2024.03.03 Troubling/Troubled/Troublesome? Let's Talk. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

   

        .     “Don’t look away.

• "Don't allow hatred to enter into your language when speaking about the conflict."

• "Practice Radical Empathy, particularly with those with whom you struggle in this conflict."

• "Christian hope is founded on God's love and presence with us in the midst of brutal realities with no immediate causes for optimism."

• "There is a buoying power in prayer."

• "The power of the love of fellowship of God's family is so important —We're not going through this alone.”

Dean Richard Sewell of St. George’s College, Jerusalem, with The Rev. Barkley Thompson, President of the North American Committee for St. George’s, recently offered online conversation about the painful war-torn situation—obviously threatening to everyone who lives in Israel, everyone who has ever visited the college, and all of us, near and far who, yes, care deeply. 

Whether we call Israel “holy land”, recall singing hymns about Jerusalem in churches, are Jewish, have messianic expectations, follow Jesus of Nazareth, or, prayerfully and powerlessly, desire an end to war-making for the sake of peace-making, we must talk.   

Recent conversations at St. George’s were described by leaders as “honest, raw, real, spiritual, moving, humane and hopeful.” There was no evaluative judgment, blame, partisanship, denial of Divinity, or even politics. Now that’s a miracle!  

The College provided this rare opportunity for the family of God to gather— authentically in prayer together in the midst of terror. 

*  *  * *

Many of us would be quick to deny the existence of God, to wonder why “he” does not intervene to eliminate such chaos and pain and death, especially when it is inflicted on the innocent. 

Good god! Do we not know by now that, IF there is a Creator, and IF there is evolution that insures humanity with ongoing conscience and will and heart, and IF our own fear blinds our own kindness and breeds insanity, revenge, and war disguised as peace-making, THEN we will continue powerless, make enemies at will, and blame or shame, whichever comes first. Any parent knows that. I think very little of transcendent anything, and even less of divine will or some idea that we can, by sheer will, eliminate pain and error. 

What we can do is get honest, have conversations not harangues, listen, pray simply to let ourselves in on our own truthful thoughts and feelings, grieve together, establish enough kindness to intervene with courage when we can. This is how to take the long hard path toward mutuality—your need is as important as mine, so let’s talk—and listen. 

*  *  *  *

P.S. When Jesus is remembered in the Bible as having a temper tantrum about the desecration of holy ground in the Jerusalem Temple with merchandise, usurious practices and greed, may we also remember his temper didn’t work to stop greed—but it did leave us a story we never forget.  And gave us permission to roar when necessary.  

2024.02.25 And Then There's Music! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The first spiritual experience I had with classical, aka “good” according to my mother, music was in college sitting on one of the uncomfortable lecture hall seats with the pop-up desks that slid between the seats, ready to take notes on music.  The first “lecture” was a piece of music played once, then again, and then again. In between the “hearings” the professor told us how to diagram the piece which was Wagner’s Overture to the opera, Tannhauser.  

I was thrilled, not simply by the music itself, but by the fact that a grand piece of classical music could be diagrammed, just like a sentence can. Music, not just the elementary scales and practice books my boring and haughty first piano teacher used, but grand public music with thrills and trills, movements, transitions, themes with variations, rests, and punctuations. 

As a writer, a lifelong devoted reader, and lover of words, I now heard that music could be read. I was also excited to know more about the music business of my maternal grandfather, known in NYC as “Pop” Adams. He was an impresario whose business with the Wolfson Bureau was to attract, import, and promote European classical music, vocal and orchestral, in the United States, where in the 1900s there was a dearth of classical music, vocal and orchestral. I never knew him because he died when Mom was twelve and I was unborn. Still, I felt as if I knew A.F. Adams through my immediate attraction to classical music, especially opera, with the exception of the occasional scorching soprano who could not blend. 

Despite occasional flirtations with rock and roll and jazz, my love has stayed steady. We had season seats for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and now with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra whose conductor is the animated and vibrant Carolyn Khan. 

*  *  *  * 

Wendy Gerbier, to us, is Auntie Wendy, a mezzo-soprano with a voice that soars with a slow die-out, like an echo. It stays with you. She is an ambassador of singers who have sung our national anthem at events, and has a three-octave range. Wendy is the aunt of my stepdaughter’s son. She recently performed a concert here in the auditorium at McLean Village Retirement Community. The listening audience sat still in awe and delight. You’re never too old for fine music, even if your ears don’t hear each note. Here we are (Dick Simeone and moi) after the concert, munching on brownies with Auntie Wendy with whom we munched on brownies, provided for the event which was open to the public. 

