Becoming What We Behold

Evelyn Underhill biographer Dana Greene requested last year that I write this for the Underhill newsletter. This past summer, I had hoped to honor the 75^th anniversary of Underhill’s death by posting this, but it coincided with the Orlando shootings and I felt the need to write about that.

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Daily we behold terrible and diminishing things, not just in the newspaper and on the news, but in films, television programs, books, plays, even music.  Daily we also behold our “golden calves” of consumer products in ads, commercials, and our neighbor’s latest acquisition. Daily we are bombarded and distracted by e-mails, text messages, and the multiple layers of the internet. If, as in Evelyn Underhill’s estimation, we become what we behold, we are becoming a mess of noise, violence, and greed with little room for the divine, the holy, and God.

Saints are to be found in “the mess,” as Underhill suggests, but not overwhelmed by it. The reason?  Saints, mystics, and everyday fellow travelers take time to be present and available to the eternal, to the inbreaking commonwealth of God, to God. Not for self-improvement, but for their own sakes. But being present to eternity, God’s hope for the world, and God herself is transformative, offering peace that passes understanding—not just for ourselves but for the world. Underhill might as well have quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “become the change you want to see in the world.”

The danger she observes is that too often those who want to change the world do so without changing ourselves. In youth I wanted to “change the world.” In adulthood I wanted to change my little part of the world, the church. Now I feel blessed if I am able to change myself! But the truth is, whatever I’ve been able to do for various causes has come to whatever extent I have spent time in God’s presence. God is a very good influence, and I wish I had spent more time with God. This is why I find mystics and the contemplative life so appealing.

Of all the mystics and spiritual guides I have encountered, mostly through reading and courses, Evelyn Underhill writes the closest to my own spiritual experience. I too am theocentric, as she was at first. I too have reservations about the attempts of theology, ethics, religion, and the church to “capture” God, as if that were even possible. I too value other religions and the multiple expressions of Christian faith.

But I too have needed spiritual guidance, spiritual community, belief systems, and liturgy and worship to better understand that God is love. And perhaps most intimately, I too believe in the “homeliness” of the spiritual experience. For me it is not ethereal, other-worldly or supernatural, but an incarnated, earthly, and embodied encounter with the sacred—yet no less profound because of that! God’s love was first embodied for me in my parents, and then multiple church “families.”

That’s why Jesus is important to me, more so than “Christ.” The homeliness of Jesus, his everyday compassion and yet need for prayer, his teachings and also his teachings on prayer, praying in our pantry or closet (remembering to “shut the door” in Underhill’s words), the simple prayer he taught his disciples, and his trust in a loving God—all suggest spiritual maturity. Yet “Christ” too is important for me, as it was for Underhill, that we as Christ and as part of Christ live redemptively for the world and as part of the Body of Christ, the church.

Click here for all my posts that reference Evelyn Underhill, and scroll down.

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

This Post Is Irrelevant!

Reading the morning paper, listening to or watching the news, I am only too aware of the many topics I might address on this blog. Ferguson, Missouri, reminds the U.S. that we are far from “post-racial,” and even conservatives are alarmed about “the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve” (Rand Paul).

North Korea shoots rockets as Pope Francis visits South Korea, Hamas shoots rockets and Israel retaliates, Russia continues to threaten Ukraine, while Yazidis flee the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And still unresolved is what could be called another “Children’s Crusade” of Central American children coming across U.S. borders.

Progressive Christians tend to be progressive politically, and might expect this blog to concern itself with political realities, rather than serve up “sentimental nonsense” as an anonymous comment labelled the last post, “A Church and World Re-Imagined.”

I do know that visitors to my blog increase exponentially whenever I am politically “relevant,” but I don’t purposely appeal to that, because my hope has always been to enhance the spirituality that undergirds our actions to make the world a better place.

Presently I am reading a lot of Evelyn Underhill, an English mystic of the first half of the twentieth century. There are so many of her insights I have wanted to share with you, that I hardly knew where to begin. Reading her this morning gave me the concept for this particular post.

Yesterday I read of her emphasis on the “homeliness” (in other words, the everyday qualities) of the spiritual life. She observes, “The Christian’s life is lived in the open, not in a pious cubbyhole.”

“There is nothing high-minded about Christian holiness. It is most at home in the slum, the street, the hospital ward.” She explains further that “the God of our natural life makes of that natural life the very material of [God’s] self-revelation. [God’s] smile kindles the whole universe…”  I especially love that last sentiment.

She accepts her limited role in the scheme of things, rather than “fussing about the things other souls do and feeling despondent because I cannot do them!” She adds, “We are all inclined to be a bit romantic about religion. But God is a realist. God likes home-grown stuff. [God] asks me for a really good apple, not for a dubious South African peach.”

