God Is Not a Boy's Name

Lyn Brakeman was among the first women to enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church just after the General Convention voted in 1976 that women could be priests. The bishop of her diocese had voted against ordaining women priests and hospitality towards female aspirants was guarded at best.

So why would a forty-year-old institutional naif, suburban housewife, and mother of four enter such unfriendly territory to seek priestly ordination at a time when her personal life was in chaos? Things would have been easier had she been a man and had she not read Betty Friedan, not been headed for divorce, and not engaged in sins beginning with ""a."" How did she manage to stay this course?

Brakeman offers no easy answers but tackles difficult issues--addiction, death and grief, divorce, the nature of priesthood, church politics, Christian feminism, and Jesus the Christ--with candor. Her story is held together by her spiritual connection to the voice of God from within and her growing conviction that the nature of divinity is gender-free; hence, theological language in sanctuary and classroom must reflect this truth in a balanced way.

""Lyn's memoir is a contemporary Journal of a Soul . . . only more so. It is the journey of a woman fully alive in body, mind, and spirit, a journey into self, history, vocation, community, adulthood. Fiercely honest, even shocking at times--at least to this monk--and often howlingly funny, it speaks of faith, betrayal, forgiveness, resistance, and homecoming. Daughter, wife, mother, feminist, counselor, priest--Lyn's is a life offered in all its wonderful messiness and raw integrity, touched over and over by grace. It is a mirror of our own messy journey into Christ.""
--Robert Sevensky, OHC, Superior, Order of the Holy Cross

""Lyn Brakeman, Episcopal priest and spiritual counselor, invites us to join her on the path of reflection and remembrance as she tells us, with devastating honesty and self-deprecating humor, about her journey to the Episcopal priesthood, and her parallel journey into the radical inclusiveness of the Gospel. She does this with grace and blessing--not pointing a finger, but welcoming all.""
--Chilton Knudsen, Eighth Bishop of Maine

""If Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Johnson had produced a literary love child it would be this feisty, often funny, and deeply wise autobiographical narrative of a spiritual quest from an alcoholic yet loving home through a marriage with four children, divorce, and the arduous journey to have her vocation to priesthood confirmed by the Episcopal Church. Brakeman combines Lamott's wit and grit with Johnson's theologically sophisticated imagination, providing a gift for heart and mind.""
--H. John McDargh, Associate Professor, Boston College, Department of Theology


The Rev. Lyn G. Brakeman is an Episcopal priest, pastoral counselor, and spiritual director, retired. She is the author of Spiritual Lemons: Biblical Women, Irreverent Laughter, and Righteous Rage (1997) and a blog.