2018.09.23 A Crisis of Formation In the Episcopal Church?

Does anyone imagine that the core values of the Christianity—like social justice, prayer, outreach, compassion, liturgy, ministry, care for all Creation—flourish without a solid rootedness in faith formation? 

Yesterday Dick and I were presenters at a day-long Ministry Network Showcase, sponsored by the diocese. There were thirteen presenters sharing specific ministries focused on Reimagining Our Congregations, Building Our Relationships, and Engaging Our World. We spoke as the Coordinators of Education for Ministry (EfM) in the diocese. Here’s Dick at our resource table. So cute, isn’t he?

Obviously all presentations, strictly timed (with only a couple of cheats) at 18 minutes each, overlapped in energy and intent: being in relationship to work together as ministers to bring about justice, compassion, and peace. All these works can happen without religious faith of course, but the fuel for their implanting and ongoing verve is spiritual—the love of God in our flesh. It’s shareable!   Ministry is present in whatever we do. Think of it this way: everyone we meet and everything that happens presents us with an opportunity to enhance or impede the flow of divine love.

To avoid dryness, Dick and I invited the audience to listen in on a conversation between two lay Episcopalians about The Episcopal Church (TEC). We opened with “Houston, we have a problem! We can’t get down!”

What’s that got to do with the Church?

Despite being lost in wonder, love and praise over our liturgy and music, we haven’t done well landing in ongoing faith formation for adults—ADULTS!

Some facts—not fake news, taken from an article by Missy Morain, lifelong Christian formation advocate in the Diocese of Los Angeles, entitled “A Crisis of Formation.” 

“Christian Faith Formation in TEC is lifelong growth in the knowledge, service and love of God as followers of Christ and is informed by Scripture, Tradition and Reason.” That, dear friend, is TEC’s General Convention (GC) resolution passed in 2009.

Are we doing it?

Not so much.
    -At our 2018 GC there was NO talk about formation and discipleship.
    -Over the past nine years GC made significant changes to structure and governance of TEC.  They chose in 2012, just three years after that noble resolution, to END the work of the Standing Commission on Lifelong Christian Formation, to CUT its budget by $2 million, AND to reduce its full-time staff from 9 people to 4. FOUR!
    -There is only enough staff and funding to work on formation for ages 13-30. Do the math. Is that lifelong?

It IS a crisis. What now?

EfM of course. It’s offered by the Beecken Center of the School of Theology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennesee and has been around since 1975. It is defined as a distance learning program of adult formation—a curriculum covering both biblical testaments, church history and theology over four years. EfM meets in small weekly seminar groups guided by certified and re-certified mentors. EfM happens all over TEC and the Anglican Communion AND it’s ecumenical, open to all denominations. 

Too big a commitment!

Sign up one year at a time.

My Rector’s too busy to take on another parish program.

EfM is not a parish program. It comes at no cost and with nothing to do. Maybe offer space.

Oh, the vestry will love that! 

EfM thrives on TR. That’s theological reflection, a process that helps us connect the wisdom of our faith tradition to our lived experience. TR is spiritual: EfM’s heart and soul. Insights are electric!

Come on! Really?

Yup. Here are a couple of true examples.

I’m a parent serving on our local school board. I was recently stunned when one of our kindergarten teachers came before the board. She spoke about EfM, said it made her a theologian and a minister. She asked us if she could apply the 18 CEUS she got yearly for her EfM training to fulfill her continuing education requirement as a teacher.  She told us she saw her students with new eyes. I was so impressed.

Did the board grant her request?

You bet we did—unanimously.

Another EfM’er, a businessman, raved about his EfM group, told me he never thought of himself as a minister. “Imagine me a minister!” He laughed, then told me he saw his staff and clients differently. “Maybe I try to see them as God sees them.”

Hey, Houston, EfM is a way for TEC to land and to honor its own resolution.

Besides brochures we made book marks with contact information and EfM’s purpose and mission:

LIFELONG CHRISTIAN
FORMATION GIVE US
STURDY LEGS AS WE
ENGAGE THE WORLD.

EFM GIVES US
CONFIDENCE TO SPEAK
GRACEFULLY ABOUT OUR
RELIGION’S VALUE

EfM Coordinators:
    Lyn Brakeman:lyngbrakeman@gmailcom, 978-314-7763
    Dick Simeone: sim6366@gmail.com, 978-314-7762

2018.09.16 A Rant

Since this is a rant I begin with asking forgiveness from anyone who may be hurt by its excesses.