At the same time, today’s readings of Underhill on the subject of retreats suggest we need time with God variously to “give one’s soul a chance,” “to recover if we can our spiritual poise,” and “for realizing our spiritual status.”

Referring to Jesus’ admonition to enter one’s closet to pray, she writes, “It is no use at all to enter that closet, that inner sanctity, clutching the daily paper, the reports of all the societies you support, your engagement book, and a large bundle of personal correspondence. All these must be left outside.”

“By a curious paradox, as our physical universe gets larger, our true horizon shrinks,” she writes elsewhere, so we need retreats “quickening that which has grown dull and dead in us”: 

We forget that awestruck upward glance which is the mark of the spiritual person. Then we lose all sense of proportion; become fussy, restless, full of things that simply must be done, quite oblivious of the only reason why anything should be done. Our prayers become more and more like supernatural shopping lists, less and less like that conversation between one friend and another which is the ideal of Thomas a Kempis. We can’t rest in the Lord; there really isn’t time for that. 

Finally, regarding each time set apart for God, “We do not come for spiritual information, but for spiritual food and air—to wait on the Lord and renew our strength—not for our sakes but for the sake of the world.”

My hope for this blog is not necessarily to be relevant, but to remind us of our footing to be relevant in the world.

Synchronicity would have it that this past weekend I finally found and watched one of my favorite films (1990) on YouTube: Mindwalk, a conversation on the nature of reality (that includes philosophy, science, politics, and poetry) among an expatriate U.S. poet (John Heard), a former presidential candidate (Sam Waterston), and a physicist (Liv Ullman), as they wander around Mont Saint-Michel. Still relevant!

The books I have been reading are Concerning the Inner Life with The House of the Soul, by Evelyn Underhill, and Daily Readings with a Modern Mystic: Selections from the Writings of Evelyn Underhill, Delroy Oberg, editor. I am only providing a link to the first book, as the second one, which I bought used for less than $7 through Amazon a couple of months ago, now ranges from $164-414 on every site I’ve tried!

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Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Why Can't It Always Be This Way?

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

The two Emmaus disciples say this to each other, together, reflecting on the mysterious stranger who joins them on the road and for a meal. Luke’s gospel does not say that one said it to the other. “They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’” They spoke as one, in unison, as if from a liturgy, as if two had become one.

That is spirituality. All of our particularities, our differences, our edges, our boundaries, our isms—all melt in the presence of the eternal, the cosmic, God, love, justice, faith, truth—whatever word captures for us ultimate reality.

It is where we encounter the fragility of our own lives and yet where we encounter the ultimate and eternal meaning of our life together. Our hearts burn within us as we discover the truth, the meaning, the context of our own lives and of life itself. And to do so with another—a friend, a lover, a fellow person of faith, a spiritual community—is exquisite.

These two disciples who traveled to Emmaus have the dream of disciples throughout the ages; they have enjoyed a revelation that is the object of all spiritual quests. The eros of their hearts has been unleashed and ignited and they burn as one. It doesn’t matter who said what to whom, who said it first, whose idea it was, who gets the credit for the observation, insight, or conclusion, or who should get footnoted. Personal or private ownership no longer matters. They own it together, this most holy communion.

Why can’t it always be that way?

That’s my question every time I complete a retreat or a course in spiritual formation.

Last week I mentioned I was reading a lot of Evelyn Underhill. It was for a course in the spiritual formation program at Columbia Theological Seminary here in Atlanta this past weekend, expertly led by Underhill’s biographer, Dana Greene, with morning and evening prayers created by Linda Abel, using Underhill’s writings. These courses always include small groups and spiritual friendships, rare opportunities for spiritual intimacy.

             

No doubt you have had similar experiences. Soul friends. People with whom you’ve intimately and passionately connected in prayer-making, truth-seeking, justice-making, and possibly, love-making. Friends who can finish one another’s sentences. Shared spiritual searching makes us one with people with whom we may have little else in common. It opens doors to a communion hardly thought possible by our privilege or lack thereof.

I’ve learned that Evelyn Underhill’s spiritual development began as theocentric, with intellectual curiosity about Mysticism, the title of her first book on the spiritual life. Only gradually, under the guidance of a spiritual director and her initially reluctant embrace of spiritual community (the church), was her intellectualizing transformed to a more incarnational faith, realizing we are called to union with Christ’s “redemptive work always going on in the world.”

I recognize the experience, though my faith began more incarnationally and became more theocentric. Yet I find that when I need forgiveness, compassion, and encouragement, I turn to the more incarnational expressions of our faith, such as friends, family, Jesus, and spiritual community.

