detective work and police searching for criminals. 

But Magdalene’s search takes a sudden alarming and enlightening turn. She hears her Lord’s voice calling her name, "Mary". It is enough to raise her despair to hope. She runs to tell the other devotees, who do not believe her, until they too check out the empty tomb. It is empty. It’s true. The rest of the story can be summed in these words: “But what does it mean?” 

Mark just tells the story from a more down-to-earth perspective. Markan language and literary style are different, but the story told has the same basic ingredients and ends simply with the empty tomb without further embellishment or explanatory revelations. We are left simply with the mysterious quest and question. 

It is what still drive us today, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?  

*  * *  *

I offer an image of God and the relationship between divine and human, including the whole natural world of living things. The image is from the Hebrew word L’mantzeach: “To the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony.” Pamela Greenberg, author of “The Complete Psalms” a translation. She dedicates many of the psalms The Conductor of the Eternal Symphony—an image of God as “the arranger of the many diffuse aspects of existence.”  (Greenberg, p. 323.)

I played in our high school orchestra too many years ago to count. I cringed when my clarinet squeaked, and/or if someone’s trumpet blasted in where it wasn’t time, or too loud or something. I’d feel sorry for the conductor, who nobly continued to direct the orchestra anyway for the sake of the whole production and for the integrity of the symphony itself. Greenberg writes: “the image suggests a deeply concerned, involved, and orchestrating God.”   

To me, it also suggests that everyone and every variety of player and instrument is involved, has has a part to play, and each is essential to the harmony of the whole.  

We make the best “music” together when we play our part well, and do not judge ourselves, punish or mock others, or violate the harmony. Such behavior is sinful, wounds the eternality as well as the finitude, and disturbs the fluidity of the “symphony” itself, not to mention making the “conductor’s” job a mockery. 

May we trust each other and listen with respect to our own voices and all the others in this Creation. Why? We are all making a Symphony. 

2022.04.17 Little Easters Everywhere. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/17/22

O God of Love

    so high above

       so deep beneath

           you never sleep

                you always keep

                    your heat in beat

Your love of LIfe’s

alive in strife

You love, therefore I am.

I love, therefore You are. 

                   Lyn G. Brakeman

Bovine Salvation

Sturdy Ms Methane

staunch in her pose

She’s not vain

Just full of Methane

See how she stares

Her soft eyes engage

She’s gassing the planet

In peril it stands—yet

We’re changing her repast

De-scenting her gasses

She’s still very well fed

And we’ve nothing to dread

For the gasses she passes 

are now Methane-free. 

Lyn G. Brakeman

  

Does anyone imagine that God does not have emotions? I bet it is hard to imagine God’s own feelings, especially fear or anger, if you’re not in touch with your own. Still, we have for so long worshiped a Divinity so dominantly transcendent, so consistently almighty, and so exclusively masculine, that we really don’t know God at all. 

The Creator God of the Bible creates natural wonders of Life itself with excessive prodigality and excitement. This God has creative power and shares it radically with all Creation—natural world and human. God wants it all to thrive, and adorns it all with the freedom to do just that. 

We, according to ancient story, chose to do the one thing God knows will make trouble for us for the whole rest of our existence: we exercised our freedom to know both good and evil, and to choose either way. We exposed ourselves to evil as well as good, to moral as well as immoral. And thus this little mythic story explains why we have been at odds with ourselves, each other, and God forever and ever, amen. It takes courage to make choices, and more courage to undo or reset those choices that turn out not to be so good. It takes courage to suffer choices we do not make. 

It takes prayer and serenity and wisdom and love to realize that the binary God seemed to set up is much more subtle, much more demanding and much more rewarding, precisely because it is NOT a true binary. There is no such thing as a purely good choice OR a purely evil one. This, I believe, is why God Creator warned the Edenic couple to leave the fruit of that tree alone—and why they could not leave it alone. 

This little story never happened. This little story always happen. Outside the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem there is this giant sculpture. 

