2024.12.08 ADVENT—War AND Peace? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

I confess that I feel afraid of some of the recent, and perhaps inevitable, developments in this country.  Yes, it does seem to me that traditional logic—the more wars we make the more peace we will get—is painfully flawed. 

Here is Doris "Dorie" Miller,  a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first Black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. 

As a mess attendant second class in the United States Navy, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. For his heroic behavior he died.  But did things really change?  And now there was a martyr to praise, our consciences relieved— until the next conflict arrises.

   

I remember a time in my own life when I felt all alone and helpless. The parish church offered quiet days for people to sit or kneel in silence to pray. I sat there for a while. Then I kneeled, stared up at the crucified Jesus, and cried. My tears startled me. I brushed them away, looking around to make sure no one saw me. I just sat there thinking Jesus must have been a total idiot to fall into this trap. What was he trying to prove? 

What are we proving today with all our wars? Do wars make heroes? Just so we can weep and worship one more martyr? Are we soothed by our tears? Well, yes— until the next conflict arises.  My tears turned out to be about fear and hard personal choices. 

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Is that what our country faces today, trapped in a twisted paradox: the more war we make the less trustworthy the peace that follows? I mean school kids are afraid to go to school. “What if a gun happens to me today?” Having a license to carry a gun is as common as having a drivers license. Violence is reported every single day on the News. The next slogan I expect to see is “GUNS FOR PEACE” !  

When in history has WAR solved territorial disputes or political disagreements?  WWI was known as the “war to end all wars.” Did it?  WWII did, you will say. NOPE! On and on! 

Wars don’t make peace. But I can—and so can you.  

2024.12.01 WONDERMENT. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

I have noticed how amazingly unique aging people are, even when they are all of the same color, the same intelligence, all aging daily with new pains and losses of memory and function daily, gnarled, and all still arguing about the same old things. How so?

Meet Methusalem.  I take a clue on aging from this ancient tree. 

This 700 year old Holm Oak tree around whose presence and wisdom Pope Francis and his gang have decided to build a new project called Papal Gardens. In this garden stands the most ancient tree in the world—so they say. 

I remember my mother often saying, with either admiration or scorn, depending on her own feelings about this person, that he/she/they was older than Methusalah, born in 3074 in the ancient Near East, apparently the grandfather of Noah.The reason for such age and status was that Methusalem (Hebrew spelling) walked with God. Well, okay then, and yet………. I do not want to live longer than my body permits. Oh yes, I take meds, exercise as I’m able, most days make sense, have wonderful insurance and the daily comfort of a loving spouse and nearby family. I can tolerate ugliness. BUT chronic pain? I haven’t the courage. 

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As a child I felt terrified of Methusalah, especially as I watched the aging process of grandparents— withering skin, bedridden, drooling, sometimes senseless mental wanderings, and more. My maternal grandmother in her dying looked out a window and said: “Look! See, right out there, that beautiful horse.” If I didn’t see it she would call me silly, and if I pretended to see it I felt silly.  So I looked out her NYC window, brushed my tears aside, and told her: “Oh yes, it’s beautiful.”

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As we enter this Advent season, we watch for all kinds of things wonderful and strange, seemingly impossible. Children have the amazing gift of sitting and staring for a long time, totally absorbed by something fascinating to them, mostly invisible to others.

This is wonderment. If possible,  no adult should ever interrupt, scold, or berate a child thus engaged. When adults take time to sit very still, breathing without expectations or agenda, it’s called Contemplation, aka Wonderment. 

Unless you’re already living in a contemplative community, you have to pay for such time, take time off for it, travel to a retreat setting where they won’t declare you insane, feed you good food, and maybe make your bed. (I recommend this option and Mercy Retreat Center in Madison, Connecticut!) 

2024.11.24 CONFINING DIVINITY? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Most spiritual/religious groups have naming ceremonies for those newly born or for those later choosing to be a member of that group. Naming rituals are usually celebratory and happy. They vary according to the customs of each group. BUT ALL of them matter because we all need to know we belong and that we matter. 

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NOW comes trouble! How dare we presume to name, and worse, describe and define Divinity? 

In my younger growing years I assumed God was Catholic. Later, I assumed God was Father, then Son, then Holy Spirit, then Catholic!  Each tradition establishes its own vocabulary to define, describe, and yes, confine/ imprison Divinity.  