In their own need for consolation, the Emmaus disciples invite the stranger to dinner and suddenly, at table, their fellow pilgrim is revealed to them not as their guest but as their host, blessing and breaking and offering them their own bread as a sacrament, and their eyes are opened and they recognize their hope alive again, their passion resurrected.

Posts referencing the Emmaus disciples:

Resurrecting Jesus

Whose Resurrection Was It Anyway?

Open Your Refrigerator

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Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

War and Peace

Looking for a letter about WW II by my grandmother, I happened onto this pencil drawing I made during the Vietnam War of a news photo of an American soldier mourning the bombing death of his Vietnamese wife.

“Christianity and war are incompatible, and nothing worth having can be achieved by ‘casting out Satan by Satan,’” English mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote in a 1941 letter a month before her death.

But I’ve wondered if she would have felt the same way if she had lived to see how WW II turned out. The destruction of fighters by fighters could be said to illustrate her point, even that of citizens of warring nations caught in the crossfire. But what of the millions murdered in death camps? Shouldn’t they have had someone fighting for them?

To her credit, Underhill wore her pacifism modestly, never claiming it to be a universal path and taking issue with pacifists who themselves became “warlike” in impressing that standard on all. In the same letter quoted above, she wrote of the choice between the war and the cross:  “And only a very small number are ready for the Cross, in the full sense of loving and unresisting abandonment to the worst that may come.” Earlier she had realized that her own spiritual progress required “learning more about the Cross,” and claimed “We must accept the world’s worst if we are to give it of our best.”

During the Vietnam era, I sorely wanted to be a pacifist, but I believed there were justifiable wars like WW II. I was absolutely supportive of friends who willingly or unwillingly served in Vietnam, corresponding with them, including one who wrote that he saw his buddy “blown to bits.” Though I could imagine dying for my country, I couldn’t imagine killing for it. Thankfully, my number in the first draft lottery was too high to be drafted.

Nonetheless, I had my desired pacifism challenged in an independent study of Christian ethics by Dr. Thomas Love, the founding chair of the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. “You’re an excellent marksman with a rifle,” he hypothesized, “And you’re at one end of a hallway. At the opposite end, a madman is slitting the throats of children one by one. He is about to kill another child. What would you do?”

“I’d shoot him,” I replied without hesitation, realizing that I was not really a pacifist. My college friend, Gary Hall, now (thankfully) dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., told me at the time that the hypothetical was unfairly manipulative. But the point remains that I would kill to defend an innocent. And I understand why so many war veterans talk of doing what they did to protect their buddies.

It’s pretty obvious I am writing this in light of recent “wars and rumors of war” regarding Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Syria, ISIS, and President Obama’s recent speech. I had another post written, but couldn’t resist speaking up.

In high school I saw the then newly-released 6-hour-plus Russian film epic of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1967). The only scene I remember clearly is of a miles-wide battle in which two armies engage in a bloody fight. At first you see the soldiers distinctly, but as the camera pulls back to a distant height, all one can see is a whirlpool of tiny figures on horseback drawn into a swirling vortex, illustrating war’s futility.

I can’t claim an easy answer about war for myself or anyone. The cross scares the hell out of me. But so does using the sword.

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Related post: A Pre-emptive Peace

For other posts on peace, enter “peace” in the search blank in the upper left corner of the blog. 

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Woke and Awakening

My well-worn copy

I love that “woke” is related to “awakening.” “Woke” as an adjective is from African American vernacular, and, as employed by Black Lives Matter, entails social awareness, especially of racism and social injustice. It is now used ubiquitously to suggest someone who is politically aware.

In spirituality, “awakening” suggests spiritual awareness. An early twentieth century authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, describes “awakening” as the first stage of a mystic’s lifelong process. She described five stages of a mystic: awakening, purgation, illumination, dark night, and union.

What brings this to mind for me are two recent articles evaluating Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. One article reviews a book that offers a disconcerting analysis of Lee’s novel as a defense of upper class educated Southern whites distancing themselves from racist “white trash,” as if the latter were entirely responsible for racial barriers, while excusing themselves with the actual economic, political and social power to end segregation.

Jarring as this is for me as a fan of the novel, this appears to be true, and, I hate to admit, could also be said of those who insist President Trump was elected by that infamous “basket of deplorables” rather than by educated, middle and upper class white voters.

The other article, reviewing another related book, explains the writer’s disdain of the novel as insufficiently aware of the African American experience. Only Scout’s character is fully developed, she writes, not that of Tom Robinson or even of Atticus Finch.

