2025.04.20 Is It Easter Yet, Mom? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

My young and growing children used to ask me this question. They then complained bitterly about why Easter was just one day.“You know like Christmas or my birthday” they opined.

But Easter IS about FREEDOM………..not the same as license, btw. 

I understood their frustrations. Even I had to check the liturgical calendar to see exactly when Easter was this year. In addition, Easter was also a bit of a letdown because there were no gifts like Christmas. The only thing we resurrected was the “Alleluiah” we’d buried, meaning we couldn’t say it for all of Lent till Easter Eve. Anything forbidden, in a child’s eyes, automatically acquires extra power, because it’s for Divinity, not just your team. 

HALLELUIA!   

 As a child I used to march around our New York City apartment singing this song I called Dom Ring. 

My country tis of thee

sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died

land of the pilgrims’ pride

From every mountain side

Let freedom ring.

This remains the only national anthem that makes sense to me, because it covers far more than any national anthem. FREEDOM is for all lands, all peoples all creatures great and small. 

Yes, it is Easter— Dom Ringing all over the earth. 

04/13/25 Shall We Dance or Flee, March or Sleep, Simply Wait In Hope? Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

I remember a time when I was standing in line at a sizable department store waiting to return /exchange a gift that didn’t fit.  A woman behind me smiled at me and said: “My dear, the meek shall inherit the world.”  I felt a flash of anger, imagining myself to be a weak wimp, without the guts to shove and push or curse.   

When I got home I looked up “meek” and discovered it meant “quiet, gentle, submissive”!! Wow, no way did I want to be meek! But Jesus blessed the meek, didn’t he? I might inherit the earth. I took my returnable item home and donated it to the parish church fair for the “white elephant” table. Wait! Elephants are huge, fierce only when necessary, faithful to their pack, and protective of their young—meekly powerful or powerfully meek!  

I left the line, went home, wept, and found a therapist who offered bioenergetic therapy. There I met my body and ALL its muscles, some weak and some strong—inner armor, forever meek AND blessed.

*  *  *  *

Life is full of varying muscles, varieties of prayers and hopes and fears. On this Sunday,  called Palm we Christians re-enact the dramatic biblical story of Jesus’s journey into Jerusalem to confront Rome’s antisemitism while crowds follow waving palms. 

We all knew how this bold confrontation turned out. BUT in the meantime we brandished our palms to wave in a parade. Boys turned palms into spears to fight duels. Others saved palms to create palm crosses. Clergy saved some palms to burn to make ashes to anoint our foreheads next Ash Wednesday.

One lone palm remained lying in the center aisle—all alone. I picked it up and gave it a kiss of hope, also kissing the palms of my own hands—open and ready.  

*  *  *  *  

Hope, Pope Francis tells us, “means believing that history does not end with our mistakes, our violence and injustice, or the sin that crucifies Love.”    

2025.04.06 Prayer Journaling. Lyn G. Brakman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

🙏🙏🙏

The writer Flannery O’Connor started a prayer journal when she was a young student about twenty. She began a journal of prayers, addressed to God. In it, she wrote: "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You." 

She kept her prayer journal for two years, then dropped it, calling her Soul “stupid and slothful”. “Dear Lord please make me want You .”  “I am a cheese, make me a mystic immediately.  .  .  .  Her Soul  “wants the God who made heaven and earth, to be its Lover. Immediately.   .  .  .   She judges herself and her writing as a “sham” and ends up feeling “very far away from God. He might as well not have made me.  .  .  .  Today I have proved myself a glutton — for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me." That was the end of the prayer journal.

Reading this was very sad. I too kept a prayer journal. When I was on a silent directed retreat I was able to let go of all judgments and, “egg up” (like puke) some coherent wisdom and deep emotions I had kept hidden.

The first time I took a weeklong silent retreat at a monastery in the 1980s, I felt like a religious hotshot. Solitude — no crockpot, no squabbles, no traffic — was mine. Within 24 hours, I became furious. Why was no one speaking to me? Why were they all so rude — monks, nuns, and everyone? Be patient. Wait for God? Baloney, I thought. 

I felt helpless and alone. I wrote letters of rage and sorrow to God. Slowly, a surge of safety and truth, wrapped in silence, rose up inside me. I met my self. 

Alone but not lonely. 

2025.03.30 A Famous Story—Now and Forever. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Last night I dreamed about the parable called The Prodigal Son. When I woke up I had this sentence at the front of my mind:  Let go of your prideful ego and discover your famished soul. 

My first feeling was annoyance, and then I began to wonder if the sentence itself was prodigal, that is wasteful or extravagant especially with pride?  My mother was amazingly prodigal with my father’s hard-earned salary. Once I saw Dad cry about money, and once he cried prodigal tears over the dog he loved who obviously failed to look both ways before he raced across the road and was killed by a prodigal car that never even stopped! My little sister could easily have done the same thing, and it would have mysteriously been my fault for not watching her, because I was engrossed in my favorite book—prodigally!