Even Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous concluded that everyone needs a Higher Power. Every evolving life-form on Earth, except the horseshoe crab which has never evolved. But I bet every beach-goer has praised that graceful glide.

*  *  *  *

Consider this bison who, thought-to-be extinct, has, after 200 years, reappeared to roam the range in the European Carpathian mountains of Romania—to fertilize the habitat for other species. LIFE! 

In the 1980s I worked as a Chaplain in a treatment center for recovering addicts. I met a young man who puzzled over the concept of Higher Power. He had never heard of prayer either. I’d never met anyone who never even heard of God. We sat in silence. I debated various arguments, all dry and useless. I thought damn, then I silently swore, and then I thought help. Something came to me and I said to the young man: “Okay, have you ever sat alone in some open space like a field and loudly cried out HELP!”

“Oh yeah, lots of time,” he said.

“Well, who do you think you were calling out to?” I asked. 

The young man sat up straight. All he said was “Oh.”  And again, “Oh.” He grinned and then left my office.  He lives on in my heart-prayers.

 

2024.11.17 THERE IS ALWAYS A STORY! Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post,

I hear myself say something like: Are you kidding? But I have no interest in debates or discussions that go nowhere. All I know is that when things go kerflooey, quite off-kilter, I return to something ancient yet continuing to be amazingly graceful. For me, that is the ancient story of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Honestly, I have no trouble with Job, the biblical master of the long whine. I used to gag over this poor-me man. Now that I am aging, however, I admire Job’s way of grieving which is long and incessantly nagging God and anyone who will listen for explanations of all the grief and woe in this life on earth.  Job’s friends exhaust him with a million explanations—all quite obvious and logical. My favorite is from Job’s fed up wife who tells her husband: Curse God and die! (2:9)

I can identify with such a headlong grief and have sat listening to many a grieving soul, including my own. All we want to know is WHY this putatively almighty God does nothing, or worse, causes all this suffering. I ask grievers to forget about WHY, and  just talk honestly about their losses, or anything else on their minds. Then I simply listen, for I know that there is always a story, and rarely is it what I might imagine.   

It’s very easy to get stuck in grief, so please talk about it to someone you trust, even if it’s not directly about the loss. ‘Tsokay. There is always a story.

PS. What I love most in Job is the role of God/Divinity. After many years, God finally treats Job to an enormous vast, and complete view of ALL Creation spread out before him in 3D panorama. God doesn't brag but simply offers Job, and us, a panoramic vision of enormous depth, breadth, and width—almost too much for Job to take in. 

Job’s jaw drops in awe. All he can say is: I know my redeemer lives. You’d think he’d offer effusive thanks. Wonder is quite enough. There is ALWAYS a story!

😉💕

 

2024.11.10 WHAT'S NEW? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

Well, we have elected a new president who is very far from new, not only in chronological age and gender, but in personality and style. He is still Trump— everlasting in his own mind.   

I remember when Y2K hysteria about computer programming going akimbo after 12/31/1999 became 1/1/2000. It was much ado about nothing. Computers turned out to be smarter than we had imagined, and most of them recognized the metrics.

Well, it is not quite the same when we are talking about flesh and blood embodiment, is it? And there’s a lot of flesh in this body. Still, DJT we’ve known and have seen before, and all along. 

What we have NOT seen publicly along this election way is something I pray we will this time, something more mature than furor, hullabaloo, uproar, outcry, blaming and the like. 

Most newscasters are calm though honest on public television, but it’s not too hard when you are just charting the facts, please.  I am trying hard myself to keep my mood calm and my affect cool. Of course I am failing a bit, because I do dislike these candidates, Trump and Vance—not just their personalities but their politics. I am trying not to stir up my own pot of anger but rather to stay calm and kind and avoid arguments and prayers that this guy will be assassinated. 

Should we not be changing our perspectives? Should we not, for God’s sake, cultivate internalized compassion—versus politely deaf attitudes or heartless kindness? Does not robotic quoting of Holy Scripture feel like the clinking of a single coin in a beggar’s empty cup?  

By 2006, Al Gore, former Vice President under President Bill Clinton would publish his book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming. The world soon would need a bipartisan and multi-national effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth. Gore was born in 1948, just ten years after me. All the projected fears were contagious. Terra Firma was no longer firma.  I dare say the answer is NOT to deport honest working families as if they were “aliens”.  