I wanted to counter that this is because the book is not about Tom Robinson or Atticus Finch: the book is about Scout and her transformation in the light of her personal experience of events and characters in the narrative. The most authentic representation of African American experience would most likely be found in the writings of African American authors themselves.

The novel's film was released a month after Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech. Though the sterling character of a small-town Alabama lawyer like Atticus Finch might have been a stretch, given the times, as one writer suggests, he serves as a counter to the prevailing ethos of racial prejudice. He gives white readers someone to emulate, something lacking in Lee’s original version, Go Set a Watchman. Thanks be to God for a good editor who advised her to revisit and reshape the story!

All this is to say, as I’ve written in my books and on this blog, To Kill a Mockingbird served as a “woke” experience for this 12-year-old boy from California who had never even visited the South. That, coupled with the Civil Rights Movement and good teachers and preachers, began for me a lifelong journey toward a better understanding of racism and social injustice.

The books of African American authors furthered my growth: Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Stephen Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, James Cone, Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, and Cornell West. Articles, reporting, firsthand encounters and presentations by numerous others also contributed to my “woke” process.

Just as “awakening” is only the beginning of a mystic’s lifelong path, maybe we might consider “wokeness” as only the start of political awareness. Maybe we could speak of a “woke-consciousness” that allows further development as well as application to other social issues of our times.

I was struck by the spiritual parallels as I completed reading this past Sunday Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality. He quotes Flora Slosson Wuellner’s description of spiritual growth in her book, On the Road to Spiritual Wholeness:

As we are healed and pulled together into wholeness, we are shown many things that we had not seen before. We are shown feelings we have had, but which have been repressed. We are shown things we have done, judgments we have made during our days of blindness and insensitivity. We are shown relationships in a new light, and facts to which we had not awakened. And as we wake and see, decisions about what we see begin to rise in freshness and power.

Related Post: Black Lives Matter

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Spirituality Is Not Optional

Reading a review of a book about America’s faltering infrastructure, I thought of how spirituality is our infrastructure—how necessary it is to keep our lives together, to make sense of things, to provide a path, and how little attention is paid to it by so many, just like the bridges and schools and roadways we take for granted and fail to attend and maintain.

I remembered Evelyn Underhill’s understanding in The House of the Soul that our spiritual house never stands alone, but as part of something larger, the “City of God.” We must tend to it, remembering the role it plays in our urban spiritual environment: 

Christian spirituality…insists that we do not inhabit detached residences, but are parts of a vast spiritual organism; that even the most hidden life is never lived for itself alone. Our soul’s house forms part of the vast City of God…it shares all the obligations and advantages belonging to the city as a whole. … The way we maintain and use it must have reference to our civic responsibilities. … 

So into all the affairs of the little house there should enter a certain sense of the city, and beyond this of the infinite world in which the city stands: some awe-struck memory of our double situation, at once so homely and so mysterious. We must each maintain unimpaired our unique relation with God, yet without forgetting our intimate contact with the rest of the city, or the mesh of invisible life which binds all the inhabitants in one. 

So we maintain our spiritual house, in the apostle Paul’s words, our “temple of the Spirit,” not for ourselves alone, but for our neighbors and the citizens of the whole City of God.

Recently I was reminded of what I once asked volunteers at AIDS trainings: 

What in your belief system prompts you to volunteer?

What is your spiritual community?  

To me this was key to discerning their core spirituality, even apart from religion, a spiritual base line that might serve as an infrastructure for all they were about to face. 

I encouraged them to be creative when it came to defining their spiritual communities. One woman had an ah-hah when she realized hers was a group of women with whom she had played tennis for years. “We shared births and deaths, marriages and divorces,” she explained, “Supporting one another through them all.”

Recognizing and maintaining and building our spiritual infrastructure is necessary, not a superfluous “bonus” of life.

At the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus described this spiritual infrastructure. He said that one who hears his teachings and does them will be like one who builds a house on rock as opposed to another who builds a house on sand.  The first house remains standing in the storm and flood, but the second is swept away. 

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Is God Too Grand for Us?

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Is God too grand for us? In a word, yes.

God has become so big to me that with the psalmist, I worry, who are we that God is mindful of us?

Progressive Christians (hopefully) have not settled for “a pocket God,” a term introduced to me by Evelyn Underhill biographer Dana Greene, a god we can pull out of our vest pocket like a dependable watch, an anthropomorphized deity that reflects our narcissism as well as our peculiar ideologies. Earth, for us, is not the center of God’s universe. We have theologized the Copernican revolution.

That’s why I was struck by one sentence in The Temple of God’s Wounds that longtime readers of this blog will remember I read day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter each day of Holy Week. Each time I find something freshly insightful as well as things that do not speak to me, but in all my years of reading it, I have only underlined one sentence: 

To break God’s heart is beyond human imagining. 

