HOPE. . .FULLY. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 5/04/25

2025.05.04    HOPE…FULLY

The Hebrew phrase, Ha tikvah, means “Have Hope”. 

It says a bit more than simply, ‘Be hopeful’ as if hope were focused on the future only.  No, we are to FILL ourselves with HOPE. Breathe it. 

Ha tikvah is an everyday present reality, not future. It makes me think of the phrase in the traditional service of Holy Matrimony. It used to be among the minor sacraments, that is, an outer sign of an inner holiness, or the Presence of Divinity.   

Marriage is still considered holy, and yet it has many variations, and is no longer “holy matrimony”—a sacrament in which Divinity is both present and bestowed. Something got lost in revisions. I cannot explain this loss adequately, yet I know marriage is  now a “pastoral office”. It still requires ha tikvah.

Couples of all sorts and conditions view their marriage in a holy way, anyway. Couples do honor their love with all its vicissitudes, its flaws, its drastic ups and down. Married life can feel like a rollercoaster: we climb, we reach a pinnacle, and then we race down, only to begin a new climb. Over and over as we age. Marriage is hope-in-process, rooted daily in ha tikvah.

Thus rooted I think is all of creation, as the psalmist sings:

 “Let everything that breathes praise God. 

  Shine forth your praises on God.” 

  

HOPE. . .FULLY.

STRIVE, THRIVE, BE ALIVE. Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post, 4/27/2025

It seems to me that all the things that matter most to me in my life are things that I have strived for and thrived with and lived because of. 

Besides avoiding my mother’s overweening praise, the obvious first-up on my list was the process of birthing, actually bringing forth into the light a brand new life, and then immediately feeling the rush of joy and terror at once. 

Perhaps I exaggerate, but for me, beside the trauma of sexual intercourse itself for which I was totally unprepared, birthing was first up. My first child was a daughter with amazing lung power and great weight for a firstborn: 8 pounds 13 ounces, born on the 13th of January, 1962, well before there was safe medication to ease the pain, not to mention much good literature on things like breast feeding and childcare. It is embarrassing to admit that I was both dazzled and intimidated by my beautiful new daughter—so afraid that I was sure I’d break her arm while putting on a wee undershirt, not to mention getting the diaper pin on securely without stabbing her, all at once and with adoration!

She was, and is still, capable of engaging my awe and my love at the same time. I went on creating, yes, more biological children, all equally beloved, and also my own dreams and sins. Unlike what our religions tell us, there is no end to such potency, such striving and thriving, such unjust justice, even to such believing disbelief. Ever. 

I wonder if this is how the Divinity the Bible calls God/Creator kept on slowly striving, paying meticulous attention to each tiny detail and its placement, laboring and even feeling pained by the effort itself as Life turned into Being?  Would Creator-God have felt such pride and awe at once?  

The Holy Bible itself even ends with something like, I’m coming and I’m not telling you when or why.   

And beloved Job, finally and after a whole life of nagging and being righteous, received a guided tour of Creation and ended up with something like WOW!

It is enough to strive, thrive and be alive— never imagining an end. I am ready to give up all that language about justice in order simply to proclaim: 

Divinity isn’t moral, only holy?    

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”.