 

The wind was fresh, the earth was young,

the scent of life was everywhere

the garden lay a fruitful dream

and God enjoyed the evening air

Where are my loved? the Maker wooed.

The clay I shape and call by name?

The questions spread through stem and leaf,

but as God waited no one came. 

God’s loves were hiding, faces turned,

beyond the reach of breeze and Voice,

aware that sometime in the day

they’d made a dark, far-reaching choice.

The question lingers in the leaf

in barren branch and shrinking pond—

Where are my loves? The Maker calls,

still trusting clay may yet respond. 

Michael Hudson, Songs for the Cycle

* * *  *  

A wise old owl says: Now, my dears. Do hoot and cheer and never fear, I’m always here.  

Another wise owl stays far aloft. I look out for danger and for prey. I’m always here.

Both the guardian and the nurturer seek little easters everywhere. Both equally incarnate the Spirit of Love that simply never burns out. 

*  *  * *

EIN SOF

The first time I heard these words was on our 2012 trip to Israel—a two-week pilgrimage I shall never forget. It’s in my bones. It was sponsored by St. George’s College in East Jerusalem, led by tour guides who knew the land and the language in way that made it come alive. The course was called “The Palestine of Jesus” I shall never forget my experience there. I felt as if I’d walked right into the Bible. Ein sof is one of the phrases I learned there. It’s Hebrew to describe a mystical divinity I can’t possible explain, so I call it God before God—the infinite unknowable known or finite infinitude. You see, it makes no sense and yet we know it s presence. It come in Kairos time. God’s time or timing. 

No wonder sweet mortals went speechless when they experienced kairos. It does not submit to any containment or control. No wonder that before long we humans, failing to control Kairos, invented calendars and clock, for chronos, our own time and timing.

We watch a medical television sitcom, set in the busy ED in a big city hospital. Whenever a patient, despite heroic medical efforts dies, the doctors and nurses who have been working so hard suddenly get it. They all stop at once. One doctor calls it. God calls it simultaneously. 

“Time of death 13:30” says chronos. 

“Time of Life: 13:30” says kairos.  

Ein sof. 

 

2022.04.10 Solo Flight: Meditation on Palm Sunday. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/10/22

I sagged with exhaustion not knowing how I was going to get through this holiest of weeks, at least to Christians. Why did I ever want to get into this priestly vocation in the first place? I didn’t remember. I walked down the aisle, checking pews, gathering leftover palms. I slumped down in the last pew and closed my eyes. I could almost hear echoes of  cheers—exuberant Hallelujas, or was it Hosannas, zinging about in the empty sanctuary. What is the point of all this anyway, I asked myself? 

What’s the point? 

My father often said, “What’s the point?” It was his favorite phrase when he felt defeated by life. I don’t think he expected an answer. In fact It was the last thing he said to me before he died. I was standing at his bedside, taking my turn in the death watch. I don’t know what any or us, his family, expected could come out of this death watch, but my mother, my younger sister, and I took turns sitting vigil at his bedside. 

I stood over the bed and looked down at the haggard, pale, familiar face of Daddy, the one whose affection I’d zealously sought in competition with the martini glass, the one I’d loved all my forty-four years, no matter what. Now his dark hair splayed out over the white pillow case as he groaned out his salvation, wrestling his demons into submission. Then silence.  Was he dead? 

“What’s the point?” he asked. 

“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. Then, seized by a sudden wave of guilt, I took his hand and added. “But if you find out, come back and let me know.” 

It took my father several more days to die.  It took me several more years to mourn, and even longer to forgive my looming pastoral burnout. 

Now I sat in the church asking myself his old question. What, dear God, is the point? 