I’m not shocked at the omnipresence of clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Nor am I shocked by the ongoing widespread coverup. I am, however, incredulous that so many men whose vocations and careers have taken them to the top echelons of an institution which calls itself religious have become so immersed in pathological denial that they are “eating their young.”

Why doesn’t someone notice the disconnect? Institutionalized moral rules for good give rise to moral ills. It’s ironic to me that this institution funds and advocates for social justice while simultaneously being a source of social injustice.

There is no verifiably direct causality but there is uncanny correlation between required celibacy for clergy and sexual abuse of the innocent; between prohibition against ordaining woman clergy and isolation with increased vulnerability of male clergy, both heterosexual and homosexual; between prohibitions against divorce, birth control, abortion, and remarriage in the church and painful offshoots like poverty, poor health, hunger, unemployment, domestic misery, homelessness, suicide, prostitution, infant mortality, crimes of violence, and the biggest stressor of all on human and natural resources: overpopulation. Overpopulation!!

The largest Christian denomination in the world is not exempt from the part its policies play in the brokenness of those it seeks to love and serve, including its clergy.

I know. I know. I know  . . .
    -Debate on these issues at all levels of the institutional church is in process and is very complex—historically, politically and theologically. Debate is better than stonewalling. Maybe the clergy crimes are generational, but the wounds and healing processes of the victims know no generation, no statute of limitation.
    -Truly, some of my dearest friends are Roman Catholic.
    -I have never been abused by a Roman Catholic priest but have counseled many clients who have, including a former Roman Catholic priest who had been deposed for pedophilia. He had lost his entire pension and a large chunk of his soul.
    -I have experienced excellent spiritual direction from Roman Catholic priests.
    - I am an Associate of the Religious Sisters of Mercy; many sisters feel as pained as I do.
    -The majority of Roman Catholic clergy are faithfully carrying out their vocations and share my distress. Institutionalized abuse is not unique to this church. Its epidemic proportions are. 
    -Attracted to the sacrament of the Mass and the embodied way of prayer, I once took instructions to become Roman Catholic. I could not become Roman Catholic, because the only woman up front on the altar scene was a statue—sweet, silent, and immobile.
   
What does this twisted torturous “morality” do to faithful people inside and outside the institution? What does it do to the wrenching disconnect between preaching and practice? What does it do to the God who has infinite love for the infinitesimal?  What does it do to the Way of Love Jesus Christ proclaimed? It raises all hell, that’s what it does.

Is this assessment fair? NO
Is it complete? NO
Is it angry? YES
Is it truthful? YES
Is it hopeless? NO
Is it a prayer?  YES
Is it a holy NO? YES

Is there a rave in my rant? YES—for those Roman Catholic clergy and lay people who excise beauty, hope, and community from exquisite liturgy—the consistent, repetitive simplicity of ancient word, ancient meal, and love-longing prayers. 

2018.09.09 Moments To Ponder In Poetry

The poet Jane Kenyon wrote: “A Poet’s job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.” For this you have to notice what is and distill it for good reason.

LANDSCAPING?

They came
they saw
they did not conquer
but laid to rest.

I watched
I waited
I did not pray
but vigil kept.

My vigil began at seven when the nagging bleat of the buzzsaw
brought me awake with a shudder.

Another tree
—alive and well and old like me—
with a diagnosis I did not understand:
no disease, no deterioration, no blight

The operation took four hours and five men
in electric green shirts and orange helmets
They worked with care, efficiency
    no step overlooked, little talk—hints of tenderness
Surgery is like that: assess and cut twig, branch, limb, trunk, stump—one by one. Or is that
    autopsy?

No battle, no guns, no bombs, no fall—just an
enormously majestic oak of great worth
    of great dignity
        of elegant beauty
            of saintly service
a steadfast presence shading and shielding tender underlings for years—
    gone.
   