Can the grand God progressive Christians imagine be so personal as to be heartbroken? What happened to the personal God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Mary and Jesus? What happened to the personal God of the psalmist who wants to “cling” to us, the God whose providence Jesus claims we should trust for our food and clothing like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field?

Do progressives only have left the impartial and somewhat impersonal God of judgment, the God of Micah who commands us “to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God,” or the judgment day Christ who separates the sheep from the goats, those who helped “the least of these” from those who  failed to do so?

Can we also find a “warm and fuzzy” encounter with God, such as the beloved disciple cuddling with Jesus or the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair?

Following the lead of contemplatives and mystics and Celtic spirituality, I have repeatedly encouraged “intimacy with God,” believing we can enjoy such intimacy in our prayers and meditation and praise through which we may discover, discern, and disclose God’s proximity in ourselves, our neighbor, our opposition, the stranger.

The God of the Bible is One big enough to create the cosmos as well as the creatures, going so far as to–in the words of the psalmist—shape our inward parts, be with us in every place and condition, and in Christian terms, be welcomed into our hearts and homes and humanity.

Much theology is metaphor, and much of religion is storytelling. Progressive spirituality encourages looking behind, beneath, within and beyond the metaphor, even as our Christian faith challenges us to find the personal in its story.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers. This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

An Unfinished Mystic

Henri Nouwen puzzles over a question.

Presbyterian General Assembly, Indianapolis, 1985 (crg)

I have finally read Michael Ford’s most recent “portrait” of Henri J. M. Nouwen. I didn’t jump into it when I received it last summer partly because I needed a kind of sabbatical from Henri for a few of the same reasons I kept my distance in real life. Paulist Press, at the behest of Mike no doubt, sent it as thanks for including some of my thoughts on whether Henri was a mystic.

Lonely Mystic: A New Portrait of Henri J. M. Nouwen is the most intimate glimpse of Henri yet, if that’s even possible, given his intimate self-portrayals in almost every one of his own books. It may make those who want to see Henri canonized squirm a little, though not because of any illicit affairs or theological heresies or tasteless behavior. He was the consummate “best little boy in the world” that every gay boy and man wants to be, but his calling to a celibate vocation kept him lonely and needy and sometimes, broken.

I read with particular interest the chapter on Frank Hamilton’s close friendship with Henri. Begun as Frank eagerly sought out Henri for spiritual guidance, over many years it transformed to a friendship that I would describe as “soul friends.” I had heard some of the stories recounted in the chapter from Frank himself over a private dinner when he attended my first Columbia Seminary spiritual formation course on Henri. A few other stories are found in Henri’s own books. Btw, I’ve been asked to teach the course again September 17-20, 2020, and I’m thinking I will use this new book as one of the texts, prompting intriguing changes in the content.

Though I resisted the tug of Henri’s emotional needs as well as the spotlight of having a famous friend, I envied Frank a little for the spiritual intimacy he and Henri shared. Yet I had my own life to live as a gay activist and, I hoped, a spiritual guide within the LGBT community, and my notoriety as such even prompted Henri to decline a desire to dedicate one of my books to him, at least, while he was alive. After his death, I dedicated Coming Out as Sacrament to him, an ironic twist in that Henri never came out, though Mike points out that many a gay reader recognized their own experience through his books in his passionate reaching out to others and to God.

Mike asked me to reflect on the question, was Henri Nouwen a mystic? Using Evelyn Underhill’s stages of a mystic, I saw that Henri had experienced all five, though as “dimensions” of mysticism, cyclical rather than sequential. The final stage, union, is debatable. In that context, I suggested Henri might be considered an “unfinished mystic,” never having finally “arrived.” Like the chapters about various events in Lillian Helman’s memoir Unfinished Woman or Rembrandt’s many self-portraits over the years, each of Henri’s books may represent a self-portrait of Henri at that point in time, amid different circumstances, contexts, and communities.

I’ve written before that, in the spiritual life, there is no finish line. And that the greatest spiritual danger is to believe one has “arrived.” There are no “finishing schools” for saints, which accounts for their often eccentric, countercultural, and prophetic ways. For Mike’s purpose, I used as examples Henri’s unfinished books on Adam, his charge at Daybreak (completed by Sue Mosteller, his literary executrix), and the Flying Rodleighs, trapeze artists,

who came to represent complete union with God. They had taught him the vital (life-giving) importance of “trusting the catcher,” in life and in death. That he never completed this book is emblematic of Henri’s own inability to let go. Instead of trusting, he was always trying to “catch the catcher” (take hold of God).