I closed my eyes, hoping to doze off, not into death, but into some kind of tranquility, some sweet detachment. It was then that I heard some steps, almost inaudible, as if someone were sneaking into the darkening sanctuary. I looked up. A young boy entered the sanctuary, its doors still hospitably open.  I watched. He looked around as if to check his surroundings or adjust his eye to the gloom. The he walked forward toward the altar, pausing along his way to look around. I stayed quiet and watched.The boy walked all the way up the aisle and bent over. What was he after? He picked up a lone green palm. It was lying in wait at the foot of the steps up to the altar. How had I missed it? 

The boy picked up the solo palm. He walked the two steps up into the Choir, and then two more steps to the high altar. He placed the palm onto that high altar, gazed up at Jesus ghoulishly nailed to a cross exalted, stood for a minute or more. I watched—breathless. 

Then the boy spun around and ran back down the center aisle and out into the dusk. 

©Lyn G. Brakeman, 2022

2022.04.03 A Humanitarian Politics. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, 4/3/22

 

How sad and defeated I feel when something I prayed for and wanted so much to come about does not. Yet sometimes, I discover that God, or the powers of Mystery alone, or whatever strikes your fancy to call a Power Greater Than Yourself, has a broader vision than mine—a healing vision. 

What all this means is  that I am profoundly disappointed in my political party. I am profoundly disappointed in the other political party in our two-party system, and in the rigidly bipartisan structure of American democracy.  

So I have made a decision to stop believing in politics in its currently polarized condition. Politics is simply the way we the people choose to interact for the sake of sane governance and to legislate laws for the sake of good order. Politics, however, is not God or even godlike. 

I do believe in a political process, but I no longer believe in parties. I call my politics  Humanitarian. I will continue as a registered Democrat, so I can vote in local primaries and preserve the vision of a government that helps the people treat everyone with respect. I will always vote in national elections, because it is my privilege to do so, but I never again will automatically pull a party lever to vote for all the candidates in one party. This means that I will have to educate myself about the people who run for office, rather than  to react to, or assume, anything about their integrity from their party affiliation—one way or another. 

Blue AND red remain my favorite colors; together they make purple or scarlet. I am also proud of how our current president is heroically managing the mess he was handed. I blame no one, not even one party, for this current situation of systemic disorder. 

Because I do believe in systems theory, in which the whole is not simply the sum of its parts, but more— just as a poem is more than the list of the words in it. I seek a vision of the whole. I seek an image for a politics of the human, not the partisan. 

So what does the whole human system look like to me? What is the vision behind the particulars?  Here is one image, called “Motherland” by Spanish artist Ana Juan. It is set against a background of weaponry, soldiers, violence, and flames of war, meant to re-present the 2022 Russian assault of Ukraine. It is female, but not sexist or feminist. Everyone can mother. Mothering matters. Every mothering relationship must include wisdom, encouragement, nurture, and freedom. No one, and nothing, embodies this image perfectly. I see God in this image—God of soul, not denomination. God manifest in all religions, not a single religion. God of love embodied/intimate, not almighty/ascendant. 

I took this photo of  The New Yorker magazine cover, 3/21/22. I wrote to the artist, requesting permission to use her illustration for my blog: “I am an Episcopal priest, spiritual director, and author, retired and living now in Connecticut, USA. I am also a mother of four adult children and grandmother to three boys and three girls. I write to request permission to use your image, Motherland” on my blog of 4/3/22. 

I see it as one of many different possible of the Divine—this one most beautifully female though not feminist, imaging a God of love embodied. My blog appears weekly with the theme that sometimes what the world sees as sour and ugly, God may see as beautiful. I spent a graduate summer (1960) with families in Spain, Madrid and Santander. I’ve forgotten most everything except my great love for this country. Mil gracias. Lyn G. Brakeman”

Ms. Juan responded in this lovely way: “Of course, you have the right of using my image“Motherland” for your Blog of 4/3/22. I wish this image will be like the hug we all need in these dark times.  Warm regards from Spain.  Ana.” 

2022.03.27 A Prodigal Homecoming. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 3/27/22

This wonderful drawing by Tim O’Brien on the cover of the winter, 2021-2022 magazine, Columbia momentarily brought me home to my self, my soul, and divine omnipresence. 

