Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Forgiving God

I believe that we need to forgive God for not being the God we first imagined.

These words of mine echoed back to me from one of the final papers of a weekend spiritual formation course I recently taught. I had followed Henri Nouwen’s insight about forgiving other human beings for being unable to love us with the “perfect love” of God with my own view that we also need to forgive God for not being the God we were taught.

I thought about this just this morning while reflecting on a particular psalm’s view of God. The god of the psalmist was the one I had been taught but not the one I have come to believe in. While in other psalms my experience recognizes the psalmist’s inability to adequately comprehend God’s wondrous nature, the psalm I read this morning was a little too sure of who God is.

In the past weeks, I’ve re-read three unpublished novels I’ve written, and yesterday completed reading my earliest long fiction attempt, a 70-page novella begun in high school, completed in college, and polished for a course in seminary. All but one of these works use some autobiographical elements, though played with, adjusted, or completely re-imagined.

But this flashback halfway through my novella Tommy actually happened:

“You know who the tooth fairy is, don’t you, Tommy?” Peggy had just heard the amount the fairy had left for his tooth.

Tommy wanted to guess; he had some idea, but wasn’t sure. Some suspicion, that’s all.

“It’s your parents.”

“I know.” He had suspected, not known. He wished he hadn’t been told. Now that he knew, he made an easy connection between his parents and Santa Claus. They were Santa Claus as well. The fun was taken out of everything.

Tommy didn’t tell his parents his new knowledge right away, not wanting to hurt them. Destroying the myth his parents so fondly propagated might spoil his relationship with them. During a later argument, however, he used it as a weapon to hurt them in an undefinable way. Then, locking himself in the bathroom, he cried.

Many people think “destroying the myth” might spoil their relationship with God. Some have even used their knowledge of the myth to reject God altogether. Others try to “hurt” God in their anger at the misrepresentation.

I’ve experienced each option at one time or another. Not only have I needed to forgive God for not being what I thought, I need to forgive myself for being inadequate to the task of “capturing” God.

Related posts:

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith than I Do

Religion Is Not a Conspiracy

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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Violence--What to Do?

I’ll be guest speaker at the First Existentialist Congregation at 11 a.m. this Sunday, June 16, 2013, reflecting on “Spiritual Fathers and Mothers,” 470 Candler Park Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30307-2113.

I would think regular readers might have hoped for a little “bucking up” in this blog after one or more of the recent acts of violence we’ve experienced either firsthand or through the media. I did write about Newtown, but not about the Boston Marathon bombing. You see, West, Texas had their devastating explosion and Syria and Iraq were experiencing deadly attacks about the same time, and I couldn’t ignore their suffering. Then the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh. And more recently we have the killer tornado of Moore, Oklahoma.

And these examples are simply set against the daily violence throughout the world among and between peoples, nations, and religions, not to mention the violence visited hourly upon the environment and animals and habitats.

I’d guess that in a single evening of watching television, from news to ubiquitous crime dramas, the average viewer witnesses more violence than many once experienced in a lifetime, save those in war zones or crime-ridden neighborhoods. What to do?

Can we adopt the position of a Buddha-like character in my (unpublished) mystery novel Angus Dei simply that “Violence is”? Philosophically that’s safer, until violence happens to us or those we care about.

Can we rise above violence? Given that violence may come with any vote, purchase, tax, commodity, meal, etc., rising above violence hardly seems possible. An average citizen and consumer may be as guilty of violence as any army of Genghis Khan!

And for Jesus, the mere thought was equivalent to the deed. I feel the most violent after watching the news: I know exactly what to do with or what should be done to opponents and oppressors, Congress and criminals. That’s why I try not to wield my sword—my pen or my computer—in the evening!

And, after reading the morning paper, that’s why I need morning prayer time to recover my equilibrium and recoup my energy and generosity. Presently I am once again using the Psalms to do that, but I am jumping over the parts calling for vengeance or vindication or the destruction of enemies. My training suggests that this is politically or spiritually incorrect, as I should be praying the psalms on behalf of those who are crying out for justice at the expense of their oppressors. Though I do lift those enduring violence in prayer, after morning prayer I don’t want to feel like I do after the evening news or an episode of Criminal Minds or The Newsroom.

During a retreat I led, the most significant thing that got said came from a woman who had the “ah-hah” realization that she was spending so much time listing justice concerns in her prayers that she had no room for “resting in God.”

