2013.04.17 What To Do In the Valley of the Shadow of Death?

Hold hands.

The Boston Marathon tragedy has many complex facets and remains incomprehensibly tragic. Even so, we seek actions, answers, and accountability. The fact is that there isn’t much to do but pray and hold hands and wait as more data roll in to enlighten. Enlightenment, however, is only half the truth, holiness the other. What happens in such holocausts is not reasonable, or explicable. It is only healed by love and borne in faith.

“Reason is the soul’s left hand, and faith her right, by these we reach divinity.”  John Donne

Right now we are summoning every reasonable resource we can to understand. As tomorrows accumulate, faith will clasp onto the hand of reason as together they unite to help us go on living and loving.

The soul that does not value human life is stunted; and the soul that does not value divine life is equally disabled.

One day the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and "a little child will lead them," according to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (11:6) A little one, perhaps like Martin Richard below, who died as the result of the bomb explosions at the marathon on Boston's celebration of Patriots Day.  Will we follow?

2013.04,14 Potentiation Never Ends

“In the beginning . . . “  he began in somber tones.

I wrote it down in my brand new spiral notebook marked Old Testament; “In the beginning  . . . “  Then I waited, through a long pause, for more.

“In the beginning God potentiated life—over and over and over.” 

I loved that word, potentiate. I’m not sure if that is exactly what he said but that’s what I heard and never forgot.

Potentiation is what God, by whatever name, and there are many, is all about—over and over and over.  My time as a seminarian at Yale Divinity began in 1978 with this enormous required basic biblical course in Hebrew scripture.  The professor, Robert Wilson, has been teaching, potentiating, there for 40 years. (I never thought this then, but I bet he’s about my age now:)

I remember when some students nearly went nuts over an exam question which asked us to connect the texts about Sarah and Abraham in their aging process, with its attending issues, to our own lives and ministries. How would we use these texts to inform our pastoral care work, say in a nursing home? 

My recollection was that many students were angry and protested this approach, calling it proof- texting and all kinds of other putative interpretive “abnormalities” they thought were forbidden when working with sacred texts. I guessed they were afraid of aging and death, or other demons too fierce to mention.

But I loved it.  The issues were the same then as they are now, and I got it.  For me this approach made scripture come alive, and its people real. Years later I wrote two book of midrash stories using this connective experiential approach.

Recently I read that Robert Wilson said:”Religious tradition canonized the biblical text but it didn’t canonize an interpretation.  That is the job of each generation. . . .That’s the human condition. It was also an exilic problem.  How did I get where I am? How do I deal with tradition, with what has happened in the past? You have to figure out where you are and how you got there. It’s what being a fully involved adult means.”

It’s what Creator-God is all about: unending potentiation.

2013.04.10 Christian MIngle and Prayer

The TV ad for the dating service, Christian Mingle, promises:  “Find God’s Match For You.”

My first ugly thought was something like: OMG, I'm not sure I'd want to mingle exclusively just with Christians.  Good Lawd amighty forgive me!

BUT, we live in a consumer-driven/ marketing-obsessed culture.  What a thrilling prospect this ad promises, especially it you’ve tried all human means to find what some call “the perfect mate.”  Well, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a marriage, or a relationship, made in heaven, mostly because I don’t think of Godde as a yenta.

Don’t misunderstand me, I do think God cares greatly about each and all of us and desires our well being as much as we desire our own. Godde cares enough, however, to give us freedom to use our gifts, both natural and acquired, to live fruitful lives and discern our choices, even if some of them don’t work out just as we’d hoped.   

None of the above means to me that God has a plan, or a mate created and already picked for me, or you, if only we’d join Christian Mingle and find out—for a fee of course and with a guarantee that our mate will be a Christian, likely of a more conservative stripe than, for example, me. If you believe God has a match for you, then sign up. You may find someone who believes the same, and be compatibly happy ever after. 