The pronouncement? Death by landscaping.
The why? Development: more condos like mine.
Yes, but . . . in the end the landscape suffers—like mine when
my parents— one by one—became memories on the landscape of my mind
    alone.
                by Lyn Gillespie Brakeman, 2018

TWINIGHT      

The evening is lovely
light blue, mild with
cloud puffs so
light they don’t interfere
with sun’s light.
We have it all tonight
the air unconditioned, and Lo!
a doe light-stepping the green expanse
of lawn, her speckled fawn at play.
I cough.
Her ears stand at attention, her nose
combs the air, head pivots as the
little one scampers, frolics—completely free to experiment
with life while
her mama stands sentinel, and buck-daddy lurks nearby in the woods,
ready to charge at a moment’s notice.
He is unafraid for the sake of love,
not budging even for the huge noisy rider mower

I worry the fawn will dart out into the road, get run
over—die.

A chill moves the air. I turn to reach for
my sweatshirt and when I turn
back, they are gone
vanished—so close and yet so far—like Godde

Oh, stay in the woods, small one—grow and
play.
Soon enough you will have to be watchful—not yet

Pink streaks over the blue
sun going and going.

It’s twinight—so pretty in peace.

Everyone in the world everywhere has
twinight.
                               Lyn Gillespie Brakeman, 2014

2018.09.02 Eighty Is Eighty

This is how my 80th birthday celebration went.  I’ve written about this in many ways in different sites, but I’m not done celebrating. 

I was born August 7, 1938. My husband Dick was born also on August 7 but in 1941. His brain is three years younger than mine. That’s helpful at my age! (Photo November, 2017)

We decided in 2018 to celebrate our one day twice—one dinner out for my day and one for his. The first dinner was at a new Indian restaurant, Nirvana in Cambridge. We love Indian food and had scheduled our reservation early, 5:30—the hour of dining for oldies and what I’d sworn I’d never do. We expected nirvana. When we arrived we were greeted by the noisy, messy chaos of a birthday party for a group of eleven-year-old boys, complete with birthday cake and a food fight. So we talked about memories of being wildly pre-pubescent ourselves and memories of being parents of seven children and a few grandchildren in the same state of explosive life.

Our second chosen restaurant is a favorite neighborhood restaurant—Italian, Dick’s heritage. We are friendly with the staff. I have learned a few Italian words and some of the wait staff speak Spanish. It’s the restaurant we went to nearly every night when we first moved to Cambridge eight years ago and were waiting for our appliances to be installed. We were sure we’d be feted and treated like the regulars we are, and especially with a high profile birthday. However, both managers were on vacation, the place was hopping with people who had spilled out and into the restaurant from an event in nearby Danehy Park, and they were understaffed and rushing around, even had the bartender waiting tables. They hardly noticed us. We talked about the spirituality of patience, finally agreeing that it was for the saints, or at least the birds.  Spoiled, privileged, entitled, yes, but not guilty. Prego.

We got off to our two weeks' vacation in Nantucket the next day. Even the ferry food tasted good, and the sun shone brightly as the sea breeze unruffled our feathers. We were almost afraid to try again at our favorite island restaurant, 56 Union. We waited till Monday, a low night we hoped, and we went at 7 p.m. As we came in the hostess asked us if we’d like to be seated in “the quiet room.”  Ah!  Aging is good.

At the end of our birthday month after we were back home, my four children, all from Connecticut, came to take me out for lunch on Sunday August 26. They had asked what I wanted and I told them I wanted to be together with them—just them, no spouses or grandchildren. They thought we could meet somewhere equidistant, but I said I wanted them to come here. One daughter had never seen where I live in retirement. And so it was. Our lunch at Artistry on the Green in Lexington, was elegant, quiet, and relaxed. No agendas, no need for deep confessions, no leftover family kvetches, no pressurized joy. It was perfect, which doesn’t mean there was no chaos in each life. That was put aside for the day. It was a ritual as holy as Sunday church or my birth day, Sunday. They gave me a funny card, a multi-colored piñata signed with little love notes from each one of them, and a gift card for the Seaside Motel in Maine where we for years have spent Thanksgiving week and celebrated our wedding anniversary, November 23.  And they paid the tab.

(Robert William, 51,III, Jill Barlow, 54, Lynda Gillespie, 80, John Thomas, 47, Beverley Ann, 55—all Brakeman)

Eighty for me is not the new 60, or 40. Eighty is quiet of soul—glory, gratitude, humor, love, and good looks thrown in. 

