2025.07.20 THE GOLDEN RULE? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

 

Back in the 1970s I was in seminary at Yale Divinity School, hoping to get ordained a priest in the Episcopal church. The very first required course was Old Testament. I took copious notes. I only wondered why the “Golden Rule” was standard for all good Christian people to obey when it came from the Old Testament. I thought Jesus invented it.  And yet here it was in the Old Testament. 

Of course I learned all the linguistics, the differing versions, who wrote what and why. All this and my four children at home riding bikes to school while their parents worked, dad to make money and mom to study God and get ordained priest. I was young, well, midlife. I aspired to just about everything and anything that caught my zealous eye. 

One question lingered and nagged. I knew the academic answer, the scholarly one, and yet………..I was embarrassed to ask, let’s say, to admit I didn’t know: how come Jesus’ own rule, the one we called “golden” was in the Old Testament first? We weren’t told exactly, or I hadn’t listened well enough, or I just needed an expert.

One day I spotted the campus rabbi and impulsively ran after him. He moved very fast, like a rabbit on the run, and I pursued and cornered him as he went into his office where he sat down. He did not invite me in but I went in, myself quite breathless by now. I stood facing the rabbi, and of course had no idea what exactly I wanted, so I stammered: What is the Golden Rule and why is it golden?

I waited, imagining that I would miss or be late for my next class, because he of course would have a longer speech than all of Job. 

“I can tell you the whole thing while I stand on one foot,” the rabbi grinned. I laughed and relaxed. Then he stood on one foot and clearly recited, yes, The Golden Rule.

WHAT YOU HATE DO NOT DO TO ANYONE ELSE. 

IT’S GOLD BECAUSE IT HAS THE HIGHEST VALUE IN ALL EARTH OR HEAVEN, NEVER TARNISHES, AND LASTS FOREVER FOR EVERYONE.  

I thanked him. As he stood, he reached for my hand with both of his, he winked and said: "All that includes animals and plants, by the way." 

2025.07.13 ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN...AS IT IS ON EARTH, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Here is a view of New York City surrounding the great green expanse called Central Park.  

In today’s climate of fear, I relish this memory of a great green park inside a great big pile of skyscrapers. I see this relationship as mutually nourishing. A GREAT PILE OF SKYSCRAPERS RISES UP TO PROTECT A GREAT EXPANSE OF GREEN GRASSY PARK THAT THEN NOURISHES THOSE SKYSCRAPERS AS THEY REACH TO TOUCH THE SKY.  

As a small child I thought the park was heavenly, and the skyscrapers earthbound. Now I think I don’t want one without the other.   AMEN

2025.07.06 HOPE—FULLNESS. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Poetry

Whatever happens, stay alive.

Don't die before you're dead.

Don't lose yourself, don't lose hope, don't loose direction. Stay alive, with yourself, with every cell of your body, with every fiber of your skin. 

Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design.

Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope.

Stay alive with joy. 

There is only one thing you should not waste in life,

and that's life itself..."

Virginia Woolf

AND a sudden surprise popped out: a sprout on the “dying” presumed dead Amaryllis!

AND a portrait of three eager young bell ringers—a way for bored young children to participate in the liturgy of the Mass. I call it timed noisiness.  Let’em ring!! They are a sacrament. 

2025.06.29 ALL Time Perspectives ALL At Once. Lyn Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.    

As a writer of memoir I remember time mostly from the point of view of the past into the present. I’ve paid too little attention to the future. Luke’s gospel tells/warns us never to look BACK but to go forward.

Today in my aging I think that if we do NOT look ahead and move ahead we all, the entire community of Life on Earth, will stagnate collectively. We will eliminate ourselves. No one is able to thrive on memory alone. 

The only biblical writing that suggests such a forward-looking vision is the book of Job. Job has been critiqued and analyzed and “scholarized” practically to death— and yet it remains alive and well! 

I live now in a community of retired whities. We don’t talk about religion, yet when I dare to wonder about it, some people tell me they do not even have a Bible. So get one and read Job, I suggest.  What’s Job?  One resident ordered a bible, found Job and read it. Within weeks she reported with a grin: “Job and I are okay.” 

My theory? The Book of Job contains and lauds ALL of Creation and includes ALL the time values. It carefully and fully articulates the past history of this character, including all the sins and bad stuff alongside every critical perspective possible within Job’s own life, his autobiography. AND it tells us the envisioned future. 

The best part is that scholars and casual readers alike all are fascinated. Job has more written about it—more plays, works of art, scholarly texts, and so on—than any other work of art, literature, music, on and on. It covers ALL the time values. 

Forgive. Forget. Look Ahead. Move Forward.   

2025.06.22 Tragicomedies or Simply Life—Both. Lyn Brakeman Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Who cares, and yet everyone cares—enough to laugh and weep together with every passing sigh or groan? Yes?  YES!