I have so many memories of walking/trudging through all kinds of weather to night classes to earn my Masters degree in Spanish Language and Literature at Columbia. I used to wave and practically genuflect at the majestic steps leading into the halls of academe. I would have knelt before a statue like this one—to pray that I wouldn’t flunk out, or end up divorced before I even figured out what marriage was,  not to mention sex and procreation. 

I was newly married to Bill Brakeman in 1961 after a trip to Spain and a year of teaching Spanish to Smith students. We spent our first year in a small, one-room apartment on Claremont Avenue, on N.Y.’s upper west side. After eating dinner, prepared by this new “bride” who had ordered groceries delivered from a small local store and cooked one of five basic options, (chicken in some form, smothered in some soup, ham steak, pork chops, hamburger patties or meatloaf, minute steaks).  Then we went to bed, such as it was. We rolled into one another on a small pullout sofa bed and parted early each morning with a hug and a kiss. Bill would commute out to Connecticut to his engineering job, while I studied myself into oblivion, then walked over to campus for evening classes. I mean, after all, they awarded me a Danforth grant to get this degree, so I could teach Spanish. I’d better perform.  

We newlyweds must have had some conversations, but most of what I remember is exhaustion from studying, fretting over my distinctly inadequate culinary skills, and wondering if I was doing the right thing. I mean shouldn’t I be married AND pregnant by now, like it’s  supposed to happen? Be a mother?  A proper wife? Also can one get pregnant without orgasms?

Even now as I remember, I close my eyes tight and imagine myself into this wintry scene, transporting myself backwards into total student mood, a favorite fallback over the years. I wanted children, and what if my uterus suddenly aged too fast? Worrying was another fallback mood, as you can tell. Essentially, I felt pretty small and lonely and scared, like the bird—a Cardinal no less—on this cover art for the issue devoted to climate change. My imagination flew me into the wintry scene where I met my own Cardinal. 

 

Well, hello big guy.  Watcha doing?

Silence

Oh, your reading your texts or something, right?  I wish I had a phone like yours. Hey, I’m talking to you. 

Hmph

Thinking up a storm, I see. 

Little bird, little bird, do shut up. You’re casting a shadow on my phone. 

It’s snowing you see, and I just need a perch. Also, I’m lonely and bored out here.

Why won’t you talk to me? I’m pretty much of a standout feature in my flashy red suit. Like it?

I’m thinking. 

About?

Are you a Cardinal?

Yup, none other, or so they say. What other guy do you know who has such a handsome coxcomb? Hey, smile why don’t you, Mr. serious guy. What could be more fun than a conversation with another proud male in the snow on a moonlit evening in the midst of academia’s crowning jewel itself? Hey, are you grinning? 

Little Bird, little Bird where were you when I took myself so seriously, almost lost my way, or drowned in my own mind?

I was here, you just couldn’t see me. I am your imagination. I open you to create wonder and spy on God, to whom I introduced you to when you were a small child. Remember? You thought I was prodigal. But I was never wanton or wallowing in extravagance. I, like you, was just  explorative—searching out, crying out, longing, reaching—and sinning along the way.   

Cheerleading life itself, eh?  Well, thanks for the company out here in the snowy cold. 

Sure thing. I travel well. In Christian lore, I’m a symbol of vitality, sometimes a messenger. Church Cardinals dress all in red, strut their stuff, get stuffy. I do that too. So do you. Now cheer up. You can do this, even though you’re just pregnant. 

What? 

Oh, you didn’t know? Hit those books. Keep on going and next winter you’ll be trudging to the big city to take your comprehensive examinations here—great with child. I’ll be with you. 

So that was how I got through, got pregnant, received a Masters degree, and relied on my comprehensive imagination in its latest incarnation—a red male prodigal bird-angel—to remind me, once again, even now, to trust this Omnipresent One.