2018.08.26 Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

You would be 107 today were you still alive. Happy Birthday wherever you are, Dad. I miss you. I’ve read that images of loved ones fade overtime, and that the face is the last to disappear from the mind's-eye memory. I still remember your face, Dad. I can see without a photo—lucky  because the scan of a very old photo didn't work. I also remember your personality and your influence on my life.

I wrote a lot about you in my memoir, especially the moments of spiritual understanding you gave me, times when you’d call me Lynda, the name you chose for me at birth. You chose the spelling, so you could call me Lyn, but then you and Mom called me Lynnie.

You called my Lynda when you were mad at me, like the night I tried, almost successfully, to sneak out to meet my teenage boyfriend, just to see if we could get away with it. We didn’t. You spotted my absence and hollered into the night from the front door of our suburban house: LYNDA!  It was louder than the blast of a train’s horn. I tore back home, feigning annoyance, but feeling secretly protected. Getting caught was less threatening than teenage sex in a car.

You called me Lynda when we had political fights, and then too when I told you I aspired to be ordained an Episcopal priest. I stammered to explain my sense of vocation. You stopped me and simply said: “I understand, Lynda.”  I was almost forty years old then, but I felt adult. I suppose a parent always feels like a parent even with a grown child and the reverse, but this time I felt truly dignified. Thanks, Dad.

Yes, I remember your  sarcasm. I’d been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. You said:  “There must be some mistake” then immediately said you were kidding, but it stung. I will say, however, that I didn’t give it much pain-time or credence, knowing that nasty humor was martini-generated. I also knew it was probably a critique you, the fifth child of a mother who abandoned her own aspirations to be an opera singer in order to have children, had heard about yourself. You and I, however were worthy of praise.

There was one time though when your silence, not your words, hurt me and shaped my self-image. I was five, a shy child, an introvert, like you. I wanted your praise and Mom was always in the way with excesses of adulation—compensatory for your silence, and mine I think. She complained to you about my refusal to greet the cheery doorman with cheer.“What’s wrong with that child?” she said.  You, Dad, said nothing.

You could be too quiet like me, but when you spoke you were honest. Do you remember the time you and Farmer Kurtie worked together with cattle prods to coax an angry bull onto a ramp and up into the truck that would take him home after the stud affair? You were a city guy. This was not your thing. I watched in horror, sure that ferocious bull would charge and kill you; instead he relented and ran onto the truck. I was so relieved and impressed. “Daddy,” I said, “”you were so brave! Were you scared?”  You said, “Scared as scared could be, Lynnie." I hugged you so hard, just for telling the truth.

So, Dad, on your natal anniversary, I will remember you in these ways:
    I will sit in your huge red leather chair and pound the arm with my fist, as you used to when you wanted to make some point. I love your chair, and I love that I have it.
    I will say your favorite phrase: “What’s the point?” during the day and in my prayers. It was the last thing you said to me when you were dying. I will resist trying to answer that question and assume you know the answer, and that you were wise to ask it over and over.
    I will re-read my memoir chapter:”The Old Sweater” about how I wore your old torn golf sweater around for a couple of years after you died. The sweater’s sleeves hung down to my thighs when I let them. You loved that old sweater, Dad, and I loved you.

Today I discovered the answer to “What’s the point?” Celebrating my 80th birthday with my four adult children with me in the middle (Robert William III, Jill Barlow, Beverley Ann, John Thomas) was a perfect day—good weather, good food, good conversation, good company, good laughter, good sharing, good love and Love. That’s the point, isn’t it, Dad?

Love,
Lynnie

2018.08.19 Two Sisters In a Basket?

Here is a poster by Maggie Meredith, Nantucket artist and poet (1922-2012). I have stared at it and smiled for some years. It reminds me of a feline version of me and my sister.

The poster hangs in the living room of our little timeshare cottage in Nantucket—the one Dick and I purchased in 1985 just before we were married in November, 1986. We change, our little cottage stays the same.

My interest in this poster is that it is expressive and whimsical. The kitties remind me of me and my younger sister Laurie—our personalities and different stances towards life. It cracks me up.

The white one looks alert and ready to pounce with a purr or a claw at whatever she has to do to manage things at a moment’s notice. Sometimes she pounces or springs into action too soon. When this happens it can be, well, messy or aggressive, though always well-intentioned. She protects people or defends them against injustices. That’s her strength and can be heroic, like a “knight in shining armor.”  Sometimes her power overwhelms.