“When I awake I shall be filled with the vision of you,” Psalm 17:15b (NJB) greets God. This could be our mantra in preparation for facing the world.

Alongside the psalms I am using the contemporary “psalms” of J. Barrie Shepherd from his recent book Between Mirage and Miracle. In the aptly-titled “Catch of the Day—Chebeague Island, Maine,” he compares his morning prayer to lobster boats going out to sea at dawn:

Their dream, as mine—

afloat upon a steep and surging mystery—

to lure and catch a portion of life’s bounty,

a momentary savoring, at least,

of an elusive sweetness that lies hidden

in the old, encircling deep.

A Pre-emptive Peace

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Wednesday, June 5, 2013

A Priest for the 21st Century

Though priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew M. Greeley lived most of his life in the 20th century, he was ahead of his time in his vision of what the Roman Catholic Church is and what it could be, especially in the United States.

As a “renegade” Protestant, I valued his protests against hierarchy, elitism, corruption, and cover-ups, such as the one surrounding pedophile priests. I’m not aware of an equally prominent Protestant figure who parallels his brutal directness and public airing of dirty clerical laundry.

I did not always agree with him (who did?), but I often agreed with him, and I greatly appreciated the audacity with which he brought scientific study to religion as well as matters of faith to both academia and popular literature.

Peter Steinfels’ obituary in The New York Times and its subsequent editorial does him justice, but only Greeley’s own writings can offer a full explanation of his life and times. Steinfels correctly summarizes his work:

If there was anything tying Father Greeley’s torrent of printed words together, it was a respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics.

AMEN!

And then:

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in community rituals.

For me, too, it all begins with poetry, images, and stories…

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these, I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

Preach it, brother! This is not far from my Baptist upbringing that taught me that personal experience is crucial to one’s faith. In my own struggle with the Presbyterian (and broader) church, it was such experience that prompted many Christians to question the church’s attitudes toward LGBT people, while opponents decried and denied personal experience as having moral or spiritual authority. And experience collected, organized, and evaluated, as a sociologist like Greeley did, is science.

Given our own “renegade” status as progressive Christians, our spiritual grounding is strengthened by poetry, images, stories, and experience—the stuff of reflection and contemplation.

Rev. Greeley was careful not to say or do anything that might prompt his silencing by authorities. If he were really free to speak, I wonder what else he might have said.

Posts from this blog that reference Father Greeley:

I Wanted to Be Famous

Paradise Lost and Paradise Found

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Et II, Benedict?

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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Spiritual Ballet

I was astonished when I saw my first ballet performed on stage. I had seen ballet in films and on television, accompanied only by the music of an orchestra. But as I sat in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music (Eugene Ormandy conducting, of course) in 1975, I also heard the sounds of the dancers’ feet as they pivoted and pirouetted, leapt and landed on the floor of the stage, a gentle brushing as windblown leaves on a sidewalk punctuated by occasional, muted squeaks from their soles and the barely audible groans of the floor boards.

It brought my ethereal fantasy of ballet down to earth! Until then it had seemed lighter than air, with moves and postures and flights that seemed wholly spiritual, not the performance of flesh and blood, muscles and gravity.

You know where I am going with this. My surprise is paralleled by the disillusionment of spiritual seekers discovering that our liturgical choreography, no matter how sublime or how simple, cannot cover the reality that we are bodies whose friction with earth, with God, with ourselves and with one another reminds us that spirituality is flesh and blood, muscles and gravity.

That means training is required. And forgiveness when someone misses their cue. And Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

That was the case when scenery fell over with a crash during one of the premiere performances of the start-up Los Angeles Ballet. So supportive was the audience, we felt the embarrassment of the performers and stage crew while continuing to enjoy their inaugural efforts.

Boredom is another matter. When I saw the Bolshoi perform in Los Angeles before the demise of their country’s totalitarian ideology, their rigidly conservative ways of doing ballet literally put me to sleep.

Spiritual communities have much to offer, but only if we individually practice what is preached. Houses of worship cannot do our work for us. But they remind us that the spiritual enterprise is not an out-of-body, out-of-community experience. In truth, they incarnate the very muscle and gravity, flesh and blood we need on the spiritual path.

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Related post:

Dust and Glory