Although Wendy Gerbier sings mostly operatic selections, she usually offers a program of varied selections, each with a bit of information about each piece. She opened this concert with two spiritual classics, the Schubert “Ave Maria” and the Malotte Lord’s Prayer, then continued with a mix of “a little bit of everything,” including “O Danny Boy” and Bernstein’s “Somewhere.” My favorite selection in this concert was Bésame Mucho, which is a bolero (Mexican dance tune), composed in 1932 by Consuelo Velazquez Torres, a female concert pianist. The words mean: “Kiss me Lots ’n Lots” Como si fuera esta la noche La última vez.".  Kiss me as if this were our last night.”  Both song and artist are important in the history of Latin music, a downright sexy and elegant way to flirt with song and gesture and coy desiring. Wendy sang it with her voice, danced it with her body, and lured us into the rhythms with her sway—seductive and alluring. Such is the universal language of music itself.  

*  *  *  *

What has this to do with one of the most difficult times in the life of Jesus of Nazareth? After he had spent hours in prayer and discerned that his mission would be to persuade his people that he had a messianic message of universal love, he withstood all the usual temptations at his disposal—wealth, power, and unbridled control—to choose the ways of peace, justice, compassion. That sounds promising and simple, but it was not. It cost him his life.  

Temptations to betray such gracious love for all creation bombarded this Jewish preacher from many directions, even, and especially, from his closest disciples who failed to understand the depth and breadth of Divinity itself. He would have to be persuasive and totally human—have sex appeal— to lure people to follow his countercultural message.

Have you ever betrayed someone’s trust? Has anyone ever betrayed yours?  Oh, let me confess the many ways. It is blindingly difficult to trust a love you cannot see or touch or hold onto and keep as a guarantee about your direction in life. All this and no profit with little salary. 

It’s like flying blind. Or going to a symphony or opera when deaf. Or breathing in the scent of spring without the ability to smell. Or pretending to love with no heart. The last sense to go in death is that of touch. So hold a hand, and be present at the end if you can, because no one knows for sure if it is a beginning or an ending.   

Ay, dios mio! 

2024.02.18 Why NOT Tell? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

There is a series of healing stories in Mark’s gospel in the New Testament. All of them are healing stories —the transformation of some painful condition that interferes with someone’s wellbeing in life, health, or the normal progression of what is expected. In all of them Jesus of Nazareth is identified as the healing agent. He makes these miracles happen.  

Healing means change. Healing means restoration to the fullness of Life. There’s the healing of Peter’s mother- in-law. There’s the healing of a leper. There is the healing of a paralytic.

What is startling, is that in each one of these healing events, Jesus specifically warns the healed and the witnesses NOT to TELL.  Why not? Is this not all Good News? 

Is this secrecy because Jesus is not in full command of his powers yet? Is it that these healing stories are hints of his yet unrealized identity as Messiah? Or was it hasty, delusional reporting by the first gospel narrative, Mark?  

I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it was simply timing. There were many healers and “miracle” workers in first century Palestine. Who’s to say that Divinity is not at work in them all—and in the creation of amazing wheelchairs like this. 

*  *  *  *

I do know I need to make my own recent wheelchair-bound dependent condition more clear to my readers, and I do know that healing is not magic but requires the full participation of the healing agent, the one who desires healing, and Mystery.  

-In early December, 2023, I felt a twinge in my back as I was doing a familiar Yoga post I’d done many times. I stopped.

-Soon my legs became very weak and I felt pain when I put weight on them.

-Ct scans showed a compression fracture at Lumbar #3.

-One day my legs gave out completely.

-I ended up in our Health Center/Hospital for physical therapy and more. There I learned how to use my walker for assistance in walking, bathroom use, transferring from bed to walker, and getting in and out of a wheelchair.

-I am now back in my apartment working with various therapies to strengthen my legs with the goal of walking on my own—in view and not yet accomplished.   

I’m appreciative of all prayers and more grateful than I can say for the presence of my beloved husband, Dick, who is managing all other household chores, his own worries, and our joint irascibility.  I’m also grateful for all our children who call, visit, and care.

*  *  *  *

So, for this Lenten season I am giving up giving up! Some days the task of weight-bearing on my legs is so painful I am tempted to stop trying to walk at all. I wonder if Jesus was also sorely tempted to STOP trying to persuade the people that this God who created all earth desires liberation, wellbeing, fullness of life and love—on earth as it is in heaven?   

2024.02.11 Transfigured of Transfixed? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

The very idea, or image, of myself permanently wheelchair-bound at first transfixed me. Stunned, I could not get the image out of my mind. This mental preoccupation drained me of energy, as any good anxious obsession would. Prayer became circular and boring until one day a story from Scripture popped into my mind. A very contrary story. Christians came to call this the Transfiguration. We celebrate it on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, as a preview of resurrection AND as its verification. 