            [Lonely Mystic, 150]

As Henri explained in Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring, the flyer is considered by the audience the hero in the trapeze act, as he or she lets go of the bar and does double or triple flips midair before being caught by the catcher. But the real hero is the catcher, whose timing is precise enough to reach for the flyer at just the right time. If the flyer tries to catch the catcher, the latter’s wrists might be broken, so trust in the catcher is key. Henri compared this to trusting God, the Divine Catcher, in life and in death. [Our Greatest Gift, 66-67]

Romantic Age poets saw worth and beauty in an unfinished work. Henri was a great romantic, and an “unfinished” mystic. That is what draws us to his writing—his vulnerability, his incompleteness, his wounds. Like the Jesus he followed, he was in every way like we are.

A couple of months ago, I considered bringing this blog to an end. Faced with the impenetrability of God in Christian mysticism, challenged by Buddhist mysticism and the concept of “no thing,” and only too well aware of my own limitations, I felt it was time to keep quiet, to keep silence. But angels keep troubling my waters, and I feel called to respond. And many of those angels are you, the readers.

To read other posts about Henri Nouwen, click here, and scroll down. For those of you who observe this season of Lent, they may add to your spiritual practice.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

The Pandemic's "Monastic" Opportunity

I’ve postponed to next week a previous reflection about meditating on the psalms, a spiritual practice routinely followed in monasteries. But, given what I’m about to say, it may become all the more relevant.

Emails from blog readers and the cancellation or reconfiguration of local personal or religious gatherings has taught me how further isolating the coronavirus, or COVID-19, can be. To several readers, already isolated because of health or age or retirement, I’ve written this could be our “monastic” opportunity to experience the value of being “all-one” (where the word “alone” comes from) as well as resting in God, taking a break and a breath and a breather, especially important resisting a respiratory infection.

Those of you who have attended workshops or retreats or even committee meetings with me know my fondness for those present to take what I call “monastic moments” to consult their own hearts. I especially find this helpful when I pose a question or problem to a group and wish to avoid the person who speaks first distracting us from our own answers or solutions. A moment of silence allows each one of us to prepare our own thoughts and feelings for sharing with the group.

We need more moments of silence to consider who we are and whose we are—and here I don’t just mean God, but our spouses, our families, our communities of faith and otherwise, everything from our neighborhoods and cities to our countries and our environment.

The limitations prompted by our present pandemic offer each one of us a very personal “existential crisis”—a phrase much bandied about in our political debates these days. We are given an occasion to ponder vital questions: Why are we here? What do we value most? Who do we want to become? What do we believe in? Whom do we love? What do we live for?

Many of us need more than a monastic “moment” to consider if not answer these questions. We need a contemplative retreat, a temporary withdrawal from our busy world of interactions, entertainment, nonstop news, activities, and problem-solving. This may be our 40-day sojourn in a wilderness, our valley of the shadow of death to recognize that God is with us—even here.

And, I would say, we need a retreat “leader,” a guide, someone whose spiritual counsel we trust. Right now, mine is Kathleen Norris and her book The Cloister Walk. Over the years, my retreat leaders have included Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, The Dalai Lama, Richard Rohr, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther King, Barbara Brown Taylor, Mahatma Gandhi, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and especially Jesus—to name a handful of hundreds of guides who have taught me something about myself, about God, about you, about our world.

Who is your “go-to” spiritual guide whose writings you may once again dive into in your social distancing? You don’t have to find yourself alone.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

What I Pray for These Days

Hindus at prayer on the Ganges, 1983. 

A Facebook friend puzzled over my last post, wondering if it implied a kind of us-vs-them outlook. What I intended was assurance to those of us apprehensive about the Trump-Pence inauguration, including possible Trump voters, who may themselves now face loss of health care coverage, rising prices, diminished Social Security and Medicare benefits, reduced personal safety, and international insecurity.

That’s not to mention immigrants, refugees, women, minorities, and the environment who may suffer as a result of everything from current executive orders to future Supreme Court decisions.

To me, these are not simple “political” issues, but more vitally, moral and spiritual concerns.

I find myself praying for President Trump more intently and regularly than any previous president. And I am praying for the electorate and the electoral process that put him in office.

I am praying for our healing, and I am praying that our demons will be cast out.  It’s easy to point to our leadership in Washington as possessed by ideologies or ideologues at odds with our American dreams, but demonic possession, as cultural anthropologist René Girard has pointed out, is as communal as it is individual. It takes a village to make a person crazed with fear, prejudice, self-absorption, and self-certainty.