How do we meet and mate?  Let me count the ways. Right now I am praying that a dozen women may meet a man who will love them and be loved by them, for better or worse. Why? 

Well, I pray not because I think God will matchmake, but because these women have told me their longings and I let everything be known to God—all my own fears, hope, longings, anxieties, sorrows, and desires— for myself and people I care about, near and far. Once I let God know what I want, I say AMEN and leave it, for today.  I don’t know the outcome, I only know what I’d like, and I’m not afraid to say it. 

Very often things work out as I desire, but not always. Is that because I was wrong to ask?  Not at all.  Is it because God didn’t grant my request?  No.

Prayer for me is more about nurturing and deepening an open and honest relationship with Godde, in whom I live and who lives and breathes in me, than it is about expecting prayer to make things happen. 

The Lord's Prayer prays: THY will be done, not MY will be done.  It’s an act of faith and trust, not control. I pray for the same reasons I talk to my spouse and closest friends or family about my concerns.

For me prayer (and its equivalent practices, including Reiki, meditation, et. al.)  is what connects me to Godde-in-God, to christ-in-Christ, to God-in-me—and you.    Prayer is what lets me in on myself, too.

2013.04.07 Phineas

The sanctuary’s emptiness made it even more hallowed than when it was filled with exuberant hosannas and bloated hallelujahs—echoes of Easter spent.   

I felt spent too. I sat alone in the pew of a tiny suburbanish church, its steeple piercing the blue sky, humming the hymn of the 50s, What’s it All About Alfie?”   Out of the corner of my eye I saw something green poking out from under a front pew. I stooped and discovered a leftover palm—aging and beginning to brown and dry.  Its still sharp point stuck stubbornly into the aisle.  Inexplicably, I thought of Phineas.

Phineas was like a perfect storm: thick glasses, overweight, duck-footed and lumbering. His face was pocked with teenage acne, and he played the violin.  Put those ingredients all together, then put poor Phineas in teenage terrorist camp, by which I mean the daily school bus full of testosterone-challenged seventh grade boys.

Every single day Phineas would slowly climb onto the bus. Every single day the boys would call to him to come to the back of the bus and sit with them. Their cooing was not friendly. Girls tended to sit in the front of the bus, as did I.  Yet, how could Phineas sit with the girls?  It would have made his perfect storm even more disaster-bound. So he lugged his violin to the rear of the bus.

They pushed him to the floor; they grabbed his hat; they spit on him; they opened his violin case and tried to play on it while singing dumb songs; and every single day Phineas would miss his stop and have to walk back to get home.

God knows what awaited him at home. Love, I hope.  But if I were his parent I’d drive him to school and pick him up. But he might not have told his parents about his daily torture. Why add to his humiliation like Mr. Fitz, the paunchy bus driver, did? Mr. Fitz laughed and scoffed and never intervened to save Phineas, or me.

To witness such suffering and feel helpless is a trauma as vivid to me now as it was sixty-three years ago. My choices seemed almost as paralyzing as Phineas’s must have felt to him. I could fight, flee, or freeze. I was too scared to fight so I froze in my seat, wishing and wishing, fervently as a prayer, that Phineas would fight. 

After a few weeks of school bus culture, I chose flight. I made my mother drive me to school. Knowing she’d remember my carsickness, I told her I now had bus-sickness. I did, but it wasn’t motion sickness; it was compassion nausea.  I didn’t tell the truth, nor befriend Phineas because I feared repercussions.

By senior high school my own hormonal rage kicked in, and I actually dated one of those bus bullies to see what he was really like. He told me his father hit him, then laughed. I was sixteen years old when I understood that bullying was total avoidance of vulnerability, mostly because someone had bullied you first and you had to make sure it never happened again. This boy had turned into a macho hot shot, full of bravado and just as scared inside as Phineas, and me.

After high school I never saw Phineas again, but I never forgot him. I never knew him except by heart. When Google-God came to be, I searched Phineas but found no data that fit my Phineas. It’s funny, but I count him as one of the inspirations that called me into ordained ministry—one way to make up for having been a silent complicit bully myself.  