Some days you feel upside-downed.

First of all, let me be clear, this story was witnessed by a few of Jesus’s closest disciples who saw it happen to Jesus, not me. What those disciples saw was a completely different Jesus, not the man with whom they traveled on the dusty roads. This Jesus was in prayer on the top of a high mountain—not an unusual practice, also one during which his three closest disciples would inevitably fall asleep. This time, however, they stayed awake long enough to see Jesus’s face and clothing suddenly shine with dazzling bright light. Then they saw Moses and Elijah, prophetic liberator and prophet of Israel. The blinding revelation did not last long before it was obscured by a cloud cover.  From the cloud they heard a voice saying, “This is my beloved. Listen to this One.”

Peter, utterly stunned as always, advised them to quickly build three booths, one for each faith hero, as if such brilliance could be confined or contained. The experience did not last long, and Peter was left unsure about what they were supposed to do with this revelatory vision.  The earthly Jesus rose from prayer and directed them back down the mountain to continue their mission of healing and preaching the gospel of Love. It was like a dream or a vision. It left them with more questions than ever. And it still does.

-We need more proof, clarification.

-Who is this Jesus?

-And which of the others mentioned should we listen to? 

-Was this a miracle or the beginning of a new religion? 

-And which of God’s apparent “beloveds” was THE chosen?

Unable to contain themselves, they asked Jesus as they stumbled after him down the mountain. Why Elijah? Because Elijah was here first. And Moses? Well, Moses restored the “Promised Land.”  

Today in Israel on the site identified as The Mount of Transfiguration there is a church called The Church of the Transfiguration. It is lovely to visit.

Well, well, well. There is more than one chosen.  

I saw no bright lights but I will tell you that I became— paradoxically— more motivated to strengthen my leg muscles for walking. 

You could say that my shift in perspective TRANSFIGURED my mood as my TRANSFIXED attachment to the wheelchair image vanished. 

2024.02.04 Who I Met In Sickness and In Health. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

While I sat in my wheelchair, bemoaning the utterly unimaginable mental image of myself in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, I started to befriend my ever-so-faithful caregivers—one it seemed for every single body part except my toenails! (They appeared to have stopped growing anyway!)

I began to re-envision this retirement community as collaborative: WE. Together WE could collaborate to make this mission work well for both administrative decision-makers AND for aging residents, privileged to have the resources to pay our fees, and feeling various degrees of loneliness as we slowly aged in place. My new slogan for this cooperative effort became: Make WE, not pee. 

*  *  *  *

My strategy was to make small efforts to get to know my caregivers. Who are they as people? They are more than their function here. This is who I met:

-I asked a young therapist where she was originally from. She told me she was Polish but her grandfather was born in Prussia, which was a territory not yet subdivided into different countries. No one ever told her this story. My own maternal grandfather was also born in Prussia and was Jewish. My mother never told me this story. We laughed together about family secrets. Whoever knows? Maybe we’re both Prussian!

-A young woman told me she grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She remembered feeling so happy as a child riding in her father’s fishing boat returning home with a mess of stinky fish cradled in a net in her lap—the catch of the day. She felt proud to be helping. I lived in Gloucester for thirteen years and remembered the pride and the joy and livelihood of the fisherfolk—including the wafts of sea air from the harbor and the fears of families who waited for their men to return home, as I too waited eagerly for my Daddy to get home from his big city job. He advertised soups we had to love.   

-I reached out to a young woman whose face crumpled into tears, and to a hard-working man himself bending into the aging slump. He thought this just happened to women. We shared laughter as I showed him my newly acquired walker. 

-An Occupational Therapist shared grins of pride about her sports-loving daughters, one of whom had been a coxswain for a rowing crew. I tried that once myself, because I was the smallest and lightest girl in my class. Pride in our children counts to connect us all.

-An entertaining wheelchair driver serenaded riders strapped tightly into his transport van. I felt for a bit like Juliet on a balcony. 

-A lively conversation with a caregiver about cultural differences that sometimes separated us and often seemed silly in the face of a God who created ALL of us from the same Love.  

There are many more stories, all worthy of remembrance. All of them helped me feel connected to others, to my own life’s experience, and to the whole created order. It is relationships that sustain us through life, especially as we age, not just meds and therapies.

2024.01.08 What I Learned in Sickness and In Health, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons

For two weeks I have been in intensive rehab care for a spinal compression fracture in my lower back. I’m home now and continuing to heal as I reflect on my experience. I have learned how enlivening it is to laugh and to remember that, in addition to efficient and capable staff, there is also a patient with a voice in the bed.