It’s easy to judge another; harder to judge ourselves. In my first parish after seminary, on Holocaust Remembrance Sunday, I gave a sermon entitled, “The Holocaust of Our Minds and Hearts.” The gist of my talk was that we can easily point to historical expressions of hatred, violence, and prejudice, but we are less inclined to examine our own minds and hearts. Within us there is another Auschwitz and another Selma: a place where we curse, confine, scourge and crucify those different from ourselves.

Those who deny the Holocaust or the cruelties of slavery or the indignities suffered by women over the ages or the inequities of class are likely those most fearful of confronting the Holocausts in their own minds and hearts.  That’s something the LGBT movement surfaced as we recognized those most opposed to us were fearful of their own sexuality and gender expectations. 

Though, with the poet Robert Frost, “there is something in [us] that doesn’t like a wall,” we build our own walls to exclude those of different cultures, faiths, races, gender, gender identity, and sexuality. The contemporary examples of this ghettoization are our social networks, which often serve as echo chambers for our limited perspectives.

Our better natures—God’s own image—often keep such feelings in check, and our spirituality may redeem and transform misguided passion, making it instead work for justice and peace, sisterhood and brotherhood. That’s what conversion is all about. But conversion is not a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience: it is a constant effort of the will to align with God’s will that we love our neighbor as ourselves, and that we find ways to love strangers, even enemies.

The demons of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, nationalism, nativisim, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and more, need to be cast out. Like the Gerasene demoniac, their names are Legion.

Another response to my post suggested a “yes, and” to its spirit, which I never intended to exclude. We are not only to be comforted that “this too shall pass” or that God or Jesus are with us “in the mess” (to quote Evelyn Underhill)—we must be challenged. We must be challenged to speak up, not to silence others, but to encourage others to tell us what’s on their minds and hearts, what are their needs, fears, hopes, and dreams.

We are also challenged to actively resist the demons and temptations of our time, in ourselves, our communities, our nations. Naming them in others will put them on the defensive; confessing them in ourselves may lead to conversation, if not conversion.

And we must put our bodies, voices, resources, and votes in the direction that our better selves urge us to go.

This is what I’m praying for these days, in myself, in others, and in our leaders.

To support this blog ministry:  http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description. Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Woke and Awakening

My well-worn copy.

I love that “woke” is related to “awakening.” “Woke” as an adjective is from African American vernacular, and, as employed by Black Lives Matter, entails social awareness, especially of racism and social injustice. It is now used ubiquitously to suggest someone who is politically aware.

In spirituality, “awakening” suggests spiritual awareness. An early twentieth century authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, describes “awakening” as the first stage of a mystic’s lifelong process. She described five stages of a mystic: awakening, purgation, illumination, dark night, and union.

What brings this to mind for me are two recent articles evaluating Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. One article reviews a book that offers a disconcerting analysis of Lee’s novel as a defense of upper class educated Southern whites distancing themselves from racist “white trash,” as if the latter were entirely responsible for racial barriers, while excusing themselves with the actual economic, political and social power to end segregation.

Jarring as this is for me as a fan of the novel, this appears to be true, and, I hate to admit, could also be said of those who insist President Trump was elected by that infamous “basket of deplorables” rather than by educated, middle and upper class white voters.

The other article, reviewing another related book, explains the writer’s disdain of the novel as insufficiently aware of the African American experience. Only Scout’s character is fully developed, she writes, not that of Tom Robinson or even of Atticus Finch.

I wanted to counter that this is because the book is not about Tom Robinson or Atticus Finch: the book is about Scout and her transformation in the light of her personal experience of events and characters in the narrative. The most authentic representation of African American experience would most likely be found in the writings of African American authors themselves.

The novel’s film was released a month after Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech. Though the sterling character of a small-town Alabama lawyer like Atticus Finch might have been a stretch, given the times, as one writer suggests, he serves as a counter to the prevailing ethos of racial prejudice. He gives white readers someone to emulate, something lacking in Lee’s original version, Go Set a Watchman. Thanks be to God for a good editor who advised her to revisit and reshape the story!

All this is to say, as I’ve written in my books and on this blog, To Kill a Mockingbird

served as a “woke” experience for this 12-year-old boy from California who had never even visited the South. That, coupled with the Civil Rights Movement and good teachers and preachers, began for me a lifelong journey toward a better understanding of racism and social injustice.

The books of African American authors furthered my growth: Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Stephen Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, James Cone, Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, and Cornel West. Articles, reporting, firsthand encounters and presentations by numerous others also contributed to my “woke” process.

Just as “awakening” is only the beginning of a mystic’s lifelong path, maybe we might consider “wokeness” as only the start of political awareness. Maybe we could speak of a “woke-consciousness” that allows further development as well as application to other social issues of our times.