I am more like the black kitty. I am just as alert but more worried about things in general, and sometimes about my sister’s ardor, especially if she is trying to protect me, and especially if I don’t need it. My ways are more cautious, considered, wise.

Sometimes I wait too long to jump in with assertions or actions, but when I do, I am focused and persistent, like the time over 20 years ago when Laurie and I collaborated on a book, and the publisher accepted my prose but not her poetry. I knew it would hurt my sister, but, after consulting with many people and praying like crazy, I accepted the publishing offer. Laurie felt left behind and crushed, her assumptions being that we were at work on our relationship, getting closer. I felt selfish and selfish-er, assuming we were at work on a book only. Our relationship suffered great pain and wounding I imagined was inflicted by me on her. Our needs were very different, though we didn’t know it then.

Many times we have fought over our differences; broken our relationship; striven to heal; tried to understand, and wounded our relational esteem. I have envied her, and she me. We are now able to tussle and burble, giggle and grin, then, sighing, sink into old age free of the stink and stench of envy or competition—dark forces that have shadowed our love and obscured the grace of God in our midst.

Still, we are in the same basket together, so we’ve tried to fight hard—and honestly. We’ve tried even harder to reconcile—honestly. It only took 70+ years.

Laurie uses her power wisely; I use my wisdom powerfully. Both of us agree that our efforts have paid off, and both of us are grateful to the God of our Christian faith whose Love heals all wounds and cares for each of us exactly as we are.  

2018.08.12 Art Is Memory

"Art is memory. It is the excavation of so many memories we have had - of our mothers, our best and worst moments, of glorious experiences we have had with friends or films or music or dance or a lovely afternoon on a sloping, green hill. All of this enters us and, if we are artists, must be shared, handed over to others. This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  Martha Graham, modern dance artist (1894-1991). Photo portrait by Yousuf Karsh, 1948.

We are in Nantucket, a place of memory—over 50 years of it. Everyone’s memories are different. Everyone’s creative expression is unique. Everything passes into memory. Nothing will ever be the same. Graham calls this progress. I call it the way of the Spirit—creating, re-creating, re-membering, over and over and over again in multiple shapes and sizes.

Isn’t this what the art of Scripture is—re-member, re-create, re-call, re-invite?  Nothing is new and everything is new, generation by generation of interpretation. Know where you came from and hand it all over to others. That’s how it lasts. Graham sank into a major depression after she left ballet. Her wisdom came out of this darkness; she re-created her art and her life in choreography until her death in 1991. 

Is this what Mary of Nazareth did when she found herself pregnant? She raced off alone to see her cousin Elizabeth. What woman would set off on such a difficult and arduous journey in that vulnerable condition? Wasn’t Joseph available? Oh, that’s right he didn't know yet. This unbidden state of affairs had to be frightening. We don't know if Mary was depressed, but the story tells us she felt a familiar spiritual assurance before she fled into the hills.

I remember a time when I thought I was pregnant and wanted to flee like Mary. I was in high school. I was going steady with the man who in time became my first husband. We shivered in fear—together. He would call me every single day to check on my menstrual status. Our code was: “Are there carp in the H’s pool?” Really! No meant I had not gotten my period, and yes that I had. If I answered yes we planned to sneak into the H’s pool, a neighborhood rarity in the 1950s, and take a big fat illegal bloody swim—quietly in the dark.

That’s how crazy we felt at the prospect of our tender young lives being possibly over, or at least so disrupted that we would be rent asunder by parental rage, or worse, divine wrath. My mother caught me sobbing, so I confessed my fear. She sent us to the local GP who told us the facts of life—again. Then he suggested that our fears had caused us to imagine a scientific impossibility. (We hadn’t even had intercourse, just got overheated, and imagined the worst, something like the sin of the biblical Onan who spilled some sperm, but in our case we imagined that such spillage could defy the law of gravity and travel upward and into my womb.) 

The kindly doctor might as well have been God, because his word alone dispelled our fears, and, miraculously, induced my menstrual blood the very next day. Mary of Nazareth discovered that Joseph would marry her, and that her elderly cousin had an irregular, postmenopausal, pregnancy.

My story isn’t the same as Mary’s, but I re-membered hers and re-created it in my own. As Graham wrote:  “Art is memory. Artists have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  That’s what God the Artist does.

Scripture is art, and art is memory, and memory keeps us alive and dancing.