*  *  *  *

VITALITY: How vital am I?  The number of times in a 24-hour cycle someone enters your room while you are in the hospital and feeling drained of energy maybe even of blood itself, can actually cause me to feel devitalized!  Oh, some are very polite and kind and ask you if they can “check your vitals” —place an oximeter on your finger and tighten a blood pressure cuff on your arm. Still, you know it will happen whether you consent or not, and even if you are sound asleep. You know you will be judged uncooperative and perhaps resistant to treatment if you refuse. Still, I have a voice, enough to persuade the night nurse to tell them to let me sleep through the whole night after lights out at 11 p.m. till dose #1 at 6 a.m.  “She needs to sleep to get well!” She is respected. I have a nurse-friend who can rise above the rigidity of  “validity” just for my sake this night.  Thank you!

PILLS: Countless in a wee paper cup. These pills come in and go out. Most of them I recognize, like old friends. Nurses are able to recite each one and its worth, also the identity and purpose of  any new one, such as a probiotic to guard against a small dose of antibiotics. I do wonder how all these pills can travel my one digestive tract, each discerning its correct healing mission for my lungs, and my back pain, and my aging bones.  Like an infant, I trust.

INFANCY: Language thereof.  The cries of the aging as each one recedes from full vitality and joins the process of dying, which is like the process of being born into the world and out of the safe warmth of the womb. First there is profound silence, then a touch and yowl of protest—a wail that says, Listen to me, my heart. I’m here. Quickly we hear Touch me. Then Warm me. Then, Swaddle me I’m cold.  Then, Take me home now. Cuddle me. And soon Feed me. Suckle me at my mother’s breast or with the fake but nourishing nipple of a bottle and security of a diaper. And at last, the silence of deep sleep, contentment. Let me sleep now.

*  *  *  *

Dying and birthing are similar transitional processes. I believe that divine love is present at birth and at death—to welcome, listen, swaddle, warm, touch, feed, pray, and let be, which is not the same as let go.  

2024.01.07 Let There Be Light and Let There Be Darkness. Lyn G. Brakeman,Spiritual Lemons, blog post

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and called all of it good.

What is wrong in a country, in a world, in any society that prays for Peace all the time and has no idea what makes peace happen?

What is wrong with a country that calls itself a Democracy, a United states, establishes a Bill of Rights/Freedoms for all its citizens, and then silences some of these citizens from telling or writing the truth about themselves in an honest way? As a citizen I protest.

Is this moral? Is this ungodly?  Is this a violation of the freedom of every citizen to practice his/her/their own religious faith? Does this corruption, this lie promote holocaust, exile, soul-murder, evil, the censorship of truth itself?  That you can be stoned for being who you are, that you can be exiled for being who you are, that you can be lynched, jailed, buried alive, murdered, butchered, burned, bludgeoned, maimed, scalped, terrorized, banished, humiliated, deformed from foot-binding, censored, crucified, and shamed for being who you are and for writing, publishing, telling your own story about who you are.   

*  *  *  *

Why am I so passionate about all this? Well, because I am a reader who has read about campaigns to ban books that MIGHT be offensive to young minds. And because I’m a writer who remembers Holden Caulfield!

American writer J.D. Salinger, born in New York City (1919) is one of the most famous living authors in America even though he hasn't published anything since 1965, and he lived reclusively until his death in 2010. He’s best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, about a boy named Holden Caulfield who gets expelled from his boarding school and spends the next few days wandering around New York City, trying to figure out why people have to grow older, why everyone is so phony, and where the ducks go when the pond in Central Park freezes over.

The Catcher in the Rye started out as a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," and it was the first story that Salinger managed to sell to The New Yorker. The New Yorker bought the story in November of 1941, and planned to run it in their Christmas issue. That December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Salinger's story was put on hold, considered too trivial in a time of war. Salinger writes from within the mental musings of a young teenager, gawky, curious, sexually awkward—unforgettable.  

Salinger expanded the story into the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which came out in 1951 when I was 13.  The New York Times ran a review, titled "Aw, the World's a Crumby Place.” The children in it were unbelievably intelligent, and the style of the novel was too "showoffy." What adolescent is not?  Within two weeks Catcher made the best seller list. 

Who can forget Holden Caulfield, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Ebenezer Scrooge, Oz, Bambi, Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet, Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Rabbit, Cinderella, Grumpy, Moses, Cruella Deville—and more? 

Every tale and every character embodies good and evil, sorrow and joy, love and hate, light and darkness, heaven and hell, life and death—together. 

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and called all of it Good. 

O, light of the world, let your bright star stand over the place where the poor have to live; lead our sages to wisdom and our rulers to reverence. Hear this prayer for your love’s sake. Amen.  (from The New Zealand Prayer Book)