                        *  *  *  *

Any abrupt and sudden death is shocking. We rarely understand it, and yet, our grief is deeper than it would be if we’d known all about it, if we understood. And too, we do not know exactly what to do or say. What is most important I believe is to gather and talk with those who are also shocked. No, you will not figure it out, never fully understand it, but yes, you may embrace each other anew and weep together before you leap back into life and doings. Sometimes it is helpful to ask the immediately bereaved what would help them.

I recall one such situation when the only thing the bereaved said was: “Please just sit with me and don’t talk.” 

                        *  *  *  *

In 1979, my youngest sister died suddenly post surgery. She was 35. I suddenly could not breathe, literally gasped and gulped. I guess my body could not take in the shock. My mind, despite medical explanations, could not make sense of this death, could not find someone or something to blame. Time and people in sight, at hand but silently, held me in a net of caring, until my lungs gulped air, and a medical professional diagnosed and treated my asthma. “Probably dormant,” the doctor said. 

*  *  * *

Remember the small scene in the biblical New Testament when Jesus, accompanied by his close friends, looked out over the land, his beloved Jerusalem, and he wept?  He’d just heard that his best friend Lazarus had died.  Dominus flevit. means The Lord wept. 

And here in Israel today stands a small church shaped like a teardrop. It honors Jesus’s tears, his grief. Simply so.   

2025.06.15 FATHERS ALL. HAPPY AND BLESSED DAY. Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post.

Just this week when my husband, Dick, and I were watching some humorous Brit television, I had a spontaneous thought: “I love your father!”   

I do not know exactly know where my thought came from, except that I trust spontaneous “blurts” like this, because they are always meaningful and always engage my heart. That’s why I love biblical stories, because they tell me something about Divinity, something about Love, and something about myself—all in one blurt!

In this moment I suppose I was thinking about Father’s Day as I glanced at a framed photo of Dick’s parents on their wedding day. I thought how elegant they looked, how much I love their son, and how I wished that I had known them better.  

Nevertheless! I followed my inspiration and recalled a couple of tiny Dad stories.

-When Dick was a young child of four he got a fever and the doctor said he had to be in bed, kept warm and immobile. The world was waiting for penicillin. His dad of course worried and felt the need to “do” something, so he braced the cold day and went out. He returned to his son’s bedside bringing with him a street Santa with a little bell and all the trimmings. It was all he could do as a dad who loved his small son. Santa Claus had no gifts except the magic of his message: Merry Christmas. Ho. Ho. Ho.  Soon the little child did get better. Miracle? Who knows and who cares. The child lived. The small spontaneous gesture was enough.

-Another remembered story was about when Dad as a young boy working part-time as a boy with a broom in some factory. They paid a pittance to sweep up the dust and dirt on the floors. In the process the boy overheard some men talking secretively about ways to sabotage the business. He sensed it was wrong and told others. Courage.

-Another story I loved to hear was that, although Dad was wary of flying, he agreed to a flight for the sake of his business. Before he boarded the plane, he went round the airport and put coins in every insurance-selling machine and addressed the payment slips to Dick’s mom. Tragically, and NOT by divine design as some people think, the plane crashed killing everyone on that flight, including this dad. Dick was a junior in college. Faculty and friends helped him get a flight back home to where his mom was. Within a month all those insurance checks arrived, all of them valid and honored. These monies in time helped to pay for Dick’s children’s college tuitions. It was a tragic accident not organized by Divinity. It is humanity with the freedom given at Creation, that can turn such evil into good.  

-Just today I saw a father and son. Dad was helping the child to learn golf. Finally, this wee toddler, after several futile swings with his small club, connected with the ball, and whacked it good. Dad gave him a big hug. The child toddled on down the hill to the waiting golf cart where he stayed while Dad hit his own ball with a whack. It was a win for both of them. How do I know?  I simply felt its truth in my heart. 

A miracle is something Divinity does for you that you cannot do for yourself, and yet, ironically, it often bears unexpected good fruit.  Silly small things that matter big.   

2025.06.08 PENTECOSTAL BIBLICAL DISSONANCE, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

If the Holy Spirit is anything it is full of hot air!  

William Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur Georgia, reminded us all that if the Bible is anything it is off key and filled with dissonance. 

Personally, this is precisely why I do trust the Bible, and its many translations, to leave room for me in it. I can always squeeze my perspectives in, because I do not take every word literally, ipsissima verba, though I take every word seriously.  

Women who experience a call to the sacramental ministry of priest are organized and have been lobbying for ordination in the RC Church for many years, are still hopeful, and still waiting, and still failing to understand precisely why their gender disqualifies them from ordained ministry.

I was at a grandson's college graduation recently. There were many women who have served in executive positions sitting on the platform. 

I also remember the politics and the pressures for a female presidency way back in the 1960s—at an all-women's college no less!!! 

Now I live with my husband at a residential retirement community. The entire administrative staff is made up of women. Let me say that a leadership team that is exclusively female is ALSO not the best model. 

Effective leadership is not either-or, or both-and, regarding gendered pronouns, but rather, it is according to vocational qualifications, educational and experiential qualifications, training, and yes, a deep inner calling, some of us would identify as divinely inspired—none of it bound by gender. 

Thank you, Holy Spirit!