I was struck by the spiritual parallels as I completed reading this past Sunday Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality. He quotes Flora Slosson Wuellner’s description of spiritual growth in her book, On the Road to Spiritual Wholeness:

As we are healed and pulled together into wholeness, we are shown many things that we had not seen before. We are shown feelings we have had, but which have been repressed. We are shown things we have done, judgments we have made during our days of blindness and insensitivity. We are shown relationships in a new light, and facts to which we had not awakened. And as we wake and see, decisions about what we see begin to rise in freshness and power.

I posted this on July 11, 2018, and post it today in observance of Black History Month in the U.S.

You may support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Opening Pandora's Box - Part Two

Though our movement was serious, we had a lot of fun along the way!

With James D. Anderson, editor of our newsletter, and Sandy Brawders, 

a candidate for ordination who came out at the 1978 General Assembly.

In those days, newsletters were the lifeblood of the LGBT Christian movement.

Photo by Mark Sick.

In honor of Pride month, this is the third of four posts adapted from a Meekhof Lecture I gave at Newport Presbyterian Church in Bellevue (WA), January 11, 2014, regarding the meaning of the LGBT movement for the broader church.

When the LGBT movement first blessed the church decades ago, churchgoers feared opening “Pandora’s Box,” which, in Greek mythology, was really a jar that contained all kinds of human evil, which I prefer to call “challenges.” But it also contained Hope with which to face the eight challenges represented by our movement. I wrote of four last Wednesday: xenophobia, inertia, erotophobia, and pleasure. Today I write of the final four.

Our fifth challenge: progressive interpretations of scripture. During most of the 20^th century the progressive Christian movement was less defined because, I contend, mainstream-established Christianity was itself progressive.

Only as biblical literalists and fundamentalists and evangelicals grew in influence in society and in the church did progressive Christianity appear to be a minority position, I believe.

You can’t read Fosdick, Evelyn Underhill, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, Teilhard de Chardin, Dorothy Day, John Robinson, Pope John XXIII, Hans Küng, William Sloan Coffin, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Reuther, James Cohn, Letty Russell, Desmond Tutu, Joan Chittister, Henri Nouwen—just to give multiple examples, and not recognize them both as progressive and influential in the 20^th century church in America.

The problem was, though, that out of compassion or for the sake of job security or simply because of sheer sloth, much of what we learned in seminary did not get communicated from pulpit to pew. I would say that’s why Bishop Spong is such a lightning rod in the broader church: he’s spilling the beans about what most of us learned in seminary!

Our sixth challenge was gender dysphoria. Some of you may know that for a long time those whose understanding of themselves did not match their designated gender were diagnosed as having “gender dysphoria.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dysphoria” as “a state of unease or discomfort; an unpleasant state of mind marked by malaise, depression, or anxiety.” I would say that now describes much of the church in relation not only to its transgender and intersex members, but to all who do not neatly fit gender expectations, such as lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men, and ever more contemporary women and men who are shaking up gender roles.

Our seventh challenge revolved around ordination. I used to joke that trials for ordination virtually replaced heresy trials! That was when we often determined what is orthodox in our beliefs and behaviors.  Now of course there are more church trials, and most of them seem to be about our differing views on homosexuality.

But what does ordination mean when all Christians are called to be ministers? Are ordinands to be “holier than thou”? Do the sins of the celebrant affect the sacraments offered? (Calvin said “no.”) When a governing church body discerns that gifts for church leadership are present, shouldn’t that be enough?

Our eighth challenge was marriage, which, as some pointed out, should’ve been discussed before the question of ordination. In the discussions on homosexuality and ordination throughout the church, there would be audible gasps if someone even suggested the possibility of same-gender marriage. We’d be talking about ordination to our spiritual leadership, but marriage was untouchable.

When the 1991 Presbyterian Study on Human Sexuality questioned heterosexual marriage as the paradigm or model for all sexual relations and instead suggested an ethic of justice-love that would govern sexual relations including those of marriage, much of the denomination went ballistic. I was at the Baltimore General Assembly that discussed the report, and the feeling among some delegates seemed to be, “We’ll give you ordination, just give us back marriage”!

So what is the Hope left in “Pandora’s Box”? Find out in next week’s post!

I urge you to make a donation to and/or attend these once-in-a-lifetime ingatherings of LGBT saints and allies:

Rolling the Stone Away

Oct 31-Nov 2, 2017

St. Louis Airport Marriott

https://rollingthestoneaway.org/

40th Celebration of LGBTQ Lives at Kirkridge

Sept 8-10, 2017

Kirkridge Retreat & Conference Center

http://www.kirkridge.org/?e=event&eventId=26746&rDate=1504878949

To support this blog ministry: 

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.