The answer is to be kind to one another, to stop arguing and speculating, to give money to scientific and local as well as national and world measures, and to do all we can locally to set our focus on saving our beloved planet!!     

Oh, btw, pray whether you believe in God or not!  We all have a Higher Power!  

2024.11.03 WHERE ARE YOU? Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post,

After this Coventry Cathedral in England was bombed in WWII, the shell was left. The  brand new cathedral, thanks to the efforts of many countries, is attached and grows forth from the old.  Here is an image of BOTH the shell of the bombed cathedral AND the new building—together.  Is this not an image of how we ALL must behave NOW? 

The profound influence of immediate surroundings is NOT something we notice much. We are too busy obsessing, squawking, arguing, or moaning about “climate change” on a large scale that we miss the impact of our more subtle surroundings.

By habit we jump  first to the weather report. Will it be too warm, too cold, below freezing, sunny, wet, on and on? All of it short-term and shallow—surface palaver.

*  *  *  *

Last evening we saw on television a brief special about how immediate surroundings affect conversation, mood, comfort levels, decisions, even outcomes. Some alert women noticed that controversial board meetings about expenses or future survival, or costs/benefit analyses, and the like went more smoothly, efficiently with fewer arguments and more clarity of agenda, purpose and outcome when the group met at a local Museum of Art. When surveyed, others in the group agreed.  Why?  

I have long thought that The Arts could heal/save the world. ALL the arts: music, dance, theater, painting, graphics, literature, poetry, even nature and, yes, even business, politics and governance—the art of respectful listening more than talking.  ADD the creative drama of Nature itself!    

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When you enter a library filled with shelves of books, do you suddenly quiet yourself, hush noisy children, relax? Few have ever violated the sanctity of a library. 

If you go to a huge concert hall or a large theater, even a movie theater, does it immediately hush your soul? Open your heart, make ready your soul?  

Or a hospital, the sanctuary of vulnerability where sorrow and healing and love hover all about together creating the climate and fabric of the place. How about any religious sanctuaries— church/temple, cathedral, mosque where murmurs of prayers for peace and echoes of joy from live choirs linger. You can hear all this even though you were not or are not present. You just know. 

I recall the near panic, alongside bold, broad public mourning, that accompanied the collapse of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.  A world shuddered, and lots of money poured in for its reconstruction. Few people worship there any more, and yet it drew the hearts of thousands worldwide. 

How about a planetarium? When you gaze at the stars all twinkling far above you, do you gasp with awe, even weep? Or a cemetery, the collective dead gathered? Woods. Gardens or Greenhouses. Swooping birds and squirrels build nests I see from my window.

I even recall the awe of the first huge lecture hall at the divinity school that caught and held my breath, as if Divinity itself gave weighty lectures that lingered there. 

Perhaps so.

A BIT OF WISDOM, Spiritual Lemons, Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post, 10/27/24

“Moral imagination is the special gift of the prophet and the artist. The artist listens and looks and sees and hears the pain and suffering of the world, and it is from these experiences that the artist creates new images. Without moral imagination there is no compassion, for it is from the ability to picture the suffering of others, that we develop the skill to imagine other ways of living.  

Solutions to political problems depend on moral imagination. We find these solutions in the process of being and doing, listening and seeing, with deep sensitivity, to the insights of our imagination. But it is not just artists who exercise their imagination in this way: we are called to sensitize our perceptions so that we come to learn where real suffering and injustice lie.” 

 

-Sister Stan Gardening the Soul. Soothing Seasonal Thoughts for Jaded Modern Souls.  The author has an honorary Doctorate of Law from Trinity College, Dublin. She joined  the Irish Sisters of Charity in 1958 and develops programs of social service for people in need.  

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This wisdom I believe is precisely geared to how to make choices, and how to vote using our moral imagination—not just according to the authority of a political party. It is also how anyone governs, with compassion and respect for the office AND for those you will govern.

 

Notice that the biblical gospel story for today is that of the blind beggar Bartimaeus (Mark 10: 46-52) who, after he received his sight, did not run off in joy to celebrate like most of the healed do, but stayed to follow Jesus.  

Oddly admirable, no?