You see what I mean about the many and varied complications this very prodigal parable invites. This is why so many preachers glibly blame Divinity itself, because of course Jesus had just told them about it all. Puffed up with pride, the disciples went forth, forgetting Jesus’s own favorite words: FEAR NOT.

*  *  *  * 

As I age I feel proud of myself even though I cannot mobilize like I once did. After all, I have survived. I remember my name. I still can lobby for all kinds of good things. My husband and I still love each other……. prodigally. I can laugh even at myself tottering along at 86. I pray that my adult children forgive me some of my own prodigality as they enjoy their own. 

*  *  *  * 

I’m not really starving, and yet when I die, God, please fill my famished soul. I suppose there’s one of those paradoxes often found in biblical story: the less you strive for pride the more you discover you have.  In fact I can read the entire Holy Communion/Eucharist as a paradox: we pray hard for the salvation we also acknowledge that we already have!   

I’m not really starving, yet when I die, God, please feed my famished soul anyway.  Thanks! 

FIGS ALMIGHTY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 3/23/25

Have you ever eaten a fig?  I have, and honestly, it wasn’t very delicious—too sweet. overloaded with seeds and with a tough consistency, not unlike the skin of an aging person, like me. Downright seedy!  (Luke 13:1-13)

I pinched the skin on the top of my hand  just to test this figgy metaphor, and LO!—my skin did NOT pop right back to smoothness. It actually waited in an ornery way for me to move my hand or touch it to make it smooth again. With horror, I imagined a day when I might not be able to re-smooth my aging hand, and it would be figgy and seedy forever.

Irritated with Jesus and his dumb parabolic analogies, I repeated my skin-pinching several times. It just made me annoyed, furious, to be honest. I felt like the disciples might have felt. They were committed to following him, because he just might be THE Messiah God promised Jews and everyone. Raw deal! Damn!  

I didn’t get the parabolic lesson. I hated it! What the bejesus IS the point anyway? I pinched my hands until they hurt, so I kissed them. Only then did my tears squeeze out. 

How beautiful is the fig tree that ripens and bears fruit in its time—in its time. Annoyed as it gets me, I do love the subtle wisdom of Jesus’s pace in life—steady and sure and patient all the way to Jerusalem, trial, death, and risen life. I always want to push it, hurry it. 

When I do I usually “trip”.   

MIRACLE. MUDDLE. MYSTERY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 2025.03.18

We are still in the midst of wearing green and celebrating St. Patrick who wasn’t really Irish. But you know these things happen, don’t you? 

Back in the sixth century Patrick traveled to Ireland on assignment: Convert these pagans to Christianity. What Patrick did, however, was to endear the Irish people to himself and he to them. Rather than confront them with an agenda to convert, he got to know them. He familiarized himself with their pagan ways and rituals. These pagans always used the sun as an image of Divinity. Patrick therefore incorporated that bright roundness onto the Christian cross.  To the people he was saintly simply because he respected them and their local traditions. 

If only we all could behave like Patrick and simply listen to each other with respect not agenda. DO NOT try to convert anyone to your own ways. Listen. Take the relational way, the way of letting-be. Patrick honored the pagan ways and used their own imagery. Here, for example, is a Celtic Cross with the round sun, favorite pagan symbol, superimposed onto it. 

Poet and devout Roman Catholic, the late Brian Doyle, demonstrates this way in his prayers, addressing Divinity as Coherent Mercy. Doyle minces no words in his prayer-talk. 

Prayer of Spitting Inchoate Rage That You Allow Such Things & People to Inflict Such Horrendous Pain & Agony, Especially on Little Kids, How Could You Let That Happen? Most of us secretly wonder about such mysteries but few of us let God know as directly as Brian Doyle does. I usually quiet my rage by reminding myself that God, after all, gave us freedom. Doyle knows all about this freedom, too, but he goes directly to God with his prayer-complaint: “How could You have given us such freedom? But you did; and so my prayer must be finally for me, to work harder against the dark, to sing louder, is that right? Your silence is eloquent again ‘as always’ as always. And so: amen. 

2025.03.09 BIG TENT/LENT SERENITY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

The Serenity Prayer—all of  it, written in 1951 and still so needed!

God, give me grace to accept with serenity 

the things that cannot be changed, 

Courage to change the things which should be changed, 

and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. 

Living one day at a time, 

Enjoying one moment at a time, 

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, 

Taking, as Jesus did, 

This sinful world as it is, 

Not as I would have it, 

Trusting that You will make all things right, 

If I surrender to Your will, 

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, 

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.

Noted American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was born over in Wright City, MO on June 21, 1892. He graduated from Eden Seminary in 1913 and also earned degrees from Yale Divinity School (1914, 1915). At Eden, Professor (later President) Samuel Press, who is the namesake of the school’s main building, particularly influenced Niebuhr. Ordained in the Evangelical Synod in 1915, Niebuhr was a pastor in Detroit and went on to teach at Union Theological Seminary. He authored books like "The Nature and Destiny of Man" and "Moral Man and Immoral Society."