Sitting in the pew fingering the palm’s green tip, I said one small alleluia for Phineas. I hoped he was alive and a concert master violinist in some major symphony orchestra where huge crowds applauded and never hissed.  

2013.04.03 Poetry of Rob Brakeman

I'm proud and pleased to share with my blog readers my son Rob's poetry.  He has recently become a blogger himself. You can find his work on www.robbrakemanpoetry.com.  Poetry is one of the creative endeavors that, to me, is very spiritual. Why?  Because it has a way of going to the heart and soul of the matter, giving it full dignity as it is, grit and all, while at the same time communicating hope and new life. Matter and Spirit together.

Here is a poem Rob wrote some nine years ago when his brother was critically ill and Rob kept vigil in the hospital. His brother would do the same for him.

ANOTHER LATE NIGHT

an already slow elevator that stops on every floor
doctors and nurses, interns and surgeons
light blue OR scrubs and white coats
pens, clipboards and beepers
white sheets
the strange and continual smell of onion soup?
is that it?  onion soup?
peristaltic pumps clicking on and off,
beeping too loudly when the bags are empty
intravenous pick line and dried blood
that yellow paste around every IV insertion
morphine
codeine
Tylenol
bed sores
blood pressure and pulse
an impatient nurse
no information
waiting
fluorescent lights
ileostomy
colo-rectal
gastroenterology
adhesions and adhesiolysis
holy shit

and there you were
in the middle of it all
like a small pea
held delicately between the forefinger and thumb of a giant


   by Rob Brakeman when his brother John was in the hospital, 2004-5

2013.03.31 Eastering

Easter for clergy is exhausting, even if you’re only assisting. I’m the good kind of tired, the kind that comes from a fine meal in good company with lots of laughter and children’s faces, the kind that satisfies.  

In our  parish, when small children come to the altar rail to receive their share of the Holy Communion bread, which is a flat white tasteless wafer, they run or skip. Their parents grab them by whatever is grabbable to hold them back, to make them wait, corral their eager energy.  But the children know better.  They know when something is special and they know that they belong. So they run up, hop onto the kneeler, prop their small elbows onto the rail and stick out their hands—right palm over left, as they’ve been taught. Some kids curl their fingers into tiny tight cups. They try to get the formation just right.  

The priest comes by to give them their “treat.” When I am the priest, I look into their turned up faces and bend down a bit to their level to place, sometimes wedge, a wafer into each pair of cupped hands as I say their name, or my sister or brother,  “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

Then they pop it into their mouth or take a bite and discover again that it tastes yukky.  Still, they know that it’s important and that everyone is eating it with them, all together the same. Small faces register like and dislike —yes and no at once. There’s no faking here. Kids are truth.

Is it okay to say yes and no at once to Godde? Even okay to say yes, but—sometimes?

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish 

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don't paragraph 

my letters

Sweetcakes God said 

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is

Yes Yes Yes
                                    “God Says Yes To Me” by Kaylin Haught from The Palm of Your Hand, 1995

2013.03.29 Listening

It’s Good Friday, a paradoxical day when Christians remember Jesus’ hideous death on a cross and all the injustice and pain in the world, and at the same time see in it hope for transformation—brought forth by divine/human collaboration. Kinda crazy really, but hope against hope is like that.

One can only pray and write poetry. Here’s one that captures the whole hope-driven journey.

LISTENING
    by David Ignatow (American poet, born in Brooklyn, NY, 1914)

You wept in your mother’s arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
Listening to your sobs,

I was resolved against my will
to do well by us
and so I said, without thinking,
in great panic, To do wrong
in one’s own judgment,
though others thrive by it,
is the right road to blessedness.
Not to submit to error
is in itself wrong
and pride.

Standing beside you,
I took an oath
to make your life simpler
by complicating mine
and what I always thought
would happen did:
I was lifted up in joy.